Why many companies still not getting big productivity gains from integrating AI into the workflows.

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny (@bcherny ) explains citing a Harvard Business Review study from 1996 during the initial computerization era.

"The argument made by the article, which I think has immense parallels today, was that some companies kept their existing paper-and-pen processes and filing cabinets. Everyone continued working with paper, while a computer sat somewhere in the corner of the office. One person was assigned to enter information into it, and that person was the only one who used it.

Those companies did not see productivity benefits. They had simply created a new job for someone to interact with the computer.

The companies that did see benefits took the computer, placed it at the center of the office, digitized all their paper records, and threw away the filing cabinets. Everything then happened through the computer. It became the center of the company’s business processes.

Whenever they found a bottleneck caused by the paper-and-pen process, they digitized it. Then they found the next bottleneck and digitized that as well. They continued doing this until the entire business process had been redesigned.

When I look at our customers and at Anthropic itself, the businesses seeing the greatest productivity improvements are the ones that put Claude at the center of their operations and address one bottleneck at a time."

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From "Bloomberg Podcasts" YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)