Internal costs are rising directly due to AI spend, we're still figuring out cost control and budgeting around this but are expecting this to basically become a new per-employee cost to factor in.

I would say internal morale and productivity has improved. We have explicit policy guidance and a general collective distaste of pasting AI responses which is what usually sours me on interactions with people that are fully gargling the kool-aid. My CI experience has gone down from ~1.5 hours to less than five minutes and I can actually run our entire platform locally on my laptop again. My personal experience has improved at least.

Externally, you're probably right that we're not really capturing user sentiment well about how our company's changes are impacting them. I can concretely say that there were several customers that were disappointed that our public change log notes have been about the same length. They were expecting us to go through our feature backlog faster because we we're starting to use AI.

On the other hand, we have had fewer outages, reached our fifth 9 consistently over the past four months which is a new company record in the 11 years its been tracked. We have had fewer support tickets, our customer retention rate is the highest it has ever been in the company's history, and we're growing our internal teams. Based on the evidence I have available to me, I would say that we're healthier than before both from a user sentiment perspective and an internal morale perspective.