The Time Savings Era of AI Is Over

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today, we are looking at the results of the AIDB Intel January AI Usage Pulse Survey, and the results are very clear. Everyone is a vibe coder now, and the time savings era of AI is over. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. With my luck, yesterday, Sam Altman turned into a 50-foot robot and became president of the universe thanks to ChatGPT 6, leaving you to wonder why the heck I'm talking about some survey results when that's going on. Well, as I mentioned earlier in the week, I am actually in the midst of a very long travel couple of days down to South America with the fam, and so I preloaded a couple of episodes. Fear not, once I'm down there, we will be on our completely normal schedule, but for these couple of days, we had to do things in advance. Luckily, we were due to talk about the January AI Usage Pulse Survey. This is basically a look at how people used AI in January, where they saw the most value, and how that was changing over time. Now, before we get into the findings, let's talk about the sample. 583 people responded. Obviously, it was all listeners from this show, it was the only place that I was pushing this. I didn't even post about it on social media, so a highly concentrated AIDB audience, which means, of course, that this should not be taken as a representative sample of AI users in general. You gotta think that this represents an extremely active and franchised subset of AI users. And so I think the best way to think about these survey results is less about where AI is and more a way to skate where the puck is going. I think the folks who responded to this are out on the vanguard of trends, which will come to all sorts of other types of users a few months down the line. Just to give you some specific numbers around this, as 97.6% of the respondents use AI Daily with 43% spending more than 10 hours per week using AI for work. There is a pretty wide distribution of roles represented in this survey and honestly a pretty decent spread of company sizes as well. Now as always, whenever we do surveys, there's going to be some concentration among small companies and solopreneurs because that's such a big base of AI users right now, people who are venturing out onto their own, crafting new things, figuring out how to make the most of these tools either as individuals or with very small, high impact teams. 38% of the respondents were in that category of small companies with between and 50 people. However, there's a pretty good distribution across the rest of the company sizes as well, with 27% of the respondents coming from large enterprises that have 5,000 or more employees. There is a lot that we're going to get into, but here are five quick critical insights. Firstly, although ChatGPT has broader reach with 87% of people saying they used ChatGPT last month compared to 80% who said they used Claude, Claude is the number one primary model, chosen as primary by 45.8% of respondents. As we will discover, Claude primary users are heavier users, more agentic, and report greater value gains. Next, both usage of and value from AI are increasing. 71% of respondents increase their AI usage month over month, and 83% say that their value increased. Vibe coding has absolutely gone mainstream. 69% use vibe coding tools, and most of them come from outside engineering and IT. Fourth, as we have seen in our broader discussions, we also see in these numbers that some sort of agentic threshold has been crossed, with more than a third, 37.6%, reporting agentic AI use. Finally, we are seeing a shift in benefits. In this survey, time savings was not the number one benefit, and that represents a big change from what we have seen in the past. In fact, when we did our AI ROI benchmarking survey at the end of last year, time savings was absolutely the universal entry point. 76.7% of the survey participants cited time savings as one of the primary benefits that they got from AI. It was the dominant benefit across every single industry, role and company size. It was, as we put it then, the low-hanging fruit of the AI era. It was nearly double the next highest level of benefit, in terms of its prevalence among these use cases. Interestingly, though, we also found that it was not the most valuable benefit. We actually saw an inverse correlation where respondents who only focused on time savings reported lower overall. Conversely, the people who deployed use cases that had strategic benefits, like improved decision making, new capabilities and increased revenue, reported significantly higher ROI scores, meaning that the shift away from time savings is something that could be pretty exciting. But with the key findings out of the way, let's start to get into some of the big areas of exploration. Let's talk about the model landscape first. One thing to note is that this set of respondents are very polyamorous when it comes to their models. The average person, in fact, reported using 3.5 models. Only 5% of respondents used a single model. This is one of the areas that I think might be most out of sync with the average enterprise user who's going to either use A, only what their enterprise gives them access to, or B, that plus whatever model they use at home. Overall, each of Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini saw a pretty significant breadth of usage. Claude and Gemini both had 80% of people who had used them in the last month, with ChatGPT, as we said before, seeing the broadest usage at 87%.