CEOs have a new AI flex

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a recent interview that AI now does up to 50% of all work at the company, in key functions like engineering, coding, and customer support. In May, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said 20% to 30% of the tech giant’s code is now written by AI coding assistants. And in April, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said over 30% of code at Google is now generated by AI.

It’s the latest CEO flex: Citing numbers showing that AI is doing heavy lifting internally. The move presents the company as being ahead of the AI curve and invariably grabs the attention of people who matter. Investors hear the magic words that the business is on track to save money—presumably accomplished—but rarely explicitly stated, through future job cuts. It also signals to clients of the Big Tech companies making the pronouncements that they should open their wallets, pronto, to incorporate more AI into their operations, or risk falling behind.

But how significant these CEO flexes ultimately are from Salesforce, Google, and Microsoft is difficult to know. The metrics cited seem precise, yet when asked, their spokespeople declined to provide any details about how the numbers were calculated or how they defined the work that they claim AI has done.

“The truth is, we don’t yet have a common framework for measuring what ‘percent of work’ really means in the age of AI,” said Malvika Jethmalani, founder of human capital advisory firm Atvis Group, in a message to Fortune. “Are we counting lines of code, tasks completed, hours saved, or business outcomes influenced?” 

But Netherlands-based occupational psychologist Marais Bester thinks something else is afoot. “I think it’s also sort of an indicator to employees, saying, you better watch your back, you better perform.” From a business psychology standpoint, that’s not an indicator of good leadership, he added.Shonna Waters, an organizational psychologist and CEO of advisory firm Fractional Insights thinks the companies that will succeed are those with “structural empathy”—that is, building systems that bring in frontline worker voices. “At the end of the day, you need the humans to still be the ones actually adopting the AI you need to bring them along with you journey and figure out how to do it in concert with them, as opposed to something you’re doing to them.” You can read my full story for Fortune here. — Sharon Goldman

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Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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