Investors are pricing in a 32.6% AI productivity boost for software engineers

Investors are signaling that AI could materially raise software engineering productivity, with market movements implying a 32.6% permanent gain since ChatGPT’s launch. For CIOs and technology leaders, the strategic takeaway is that AI is increasingly being priced as a core software development lever—not just an experiment—which raises expectations for faster delivery, lower unit cost, and higher ROI from engineering investments. However, the article also warns that task-level gains may be offset by organizational bottlenecks such as code review, QA, governance, and release management, so IT organizations will need to redesign workflows to capture value at scale.