AI is growing, but productivity isn't

💼 AI is growing, but productivity isn't

Chamath Palihapitiya (Social Capital Research) published an analysis on September 25 titled 'Why AI is booming, but productivity isn't.' According to the Ramp index (70,000+ US companies), AI spending is $12.50 per employee per month, with an employee cost of ~$8,500/month: the break-even threshold is a productivity increase of ~0.15%.

🌍 The gap is explained by work organization, not technology: AI makes tasks cheaper, but it does not reduce coordination and approvals. From an experiment on 515 startups: almost all of the revenue increase went to the top 10% of firms, and those who adopted others' reorganization schemes received 1.9x the revenue of the control group.

👤 Before automating, remove unnecessary steps, combine AI operations into chains with a single check at the end, and don't overpay for a model. The increase comes from restructuring work, not the tool itself; the full playbook is behind a paywall.

Source 1: https://research.socialcapital.com/p/ai-roi Source 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49852079