Azeem Azhar

Also not something I do particularly well.

I suppose what we're seeing here is that individuals and teams,

are seeing productivity benefits and lots of us individually can can speak to that but does it necessarily lift the firm-wide productivity or does it necessarily lift the wider economy i mean if all of these stories are so positive where's the beef a quick note if you want to support us in bringing more of these conversations to the world please consider subscribing to the show

And there is some other data, again, that shows that there's this gap emerging that 85% of engineering organizations that use AI tools are using AI tools, but only 59% of them are getting measurable productivity gains.

Again, this is not an academic survey, so read into it what you will.

But let's start by saying 59% getting productivity gains a couple of years after these tools is available is a pretty impressive state of affairs.

And the question is, why the gap?

As you know, I wrote an entire book on the gap between the capabilities and the improvements in technology, their exponential nature, and our ability to harness those.

So this is a microcosm of the exponential gap, and this is the hard part.

It is a combination of people issues, misalignment between leaders and those who are actually doing the work, misalignment in the incentive systems for how and why people should use these systems, and also all of the process issues because our internal processes have been designed around

assumptions of how fast the work can be done, how well it can be done, what kind of exceptions might happen at each stage.

And when you start to use a general purpose technology like AI as produced by large language models, well, all of those parameters start to break down and you have to think about an entire process redesign and a workflow redesign.

So the constraint isn't the availability of the tools.

I mean, we're all one click away from Claude Codex.

It's how much we can actually get done within the framework of the spaghetti that is legacy processes.

The point there being that firm productivity gains that you might see in a work group or within a few employees don't automatically scale.

You know, the story I used to tell about this, and I still do tell the story,

is that when electricity was rolling out at the turn of the 20th century, the very first car manufacturers who really were very artisanal, they worked in old carriage works, adopted electricity really quickly.

And what they did was they hung single pendant lights in their workshops to extend the working day.

But in order to really get the benefits of electricity and manufacturing, you had to build the moving assembly line system.