• Business Insider asked six tech workers which task they're saving the most time on with AI.
• Some workers said AI has turned tasks that once took hours into minutes.
• Others said the productivity gains haven't necessarily led to shorter workdays.

Ask a tech worker how AI has changed their jobs, and chances are they'll answer with a single number: hours saved.

In interviews with Business Insider, Big Tech software engineers, product managers, and data scientists described using AI to compress hours of work into minutes. They use it to draft documents, summarize months of meetings, review code, automate reports, and more.

Faster doesn't always mean easier, however. One Amazon data scientist said AI is adding hours to his workweek as he builds the automation systems that should eventually save him time. Another Amazon employee said any time saved is quickly redirected to the next project.

Here's how six tech workers said AI is saving them the most time. (Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.)

The time AI saves me gets reinvested into the next problem

Priyanka Devi Ramesh is a business intelligence engineer at Amazon. She's 30 and lives in Virginia.

Document writing is where AI has had the greatest impact. With the help of an AI tool called Pippin, it's become easy to translate my thoughts about the projects I'm working on into polished documents that can be technical or customer-facing. This saves a massive amount of time — I spend hardly 15 to 20 minutes max to write and finalize a document that would have previously taken me well over an hour.

On the technical side, I use Kiro and Amazon Quick. Kiro is great for brainstorming ideas and making logic updates in minutes. I'm building agents within Amazon Quick to automate common customer questions about dashboards and to surface insights from data.

AI hasn't reduced my work time. We're constantly looking for ways to clean up messy data and finding opportunities to automate wherever possible — so the time saved in one area gets reinvested into the next problem.

AI helps me make sense of months of meetings at Google

Prerit Pathak is a security engineer at Google. He's 27 and lives in New York City.

I use Gemini for a variety of purposes, but recently it has bolstered my note-taking.

I used to take shorthand notes during meetings to record interesting or important information. Now, I let Gemini take notes on my work calls, and the improvement has been incredible. A summarization task — such as understanding what happened over the previous six months — that once would have taken one to two hours now takes five to 10 minutes.

I'm working longer hours now, so AI can save me time later

Sarthak Gupta is a data scientist at Amazon. He's 29 and lives in Seattle.

AI has been most helpful with building end-to-end automation pipelines for recurring workflows.

It used to take 8 to 10 hours over a couple of days to create a monthly stakeholder report that involved pulling data, cleaning it, generating visualizations, and writing the summary. Now, an AI pipeline handles the data pulls, transformations, and dashboard refreshes. I spend maybe 45 minutes reviewing the output and adding context before sending it out.

However, my overall working hours right now are running longer than normal. The reason is that we're in the middle of an automation phase. Building the pipelines, integrating the AI tooling, validating outputs, and onboarding all of this into existing workflows is front-loaded work, and that upfront investment is real. The payoff comes later, when the same task that took a couple of days collapses into a button click.

So in the short term, AI is actually adding hours to my week, not subtracting them. I'd expect that to flip once the foundational pipelines are stable and the automation is doing the heavy lifting on its own.

AI helps me turn messy ideas into polished plans

Tanvi Pisal is a UX designer working as a contractor for Apple via Red Oak Technologies. She's 29 and lives in San Jose.

One of the biggest ways AI saves me time is in early-stage product thinking and documentation.

As a product designer, I used to spend hours drafting product requirement documents, brainstorming user stories, mapping edge cases, outlining use scenarios, and refining ideation before I even got to visual design.

Now, I can start with rough notes or a messy draft, and AI helps turn that into a much more structured document in minutes. What used to take me three to four hours can often be reduced to 30 minutes with feedback and refinements.

AI gets me to the starting line faster at Amazon

Udit Mehrotra is a head of product at Amazon. He's in his 30s and lives in Seattle.

Writing product documents is where I've seen the biggest change. Every major initiative at Amazon starts with a written document, and for years, the first hour or two of that process was building scaffolding: setting up the structure, filling in the sections you know by heart, and building something worth reacting to before you could get to the actual thinking.

Now I can use AI to input the customer problem and constraints and get a solid first draft in minutes. What surprises me is that it's often more comprehensive than what I'd have written on my own under time pressure.

Getting from 80% to 100% is still where the real work lives, and AI doesn't change that. The strategic judgment, the tradeoffs between what customers need and what's technically feasible, the decisions that require years of accumulated context about a specific customer problem — that thinking still takes the same depth and care it always did.

What has changed is that I arrive at the starting line faster, with a more complete structure to react to and push against. The quality of the final document is often better as a result, not because AI did the hard thinking, but because I spent more of my time on it.

What used to take a week can now take a day

Iren Azra Zou is a software engineer at the trucking logistics startup Double Nickel. She's in her 20s and lives in New Jersey.

I use AI, mostly Claude Code, for the majority of my coding. It's honestly hard to quantify the time savings; it feels like what used to take a week can now take a day.

We also rely heavily on AI to review and provide feedback on code, unless a change is particularly risky. That alone saves a huge amount of time. Instead of waiting days for human reviews, you get multiple rounds of feedback within hours. It also means I spend less time reviewing others' code, which probably saves me several hours each week.

There are tradeoffs — less human review can have downsides. But right now, the speed of iteration and innovation is incredibly valuable for us.

Do you have a story to share about how you're navigating a career crossroads? If so, please reach out to the reporter via email at jzinkula@businessinsider.com, or via Signal at jzinkula.29.

• Steve Wozniak gave a commencement speech at Grand Valley State University earlier this month.
• He was cheered after telling students they had AI, or "actual intelligence."
• Students have booed some other execs who championed AI during their graduation speeches.

Steve Wozniak did what other college graduation commencement speakers couldn't this year: earn applause when talking about AI.

The Apple cofounder took the stage during Grand Valley State University's graduation ceremony earlier this month. During his speech, Wozniak offered reassurance to new graduates who are entering the workforce at the height of the AI revolution.

"You have AI — actual intelligence," Wozniak said.

The remark garnered laughs and applause from the audience.

"It would take too long to go deeply into what I think about AI, but we've been trying to create a brain," Wozniak said. "Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts."

While Wozniak delivered his speech without interruption, the same can't be said of some other AI-forward commencement speakers. In the weeks that followed, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and real estate executive Gloria Caulfield were both booed for their comments about AI at two separate graduate ceremonies.

AI is looming over new graduates as they enter the job market. The tech is changing the landscape, from the skills candidates need to how companies assess them. Its ability to automate many tasks has led some companies to conduct AI-related layoffs.

During his commencement address, Wozniak reflected on working at Apple and offered students some advice as they begin their careers.

"You should always try to think different," he said. "Don't follow the same steps as a million other people. Think, is there something I can do a little different?"

• John Ternus, Apple's new CEO, has a background in hardware engineering.
• Oculus inventor Palmer Luckey unearthed a VR headset from Ternus's time at Virtual Research in the '90s.
• Ternus left the small VR company in 2001 before joining Apple the same year.

Apple's John Ternus is a 25-year veteran of the tech giant, but one of his first engineering gigs was at a lesser-known company building virtual reality headsets.

Defense startup founder and Oculus headset creator Palmer Luckey reminisced on X about a product that Ternus, who is set to become Apple's CEO in September, might've had a hand in during his early engineering days.

Luckey posted a photo of an old V8 head mount display from Virtual Research.

"From what I can tell, he was the lead mechanical engineer on the V8 I obtained when I was 16!," Luckey wrote, referring to Ternus.

"It was an incredible headset for the time," Luckey told Business Insider.

He described the headset as well-balanced and relatively lightweight, with a field of vision that was ahead of that of other consumer products at the time. It mainly sold to military flight simulators for around $50,000, Luckey said.

Ternus and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A user guide for the V8 published online suggests the model was released in 1998, when Ternus would've been working at the company. He was an engineer at Virtual Research from 1997 to 2001, and joined Apple later that year, according to his LinkedIn profile.

A patent filed in 1995 and issued in 1998, during Ternus's time at Virtual Research, describes a similar-looking product, a virtual display apparatus for use in a virtual reality system. It supported the attachment of video displays.

Ternus is best known today as Apple's hardware boss, notably for working on AirPods and the iPad among other products, and as the incoming CEO.

His appointment marks the return to a product-minded chief like Steve Jobs. Current CEO Tim Cook's background is in operations.

The tech giant made its debut in the high-tech headset market in 2024 with the Vision Pro, which received a lukewarm response from the public. Its $3,500 price tag and lack of a killer app didn't wow consumers. At that point, Ternus had been in the senior vice president of hardware engineering role for three years.

Despite an underwhelming response to the Vision Pro, execs like Cook and Ternus remain optimistic about the product and the future of VR.

"Vision Pro is an extraordinary product," Ternus said in a Tom's Guide interview earlier this month. "It's like we reached into the future and pulled it into the present."

• Apple's outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, expanded the iPhone's size during his tenure, delighting some fans.
• The standard iPhone grew from 3.5 inches to over 6 inches, and Cook introduced larger-format models.
• Cofounder Steve Jobs initially dismissed the larger phones, calling them impractical.

Apple's outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, proved his predecessor, Steve Jobs, wrong: some people love a large iPhone.

Jobs, the cofounder and driving force behind the iPhone, once knocked smartphones larger than 4 inches. "You can't get your hand around it," he said in a 2010 press conference. "No one's going to buy that."

When Cook took the reins in 2011, he began expanding the iPhone's size. In 2012, the release of the iPhone 5 increased the phone's screen size from 3.5 inches to 4 inches. Later base models reached up to 5.8 inches before landing at around 6.3 inches in the latest iteration, the iPhone 17.

Cook also introduced larger-format iPhones, starting with the Plus series in 2014, which had a display size of 5.5 inches that year.

Cook deftly leaned into larger models as the world turned to video streaming and on-the-go viewing. Netflix, for example, shifted its business around 2011 to focus more on streaming, and YouTube was growing rapidly around that time.

In 2025, Apple introduced its largest iPhone model yet, the iPhone 17 Pro Max, which topped out at 6.9 inches.

The shift to larger sizes has been working out for Apple. Cook said in January that iPhone demand was "staggering" and "unprecedented" in the holiday quarter. Apple posted $85 billion in iPhone revenue for the period.

Early data also showed that demand for the 17 Pro Max was stronger in the first two weeks of availability than other models in the 17 lineup, according to market research firm Counterpoint Research.

Apple's larger-format phones are an example of how the tech giant prioritizes putting its own spin on technology rather than being first-to-market with an idea.

"We could have done a larger iPhone years ago," Cook told PBS News' Charlie Rose in 2014. "It's never been about just making a larger phone. It's been about making a better phone in every single way."

Thanks, Tim.

• Noise-canceling headphones have been around for decades, but I never tried them — until now.
• I was so confused and freaked out by the sudden silence when I put in my new AirPods 4.
• I felt scared, like a caveman at a monster truck rally. Embarassing, really!

It's March of 2026, and I just bought my first pair of noise-cancelling headphones. I'm shocked, astounded, perturbed, and horrified: Is this how you people have been walking around all this time?!

Last week, after losing my right AirPods 3 earbud, I ordered a new pair of AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation. They're the first headphones I've ever worn with noise canceling.

Of course, noise-cancelling technology in headphones has been around since the 1980s, and became popular in big squishy over-the-ear Bose headphones in the 2000s. Noise canceling has been part of the AirPods Pro lineup since 2019. For some reason, I just ... never tried them.

My first experience with noise canceling

I set up my new AirPods over the weekend while waiting around in the parents' zone at a trampoline park. Because I didn't bother reading the instructions, which suggest pairing by holding the case next to your phone, I simply put the unpaired earbuds into my ears.

Immediately, everything went quiet. I looked around, confused. Did the loud trampoline park just turn off the upbeat pop music they were blasting? Why was everyone suddenly silent? Is there an emergency? Was someone hurt? Oh god, was my kid hurt?! I was panicked, scanning the other tables where adults idly sat looking at phones or tying preschoolers' shoes. No one else seemed to be concerned.

I took out the AirPods, and whoooosh — the music and din flooded back. My brain scrambled to make sense of the sensory experiences hitting it, slowly realizing that this was what noise-canceling does. I was like a caveman being shown a Bic lighter; fearful and confused. I was like the proverbial Victorian child who would pass out if you showed it the AI-generated video of anthropomorphic fruits on "Love Island."

This is incredibly embarrassing on one level because I am a professional technology journalist who generally tries to stay up to date and informed about interesting personal tech devices. The fact that I had never used noise-canceling headphones was an odd oversight.

I don't have good reasons for this, but I do have some weak excuses.

First and foremost, I'm cheap. And in my mind, headphones are something you shouldn't have to spend more than $20 on — up until the iPhone 12, Apple included a free set of corded headphones in the box with a new iPhone or iPod. I had a drawer overflowing with them! Headphones were just something that came into your life, like a cheap black umbrella — you didn't seek them out or intentionally buy them. Now, suddenly, I'm expected to drop a C-note on them?

When AirPods launched in 2016, I initially waved them off as overpriced and frivolous. It looked too easy to lose one. But eventually I gave in and, of course, realized that AirPods are incredibly convenient and great to use (I was right about them being easy to lose, however). Now, it's hard to imagine ever going back to wired headphones, no matter how much Gen Z makes it look cool.

My other main reason is that because I use headphones while walking down the street, riding the subway, or in other public situations, the idea of not being able to hear my surroundings felt like a safety issue. Sure, it might be nice on a plane, but it didn't make sense for my main headphone use.

Jury's still out on whether I like the noise canceling

As I've been playing around with the new noise-canceling headphones, I'm not sure how much I actually like them. Taking them in and out is disorienting, like coming up to the surface too fast while scuba diving (or, what I imagine that feels like).

I tried them at the gym, where they seemed useful, but at home, my husband (who has had noise-canceling headphones for a decade) was mildly frustrated when he tried to talk to me, not realizing I had them in. Understandable!

The AirPod 4s can turn active noise-canceling on and off if you rub the earbud's stem, but I haven't quite mastered this yet — I've tried and sort of fumbled around, turning my podcast on and off and knocking it out of my ear. I'll keep working at it.

I'm just glad to have finally joined the 21st century.

• OpenAI has become a centerpiece in the AI talent wars, data reviewed by Business Insider shows.
• Workers often leave Big Tech for Sam Altman's venture and then move on to smaller startups.
• The average tenure for US-based OpenAI employees is around 16 months.

Workers leave Big Tech for OpenAI. They fan out across a growing ecosystem of startups. Rinse and repeat.

Since it launched ChatGPT, the Sam Altman-led company has quickly become a magnet for AI talent. It has pulled hundreds of researchers and engineers from competitors like Google, Meta, and Apple, according to data reviewed by Business Insider. After sticking around for a while, many of those employees go on to found or join rival startups of their own.

The company has nearly quadrupled in size since its chatbot took off in 2023, scaling from a small research lab of around 1,000 employees to a tech company with more than 4,000 workers.

To get a sense of how OpenAI is faring in the race for AI talent, Business Insider analyzed findings from workforce intelligence provider Live Data Technologies, which used LinkedIn to track the comings and goings of around 1,300 employees from January 2023 to March 2026.

Live Data Technologies analyzed publicly available professional profile data for OpenAI employees who had available information on previous employers. The roles analyzed ranged from engineering and research to product, human resources, and recruiting.

Representatives for OpenAI didn't respond to a request for comment.

The company's hiring pipeline is highly concentrated

OpenAI was originally founded by Altman and Elon Musk in 2015 to compete with Google's DeepMind AI lab.

Now, Google is the No. 1 source of talent for OpenAI, accounting for roughly a quarter of hires, according to the data.

Nearly half of OpenAI hires in the last three years came from either Google, Meta, Apple, or Microsoft.

Apple's Jony Ive joined OpenAI last summer to work on a new AI device. The project encompasses around 300 workers, many of whom came from Apple, The Information reported earlier this year.

The company has also made several high-profile hires over the past year, including Slack CEO Denise Dresser, OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger, and Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.

Since 2023, OpenAI has added roughly four times as many engineers as it has lost, highlighting the company's rapid expansion as the AI race intensifies.

The battle for AI talent has become one of Silicon Valley's fiercest. Big Tech companies are aggressively competing for a relatively small pool of researchers capable of building advanced AI systems.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly taken a hands-on role in recruiting top AI employees, while Meta and other companies have reportedly offered massive compensation packages, sometimes valued in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in stock.

OpenAI is known for its high compensation packages. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that its employees receive an average of $1.5 million in stock-based compensation. Public salary data from H-1B visa applications shows that research scientists at the AI venture have salaries ranging from $245,000 to $685,000, while engineering roles are listed with a range of $165,000 to $290,000.

Where employees go after OpenAI tells a different story

Departures are fragmented, spreading across more than 150 different companies, including competitors like Meta, Anthropic, and emerging labs such as Thinking Machines Lab, according to the data. The majority of OpenAI employees left for smaller startups, venture capital firms, or academia, according to the data.

The data suggests OpenAI has become a centerpiece in the AI talent network, pulling researchers from Big Tech and sending alumni across the startup and VC ecosystem.

Only a handful of companies received more than 15 OpenAI alumni in the last three years: Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Thinking Machines Lab, the data shows.

Anthropic is perhaps the best-known example. It was founded by former OpenAI researchers, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei. VP of Research Max Schwarzer left OpenAI for Anthropic earlier this month.

Meanwhile, several OpenAI employees who left the company to help found Thinking Machine Labs in February, including Barret Zoph, rejoined OpenAI earlier this year.

Common roles at OpenAI include engineering and research, the data shows. The average tenure for US-based OpenAI employees is around 16 months.

Do you work for OpenAI or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gkay@businessinsider.com or Signal at 248-894-6012. Use a personal email address, a nonwork device, and nonwork WiFi; here's our guide to sharing information securely.