Are employers getting the returns from AI?

Question

Hi, most of the companies have now given AI tools to their employees, these include claude code, cursor and github copilot. This is supposed to be the testing period to see how will things turn out by using AI. But now its almost a year, and employers will want to see the return from their investment in AI tools. most devs have still not adopted cloud coding agents for one reason or the other. Layoff number is normal in non-VC funded companies, since they have no pressure to show AI working for employees. But this has to converge somewhere, are returns from AI tools enough to justify the headcount reduction except forcefully showing it to investors?

marcelbundle · Accepted Answer

>introduce AI to cut down on developers' salaries>layoff developers>AI credits are going upOh yeah it's all coming together

laxmena · Answer

More I use AI tools, stronger I'm convinced that it's a force multiplier. I'm one of the strong advocates for adoption of AI at work.
But I'm also very skeptical about the narrative- that AI will simply replace workers.
The main issue is accountability. If an autonomous agent takes an incorrect action, who takes responsibility?
I recently had a first hand experience at work where an agent, designed to act on customer tickets, was authorized to suspend accounts upon request.
It incorrectly suspended an active, critical account essential to our revenue metrics. Now, the support engineer who deployed that agent is writing the postmortem/CoE.
These are some incidents why I believe AI will not "completely" replace human roles. When systems fail at scale, we still require an accountable human to analyze the failure, accept responsibility.