Curious to hear what kind of work you do. Because there are definitely fields where productivity as 10x'd because of AI tools.
But even if we consider AI beyond just NLP, there's been so much ML you can apply to other more banal day to day tasks. In my org's case, one of the big ones was anomaly detection and fault localization in aggregate network telemetry data. Worked far better than conventional statistical modeling.
I usually assume there is a caricature of "AI Tools" that all of the detractors are working backwards from that are often nothing more than a canard for the folks that are actually using AI tooling successfully in their work.
Give me some refactoring in a C++ code base with 100k lines of code, and we’ll be able to talk.
I had to sign a 140 page contract of foreign language legalese. Mostly boiler plate, but I had specific questions about it.
Asking questions to an AI to get the specific page answering it meant I could do the job in 2 hours. Without an AI, it would have taken me 2 days.
For programming, it's very good at creating boilerplate, tests, docs, generic API endpoints, script argument parsing, script one-liners, etc. Basically anything for which, me, as a human, don't have much added value.
It's much faster to generate imperfect things with AI and fix them that to write them myself when there is a lot of volume.
It's also pretty good at fixing typos, translating, giving word definition, and so on. Meaning if you are already in the chat, no need to switch to a dedicated tool.
I don't personally get 10x on average (although on specific well suited task I can) but I can get a good X3 on a regular basis.
Also, what are you going to do if the AI answered inaccurately and you signed a contract that says something different then what you thought?
Either it’s their own company and they’re doing something unwise, they are doing it without the knowledge of their superior or their company shouldn’t be trusted with anything.
The point was that „AI helps me translate the contracts I want to sign“ isn’t a good example of „AI increases my productivity“ because that’s not something you should ever do.