"One of the most common concerns about AI is the risk that it takes a meaningful portion of jobs that humans currently do, leading to major economic dislocation. Often these headlines come out of economic studies that look at various job functions and estimate the impact that AI could have on these roles, and then extrapolates the resulting labor impact. What these reports generally get wrong is the analysis is done in a vacuum, explicitly ignoring the decisions that companies actually make when presented with productivity gains introduced by a new technology -- especially given the competitive nature of most industries."
Says Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, a company that makes large-enterprise cloud file sharing and collaboration software.
"Imagine you're a software company that can afford to employee 10 engineers based on your current revenue. By default, those 10 engineers produce a certain amount of output of product that you then sell to customers. If you're like almost any company on the planet, the list of things your customers want from your product far exceeds your ability to deliver those features any time soon with those 10 engineers. But the challenge, again, is that you can only afford those 10 engineers at today's revenue level. So, you decide to implement AI, and the absolute best case scenario happens: each engineer becomes magically 50% more productive. Overnight, you now have the equivalent of 15 engineers working in your company, for the previous cost of 10."
"Finally, you can now build the next set of things on your product roadmap that your customers have been asking for."
Read the comments, too. There is some interesting discussion, uncommon for the service formerly known as Twitter, apparently made possible by the fact that not just Aaron Levie but some other people forked over money to the service formerly known as Twitter to be able to post things larger than some arbitrary and super-tiny character limit.
Aaron Levie on X: "One of the most common concerns about AI is the risk ..."
