A new study from project management platform provider Linear has revealed that AI adoption throughout organizations has grown rapidly, and that the use of AI in product development is no longer just an engineering concern.
While the early adopters of AI were primarily software developers, its use has reached marketing and design, and all the way into the C suite, with the most senior leaders in an organizations getting hands-on with the technology. In companies with more than 200 employees, the amount of time CEOs spend with AI has grown by 27 percentage points from January of this year through June, the study found. Another finding is that company functions of engineering, product, design, go-to-market and founder each saw more time spent in creation and triage, assigning and updating, and commenting. This puts a spotlighting on the paradox that even as AI-assisted coding is being generated faster than ever, the bottlenecks to product delivery have shifted from development to validation, governance and security.
Notably, prompting AI and deploying agents to deal with issues are new tasks that are increasing across the enterprise, without any time taken away from other job responsibilities.
Perhaps the most interesting — and potentially challenging — data point in the study is that the number of pull requests being done in organizations has increased by 111% over the last two years, due almost entirely to the use of AI. WIth this many changes happening that quickly, teams are stressed to ensure the changes are not breaking parts of the applications or creating new vulnerabilities. Interestingly, the report found, product managers and designers attach pull requests at roughly three times the rate of two years ago. This reflects the change that people who used to describe a change now ship it themselves, the report said.
Finally, the study looked at token spend as it correlates to successful outcomes from the huge gains in code output. “The suggestion that everyone in an organization is becoming a ‘builder’ seems to be directionally true,” Linear wrote in the report. “Those gains haven’t shown up as time saved, though. … the overall time spent on product development is going up rather than down. … Teams are working more, not less.”
The point is, token spending and delivering value don’t line up at all, the study found, and “using one as a proxy for the other will remembered as a relic of AI’s early days.”