I have run a 9-person infra team at a mid-size fintech for six years. AI writing tools have made us faster. They have not made us better.

Here is the actual pattern I have seen since we started using them in late 2023. We produce more drafts. The drafts are grammatically clean. The team spends less time on the boring parts. None of that has translated into writing that lands harder with the people we are trying to reach.

The bottleneck was never grammar. It was the thinking that has to happen before a sentence gets written. AI tools do not do that thinking for us. They help us phrase a thought we already had. If the thought is vague, the output is vague, just faster.

I do not have a number for the productivity gain. I have watched the team's output roughly double on first drafts, and the quality score from our editor has stayed flat. That is consistent with what I have read from two other managers I trust, but I would not call it a study.

The thing AI is good at is killing the blank page. The thing it is bad at is knowing which page is worth writing. That is still on us.

I am still uncertain whether the long-term effect will be net positive. My read is yes, but only if the team treats the tool as a faster first draft, not a finished one. If we start shipping the first draft, we will start writing like everyone else, and that has never been the goal.
