Microsoft comes to mind, with their anti-open-source era, their bullying of security researchers, and several other infractions. Plus I suspect they're gearing up for some shenanigans re: their auth portal.
> Please hire more McKinsey consultants who say they’re AI experts
You have to recognize that a vast majority of enterprises fall in the category of "Dumb IT". To them, IT is a cost-center and overhead as their main line of business is something else. And, they look up to the likes of McKinsey for wisdom.
Yeah, you’re right about that. They view IT as a “cost center” to be cut to the bone (despite being essential to their product and strategy in most cases), while they have no problem with paying consultants astronomical hourly rates for nonsense like this.
I get that these companies (airlines, widgets, whatever) don’t see IT as a thing that generates revenue, but it’s like having electricity or running water. You don’t think about it much, but if you don’t have it, you’re fucked.
> Organizations are using agentic coding tools to build software in-house in lieu of purchasing it. Nearly a third of respondents (32 percent) report that their organizations have decided against buying one or more software products or features because they could be built internally with agentic coding tools.
People think they can do it themself... kind of like how everyone build their own database using Microsoft Access in the 90's. When all software developers needed to repair all the issues...
I am at a point in my career where I'm figuring out where I want to spend the last 15 years of it. I don't want to work in corporate for a long stretch of it. It seems to me, being a consultant to fix all those messes could be a good seam of code face to get stuck into...
Except that isn't how it played out. Most of the Access DBs, spreadsheets, and even SharePoint, Notes, and early Salesforce apps worked just fine without any help from devs. Yes, the devs got called in when those solutions needed to scale beyond a single department, but most of them never did.
It is far more plausible that we'll see that pattern again - small, department-level vibe coded apps will be around. And things that need to scale bigger will need professionals.
We can do it ourselves. Simple custom tools are so much more effective than a conglomeration of general purpose ones. I've been ripping out SaaS offerings left and right, it's great.
On the other hand, if you let in-house devs own your enterprise software, in many places it's going to be months of meetings to get the smallest change implemented.
Plenty of companies run most of their internal operations on Excel and Access for exactly this reason. And most developers barely know anything about databases anyway.
Correct, which is why we went through the initial dotcom bubble, the initial enthusiasm didn’t match the ROI and resulted in a massive resource misallocation. A tiny bit like the AI rollout?
As expected the thread is filled with smug comments on how it is definitely not ROI positive.
The thing I think about is AI is already at that spot where you don’t need a survey or a Randomised Controlled Trial to prove it makes one productive. Sometimes things are that obvious. But these kind of tests and surveys appeal to a certain kind of person who considers IMO the wrong type of things as rigorous.
> About four in ten respondents (37 percent) report that AI has contributed positively to their organizations’ EBIT, essentially unchanged from 2025—despite growth in the share of organizations scaling AI technologies. But respondents do cite other organization-wide benefits: most notably, improvements in innovation, competitive differentiation, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction.
I view this mostly as a case of uneven diffusion. Consider your priors on the tech savviness of the bottom 50% of enterprises, let alone the bottom 25%. Many companies won’t adopt AI for 5 years. Now model how a 5% difference in growth plays out; not enough to sink stragglers immediately.
The other interesting bit is a 5% increase in EBIT could be a smaller productivity increase in the margin, eg you lowered prices by 2% and some fraction of your competitors’ customers noticed.
Basically, nothing revolutionary but I think it’s an error to read this as “we don’t see ROI yet”.
The other interesting point is one of legibility; the difference between “employees using AI” and “business function has rolled out AI”.
> Among AI tools, chatbots are the most widely scaled, with 47 percent of respondents saying their organizations are scaling them across the enterprise
We should look into the details, but I read this as: ~everyone is using AI ad-hoc, the 47% is the consultant-y “leadership has stood up a measurable initiative to scale AI…”. By construction, Gartner cannot measure the on-the-ground adoption.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 9.8 ms ] threadYou have to recognize that a vast majority of enterprises fall in the category of "Dumb IT". To them, IT is a cost-center and overhead as their main line of business is something else. And, they look up to the likes of McKinsey for wisdom.
I get that these companies (airlines, widgets, whatever) don’t see IT as a thing that generates revenue, but it’s like having electricity or running water. You don’t think about it much, but if you don’t have it, you’re fucked.
People think they can do it themself... kind of like how everyone build their own database using Microsoft Access in the 90's. When all software developers needed to repair all the issues...
It is far more plausible that we'll see that pattern again - small, department-level vibe coded apps will be around. And things that need to scale bigger will need professionals.
Plenty of companies run most of their internal operations on Excel and Access for exactly this reason. And most developers barely know anything about databases anyway.
I suspect the "or features" there is doing a lot of work.
Do the most unethical profit-maximizing thing, but also account for the eventual lawsuits and loss of goodwill in your calculation.
The thing I think about is AI is already at that spot where you don’t need a survey or a Randomised Controlled Trial to prove it makes one productive. Sometimes things are that obvious. But these kind of tests and surveys appeal to a certain kind of person who considers IMO the wrong type of things as rigorous.
I view this mostly as a case of uneven diffusion. Consider your priors on the tech savviness of the bottom 50% of enterprises, let alone the bottom 25%. Many companies won’t adopt AI for 5 years. Now model how a 5% difference in growth plays out; not enough to sink stragglers immediately.
The other interesting bit is a 5% increase in EBIT could be a smaller productivity increase in the margin, eg you lowered prices by 2% and some fraction of your competitors’ customers noticed.
Basically, nothing revolutionary but I think it’s an error to read this as “we don’t see ROI yet”.
The other interesting point is one of legibility; the difference between “employees using AI” and “business function has rolled out AI”.
> Among AI tools, chatbots are the most widely scaled, with 47 percent of respondents saying their organizations are scaling them across the enterprise
We should look into the details, but I read this as: ~everyone is using AI ad-hoc, the 47% is the consultant-y “leadership has stood up a measurable initiative to scale AI…”. By construction, Gartner cannot measure the on-the-ground adoption.
(Statement has been made since 2022)