AI Saves Telcos Money | Can It Grow Revenue | Elisa Industriq
STL Partner's Managing Director of Research, Amy Cameron, on where AI in telecoms stands today: cost savings, revenue growth and trusted, well-governed AI.
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23 June 2026
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Discover why AI enhances, not replaces, developers, boosting productivity while relying on human creativity, direction, and technical expertise.
Blog
23 June, 2026
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Why AI coding tools are output multipliers, not substitutes for human direction, innovation, and taste.
“The End of Programming”
The first programmers to adopt COBOL, Fortran, and similar high-level languages were surely looked down upon by their assembler-swinging colleagues. I can hear the reverberations, echoing from the 1950s, of the presumed end of the art of programming in light of these new higher-level languages. Obviously, pulling up the abstraction level did not end programming as we know it; rather, it started it more than anything.
Power Law Adoption
I see the same momentum with AI coding agents, which in just a few years have become the de facto code writers and reviewers of modern software production. Looking closely at our engineering team of about 100 developers, I can see that a third are bullish adopters of each new incredible wave of innovation.
Many in this group are senior, experienced engineers who just found a way to multiply their impact on the company many times over. It is amazing to see how productive and innovative senior and experienced developers are in combination with the new tools. It's almost like watching them develop superpowers.
We also see a group on our team that is not yet fully on board with using AI coding tools to their full extent. There are concerns ranging from code quality and maintainability to understanding the ramifications of a codebase that has been optimized and expanded over many years. For some, it doesn't feel right to let an AI coding tool loose on our most prized assets.
We Grow in Teams
As we lead our teams through this transition — the most daunting of all the steep step functions we have experienced in our industry over the last few years — we want to take those who are willing to grow with us on the AI journey.
We have run projects where we pair the technology leaders with the AI skeptics, and we are working to learn from both groups how to embrace these capabilities: to leverage the sheer output potential while still doing it safely and with the best outcome for our customers in mind.
Output Multipliers
We value the unique perspective and experience of each person on the team, and we see the power of AI coding tools as output multipliers, not substitutes for human direction, innovation, and taste. Human and AI skills are multiplicative; they cannot replace each other fully.
An Era of Accelerated Change
Our industry is on a wild ride of new AI models and pricing changes. The state of the art is changing quickly between models, and our ability to absorb these changes is challenged by the laws and regulations that we and our IT colleagues have to live by. Annual budget planning cycles seem archaic when operating at the speed of AI-supported innovation.
With all these changes in flight, and the world going through tectonic shifts in economic policies and military alliances, we are living at the edge of the fastest acceleration of innovation in history — powered by AI and the changes around us.
It could not be a more exciting time to lead technology organizations through these stormy waters and on to new and exciting lands.
How I wrote this article
I wrote this article by hand and used Claude Opus 4.8 for grammar and native-speaker checks only. I asked it not to make any editorial changes in the first pass. In the next pass, I asked Claude to test the soundness of my arguments — where they seemed weak or unsubstantiated, and where they were strong. I took that feedback and manually edited two paragraphs. I did not accept editorial changes that would impact the key messages in the original text.
Gerhard Wieser is CTO & Head of Engineering at Polystar.
