Conservative math: 3B connected people x $0.50/day “value” x 364 days = $546B/yr. You can get 5% a year risk free, so let’s double it for the risk we’re taking. This yields $5T value. Is a $1B investment on someone who is a thought leader in this market an unreasonable bet?
There's also the issue of who gets the benefit of making people more efficient. A lot of that will be in the area of more efficient work, which means corporations get more work done with the same amount of employees at the same level of salary as before. It's a tough argument to make that you deserve a raise because AI is doing more work for you.
So beyond, that you can easily can transform a newbie into a junior IT, or JR into a something ala SSR, and getting the SR go wild with times - hours - to get a solution to some stuff that previously took days to be solved.
After the salaries went down, that happened about 2022 to the beginning of 2023, the layoffs began. That was mostly masked "AI based" corporate moves, but probably some layoff actually had something to do with extra capabilities in improved AI tools.
That is, because, fewer job offers have been published since maybe mid-2023, again, that could just be corporate moves, related to maybe inflation, US markets, you name it. But there's also a chance that some of those fewer job offer in IT were (and are), the outcome of better AI tools, and the corporations are betting actively in reducing headcounts and preserving the current productivity.
The whole thing is changing by the day as some tools prove themselves, other fail to reach the market expectations, etc.