The 10x AI is selling you isn't the one your growth needs

The 10x AI is selling you isn't the one your growth needs.

The New York Times recently ran a piece on a US company that 10x'd its code output with AI — from 25,000 lines of code per month to 250,000.

Small collateral damage thrown in: a backlog of 1,000,000 lines of code for very-much-human engineers to review, and Sales, Marketing, and Support teams under more pressure than they'd ever seen.

Sure, the Engineering team codes 10x faster. But they don't review the code 10x faster. And since AI wrote the code, the need to verify it — and to actually understand it — is even bigger.

Beyond that, the people shipping these features and supporting them didn't get a 10x in productivity either! An organization is a system of dependencies that can't move faster than its slowest link.

I think we've all run into it: AI adopted in silos, moving problems around instead of solving them. At the individual level, code review now takes longer than writing the code. At the department level, Product and Marketing can't keep up with Engineering anymore.

AI doesn't invent an organization's strengths or weaknesses — it reveals them, and amplifies them. And the first weaknesses it exposes are: fuzzy ownership, and a lack of coordination between departments.

Those are the recurring root causes of the AI productivity paradox.

If 90% of your teams use AI and you see no productivity gains, the failure is organizational, not technological.

The companies that achieve a real step-change in overall productivity will be the ones that codify the best practices into a human/AI collaboration playbook — both within their teams and between them.