Why AI coding tools might not make the slightest difference

Most “AI gives you 10x productivity” stories assume coding is the bottleneck. For large and mature companies this is almost never the case, so you roll out AI coding tools, people feel faster, but delivery metrics barely move. In this talk I’ll show how we used a Theory of Constraints approach at SEEK to find the actual bottlenecks holding back throughput, and how that changed our AI productivity strategy resulting in $1.5m / year in measured productivity gain.

You’ll leave with a practical playbook: what to measure, how to run experiments, what interventions usually unlock the next step, and how to get investment that optimises both for humans and coding agents. We’ll cover where AI can genuinely help cross-functionally across software delivery, and enabling changes you might need to roles and responsibilities, collaboration practices and platform capabilities.