The Half We Don't Measure
Ask most companies how AI is going and you'll get a usage number back. Seats filled, tokens burned, percentage of engineers active in the tool, PRs opened. Those are all real numbers. What they don't tell you is whether any customer ended up better off. That's the gap I want to talk about. If you're going to incentivize AI use, the thing worth incentivizing is a better outcome for the customer. Usually that shows up as speed. It can also show up as a lower defect rate, a system that holds up under load, or someone catching a problem in review that would otherwise have shipped. Everything else we're measuring is a proxy, and we mostly picked proxies that sit at the wrong end of the pipeline.