Ex-Meta manager says just 2% of engineers are winning the AI era

• Kun Chen, a former Meta manager, said that just 2% of engineers use AI "very effectively."
• Chen said companies will allocate the most impactful projects to that subset.
• He said developers need to have urgency in figuring out how to become more effective with AI.

Tech companies are slashing jobs left and right, leaving many workers wondering if their role is next.

In an episode of Steve Huynh's, "A Life Engineered" podcast released Monday, Kun Chen, a former engineer at Microsoft, Meta, and Atlassian, said that only about 2% of engineers are getting outsized results from AI — and that gap could make a difference in terms of who gets left behind.

"Mastering agentic engineering has proven to lead to a massive boost in productivity, but this is only achieved by a small number of developers," Chen told Business Insider.

Based on conversations with CTOs he had in his most recent role, Chen said most companies are seeing just a 10% to 15% productivity boost from AI. That's because the majority of employees are using AI in a "shallow way," Chen said, which may make the technology seem less transformative than it is.

"When these CTOs zoom in, what they see is that in their company there is maybe 2% of people who actually figured out how to use AI very effectively," Chen, a former engineering manager at Meta said.

The 2% are experiencing a "massive shift" in how they work, he said.

Chen said that in past technological revolutions, like the industrial revolution or the rise of the internet, change started on a small scale before it "took over the entire world." AI will be the same, he said. For those wondering whether to embrace AI, there's an urgency to figure out how to get value from it now, he said.

"Otherwise they may indeed fall behind," Chen told Business Insider.

Chen said that in the current moment, companies are reallocating the most impactful projects to the 2%. Those are the workers getting tokens to "charge ahead," and they're executing projects much faster. By contrast, Chen said CTOs are seeing large, slow-moving teams take months to make small changes, like renaming a button or tweaking a line of text. That's now how CTOs like to operate, Chen said.

"At some points the CTOs will say 'Hey why do we have these teams here,'" Chen said. "And they will try to double down on the 2% more and more."

That's a risky position for developers, Chen said. His comments come as major tech companies like Meta and Amazon have laid off workers and reorganized into smaller, leaner teams.

Chen told Business Insider that growing that 2% number also depends on more collective work around educating and building awareness within the global engineering community.

Given how quickly the landscape is shifting, Chen said in the podcast that developers should develop a mindset of continuous growth. He said he wouldn't advise engineers to invest too much time in specific tools, as they can quickly become outdated. Instead, he said developers should lean into a completely new approach.

"We should invest time in a different mindset of continuous learning," Chen said.