AI adoption happens bottom-up while executives remain blind

AI tools being discussed can double individual productivity but are like "magical duct tape" - useful for quick fixes but hard to scale organizationally.

I can now do my job twice as fast. And if the organization sees that, they might go, 'Wait a second. We should pay you half this much.' They're like, 'What if we get rid of some extra people or something?' And so if this stuff is magical duct tape, it's very hard to make scaled, repeatable, large scale things out of it.

Most CEOs or most executives are incredibly disconnected from the actual AI adoption taking place inside their companies.

I do ask people to ask their managers, 'Would you rather give everyone on the team very expensive coding agent subscriptions or you get an extra head count?' Almost every one, the managers will say head count. But if you ask VP level or someone who manage a lot of teams, they would say, 'Want AI assistant.' Because as managers, you are still growing, so for you having one HR head count is big. Whereas for executives, maybe you have more business metrics that you care about.

The engineers are now able to produce more technology. The ROI of building technology has actually gone up. This actually means you hire more.