Cut my contractor budget by about 40% over the last 6 months because Claude plus a few custom scripts now handles the data cleanup and first-pass research I was paying two freelancers for. The honest read is it's both: AI made the cuts possible, but the cuts were already coming because we overhired in 2022 and the rates we were paying weren't sustainable past Series A.
cut two backfills last quarter, blamed copilot, kept the savings
What's the actual headcount delta on teams that adopted Copilot or Cursor versus those that didn't at the same company?
Funny how the same framing showed up in education last spring when three districts near me cut paraprofessional roles and pointed at "AI tutoring pilots," even though the pilots were six kids on Khanmigo for a month. Budget cuts wearing a productivity costume isn't new, the costume just got better.
The "correlation not causation" framing lets execs off too easy on the other side. My agency contracts dropped from 12 retainers to 3 in eighteen months, and every single client that cut me said the same thing: their in-house marketer is running Claude or Jasper for first drafts now. That's not correlation, that's a line item moving from my invoice to an OpenAI bill.
Correlation, sure, but the framing gives execs cover either way. My district cut two instructional aide roles last spring and pointed at "AI tutoring tools" we'd barely piloted with one 4th grade class.
Cut my retainer roster from 9 clients to 4 after building Claude-driven content pipelines for each one, and I'm netting about 30% more than the agency salary I left in 2024. The "AI productivity" line is half real, half cover for headcount decisions the CFO already wanted to make six quarters ago.
