Accenture sells AI transformation to thousands of clients while quietly telling its own employees they get a fraction of what some were already spending. The internal memo reveals a tension at the heart of every major consulting firm racing to profit from AI.
If AI makes you twice as productive, and there’s fewer taxes on spending money for tokens than there is for spending money on salaries, the rational amount for a corporation to spend on it is more than a human’s entire salary, per person working with it.
Naively assuming corporations approximate rational actors, and AI does measurably improve productivity, this implies a gain of roughly 2% if these employees are earning federal minimum wage, or well below 1% if they earn average software developer wages.
Maybe their contract deliverables are poorly suited to this use case or something, but if they are given a fixed amount of money to produce some software item, then it makes sense to prioritize productivity per dollar.
How many companies allow their employees to also be employed by their competitors?
Your idea of an AI being like an employee only if there’s an AI company that will agree to an exclusive contract or at the very least respect data ownership and respect privacy. Is there an AI company that’s like that?
Data ownership and privacy absolutely, within an enterprise license. They very deliberately make you pay for that.
While it’s hard to prove they’re not just breaching contract and training on it anyway, I don’t think it makes sense to assume they are.
@prime_number_314159
Maybe their business model does not depend on productivity. If the rate they charge for a developer with AI and without AI is approximately the same, they rather sell two people than making one more productive.
@FirmDistribution
Generally in the consulting business you’d just have your employees bill more hours than actually worked if they’re being more productive than average. Obviously without telling your clients.
For government contracts it’s not unusual that the agreed upon hours estimate is what is billed regardless of whether you actually spend more or less time.