AI
AI’s Saved Hours Don’t Show Up as Savings
The hours AI gives back are real. They just get spent on the work people used to put off, which is worth a lot, but it isn’t a cost line, and it shouldn’t be scored like one.
Every AI pitch deck has the same slide: hours saved, times a loaded rate, equals dollars back. It’s a clean number, and I don’t trust it.
The hours are real. I’ve watched them come back. They just never show up on the P&L, because nobody goes home early. People spend the freed-up time on the work they’d been putting off, and on doing the old work better than they ever would have bothered to. The support lead finally writes the audit-prep guide she’s put off for a year. The PM answers a feature request with a real write-up instead of two lines. The doc that would’ve been two bullets turns into a real doc, and the nice-to-have backlog finally gets touched. Nobody’s working less. They’re clearing the work they used to skip, and doing the rest of it better.
That’s value, and I’d argue it’s a lot of value. It just isn’t savings.
We’ve seen this before. In 1987 Robert Solow wrote that you could see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. The numbers took about a decade to catch up, because companies spent that decade on the slow, invisible part: retraining people and reorganizing the work so the technology could actually pay off.
It looks to me like what software engineering went through about a year ago, and support and customer success are in the middle of it now. If you score AI on headcount, you’ll conclude it failed right while it’s working. Score the backlog that finally moves and the quality floor that went up instead.
So take hours-saved-times-rate off the slide and ask the harder question: what got done that wouldn’t have been done at all?