AI Gave Everyone a Multiplier. Most Used It to Subtract.

I've worked inside the "do the same for less" machine and inside a culture that lets a small team build what used to require departments. AI is forcing every company to pick.

I spent a decade building software at Siemens. Shared Services first, then Energy. A company with 180,000 employees where every project I touched had the same underlying question: how do we do this for less? The market was defined. Growth was slow. So the energy went into optimization. Do what we’re doing, cheaper.

Then I joined Auth0, now part of Okta. I came in as a developer advocate focused on writing blog posts. With my Siemens conditioning I figured that meant staying in my lane. But the culture kept pulling me wider. Within months I was contributing to SDKs, doing live streams, speaking at conferences. I eventually got promoted to lead the content team, and now a small group of us runs programs that would’ve required separate departments at my old company. Not because we’re stretched thin, but because the culture is built to let people operate beyond their job description.

I’ve been thinking about these two worlds a lot lately, because of AI. When I see a company hand its teams a productivity multiplier and immediately start cutting headcount, I recognize the reflex. I’ve worked inside that logic. “Do the same for less” is the default when you don’t have a growth thesis. And I’m worried that AI is giving a lot of companies permission to act on that default faster than ever. Plenty of people are asking the growth question too. But when both options land on the same leadership table, the cost cut tends to win. It’s the one you can put in a slide with a dollar figure attached.

What changes when you point the multiplier at growth

I’ve always carried around more ideas than I had time to pursue. Things I wanted to write, projects I wanted to try. Not because I lacked the skill, but because there are only so many hours in a day and I also like to go home and be with my kids. Those ideas just sat there, some of them for years.

AI cleared the path for a lot of that. This newsletter is a good example. I’d been carrying the idea around for a long time, but the activation energy of writing regularly on top of everything else was too high. AI made the process of getting my thinking into something publishable realistic in a way it wasn’t before.

My team has felt the same shift. We’re a creative group with more ideas than we’ve ever had bandwidth for, and AI gave us the room to actually try some of them. We’re producing work now that wasn’t on anyone’s roadmap six months ago. Not because the roadmap changed, but because things that used to feel out of reach became possible. Problems we’d been punting on for years, ideas that would’ve died in a prioritization meeting because nobody had the bandwidth. Auth0’s culture already encouraged that kind of expansion. AI just widened the door.

The part I’m still working through

Here’s where my thinking gets less clean. Because there’s a version of this where I’m wrong, and I want to be honest about it.

Not every company is in growth mode. I know this firsthand. At Siemens, the addressable market for Shared Services wasn’t expanding. The product was stable. The customers were internal. If you’d handed my team a tool that doubled our output, I’m genuinely not sure what we would have done with the extra capacity. You can invest in quality. You can pay down tech debt. But those investments have diminishing returns. At some point, the honest answer might be that you don’t need the capacity.

And there’s a harder version of this problem that I think most people in tech aren’t reckoning with yet. What happens if AI increases productivity faster than markets can grow?

If every company in your space can suddenly produce twice as much, but customer demand hasn’t doubled, you end up in a world where surplus capacity is the norm. In that world, the companies cutting headcount aren’t being unimaginative. They’re being realistic about a market that can’t absorb what their teams are now capable of producing.

I don’t have a good answer for that. It’s possible we’re heading into a period where productivity and demand decouple in ways that make “just build more” genuinely naive advice. The history of technology is full of moments where automation created abundance that the market took decades to figure out what to do with.

Before you cut

I think most companies are cutting too fast. Not all of them. Some are making hard, honest calls about markets that aren’t growing. But most of the layoffs I’m seeing aren’t that. They’re the path of least resistance. The first move, not the last resort. And once you cut, the option to explore disappears with the people you let go.

What I’d want to see, if I had any say in it, is a company that gets handed a productivity multiplier and spends one quarter asking what its team could build with the extra capacity before deciding to shrink. Just one quarter. That’s not a big ask. But it almost never happens because the cost savings are right there on the spreadsheet and the upside of exploration is speculative.

I’ve worked inside the model where optimization is the only gear, and inside a company where a small team with room to grow will find things worth building that nobody planned for. I can’t pretend to be neutral about which one I’d rather build in. But I also can’t pretend the growth answer is always right. Some markets really don’t have room. Some companies really are done expanding.

What I do believe is that most of them haven’t checked.