MIT says AI isn't replacing you it's just wasting your boss's money (opens in new tab)

Snark aside, this is the main topic of Eli Goldratt's "The Goal" - one of my favourite books. Output of the business is constrained by some bottleneck. Improving efficiency away from the bottleneck is just waste. Said differently, enhancing individual productivity has no effect on the business output unless doing so elevates the bottleneck. Sadly, most business don't know what their constraints are or are otherwise blocked from elevating them due to politics and other factors.

You have to factor in the cost of the tools.

And also, just because an employee is producing more code or more reports or more trades or more summaries per day, that doesn't guarantee the company will make more money. If you enabled your market analysts to make twice as many trades per day, you will likely lose money if they actually did that. Because they were already finding the good trades, and now they are also making the not-so-good trades and maybe even the unlikely trades.

And also, in the longer term not being shown in existing studies, you are in an arms race with your competitors. Like advertising, you will be spending a lot of that money in order to counter the spending of your competitors, and you both lose the game of prisoners dilemma, the only winner being the arms dealer selling to both sides.

How is this 'enhancing individual productivity' being measured? If by self-reporting, it's worthless.

Here's a recent experiment: https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m365_copilot_uk_gover...

A fairly common pattern seems to be emerging; users _believe_ that it makes them more productive, but attempts to actually measure this don't show that.

> How on earth does "enhancing individual productivity" not improve P&L performance?

If the individual is more productive, they can work fewer hours. This is especially true in a remote-work environment where you are not in an office setting.

If your boss doesn’t get credited for it it doesn’t count?