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This is a reductionist perspective that is unhelpful. Does buying a water cooler in the office increase profit margins? What about a coffee machine? Across a wide portfolio of decisions, a business does need to be profitable. However measuring the individual impact of single vendors is often a very difficult task.

How do you measure developer productivity? Code quality? Developer happiness? As far as I know, no one in the industry can put concrete numbers to these things. This makes it basically impossible to answer the question you pose.



The survey was about operational costs and revenue. Water cooler and coffee machine manufacturers don't market their products to be "smarter than people in many ways" and "able to significantly amplify the output of people using them"[1]. If these claims are true, then surely relying on this technology should bring both lower operational costs, since human labor is expensive, and an increase in revenue, since the superhuman intelligence and significantly amplified output of humans using these tools should produce higher quality products and benefits across the board.

There are of course many factors at play here, and a substantial percentage of CEOs report a positive RoI, but the fact that a majority don't shouldn't be dismissed on the basis of this being difficult to measure.

[1]: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity


Ping me when coffee machines ceo ask for 7 trillion dollars




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