The Number Nobody Wants to Hear

A few weeks ago, I wrote about running my entire workday through an AI agent [1] — meetings, research, CRM, content creation. Eight hours of productive work, not a single line of code. The response was overwhelmingly positive. But one comment stuck with me: “If AI agents are this good, why isn’t my team shipping 10x more?”

The answer is now backed by data from multiple independent studies — and it’s not what the vendor pitches suggest.