I'm not sure it's correct that we need to measure the benefits of AI depending on the lines of codes that we wrote but on how much we ship more quality features faster.
This also includes things like video and image generation, where certain departments might previously have been paying thousands of dollars for images or custom video. I can think of dozens of instances where a single Veo2/3 video clip would have been more than good enough to replace something we had to pay a lot of money and waste of a lot of time acquiring previously.
You might be comparing this to one-off developer tool purchases, which come out of different budgets. This is something that might come out of the Marketing Team's budget, where $250/month is peanuts relative to all of the services they were previously outsourcing.
I think people are also missing the $20/month plan right next to it. That's where most people will end up. The $250/month plan is only for people who are bumping into usage limits constantly or who need access to something very specific to do their job.
It's really not hard to save several hours of time over a month using AI tools. Even the Copilot autocomplete saves me several seconds here and there multiple times per hour.
Nobody outside of the major players (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Salesforce) has enough product suite eyeball time to justify a first-party subscription.
Most companies didn't target it in their first AI release because there was revenue laying on the ground. But the market will rapidly pressure them to support BYOLLM in their next major feature build.
They're still going to try to charge an add-on price on top of BYOLLM... but that margin is going to compress substantially.
Which means we're probably t minus 1 year from everyone outside the above mentioned players being courted and cut revenue-sharing deals in exchange for making one LLM provider their "preferred" solution with easier BYOLLM. (E.g. Microsoft pays SaaS Vendor X behind the scenes to drive BYOLLM traffic their way)
For non-technical office jobs, LLMs will act like a good summer intern, and help to suppress new graduate hiring. Stuff like HR, legal, compliance, executive assistants, sales, marketing/PR, and accounting will all greatly benefit from LLMs. Programming will take much longer because it requires incredibly precise outputs.
One low hanging fruit for programming and LLMs: What if Microsoft creates a plug-in to the VBA editor in Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.) that can help to write VBA code? For more than 25 years, I have watched non-technical people use VBA, and I have generally been impressed with the results. Sure, their code looks like shit and everything has hard-coded limits, but it helps them do their work faster. It is a small miracle what people can teach themselves with (1) a few chapters of a introductory VBA book, (2) some blog posts / Google searches, and (3) macro recording. If you added (4) LLM, then it would greatly boost the productivity of Microsoft Office power users.
Even when the code is not 100% correct, it's often faster to select it and make the small.fix myself than to type all of it out myself. It's surprisingly good about keeping your patterns for naming and using recent edits as context for what you are likely to do next around your cursor position, even across files.
They noped right out when it turned out to be more like $20/month/user, not payable by purchase order, and instead spent a developer month cobbling together our own substitute involving Windows Subsystem for Linux, because it would pay off within two months.