Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Tokens hit 25% of compensation
Tokens in the payroll
Companies report token spending as a percentage of total compensation spend. In the most AI-focused ones, the figure gets very high, 20 to 25 percent, and the highest heard from a company is around 30. Another reached 50.
Where the money comes from
Knowledge work worldwide is worth 25 trillion dollars. Twenty percent of that is 5 trillion, and the money has to come from labor substitution or from faster economic growth through productivity.
AI-native companies
In AI-native companies, substitution shows up as hiring far fewer people rather than firing anyone. Their gross profit dollars per employee run well above earlier generations of startups. Charts from Cognition, Ramp, and Stripe show that the companies spending the most on AI are growing meaningfully faster, though the charts don't control for industry.
Why did computers take years to lift productivity?
In 1987, economist Robert Solow wrote that computers could be seen everywhere except in the productivity statistics. This became known as the Solow paradox. US productivity growth picked up in the mid to late 1990s, years after businesses had bought the machines. Economists often point out that firms had to reorganize their work around new technology before it showed up in the numbers.
Why can a chart not prove AI drives growth?
Fast-growing companies have more money to spend on everything, including AI tools. So a link between high AI spending and fast growth could run in either direction. Economists call this reverse causality, where the supposed effect also drives the supposed cause. Differences between industries add another layer, since a software firm and a restaurant chain have very different baseline growth rates.
More from Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
