In the AI era, revenue-per-employee is the new Big Tech metric

• A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter.
• Sign up for the weekly BI Tech Memo newsletter here.

Revenue-per-employee is back, and it’s becoming one of the most telling metrics in tech.

Back in my Bloomberg News days, Mike Bloomberg obsessed over this number. The logic was straightforward: how much revenue does each employee generate?

It’s a discipline that keeps hiring tied to real business growth and forces companies to scrutinize roles that don’t clearly contribute to bringing in the Benjamins.

During the pandemic-era tech boom, that discipline slipped. Tech companies hired aggressively and headcount became a proxy for momentum. But when growth normalized, the mismatch became obvious. Layoffs followed, and many companies are still correcting for that overexpansion.

Now, AI is accelerating the shift back. With AI coding tools boosting productivity, companies are questioning whether they need thousands more software engineers.

See the ranges below. The data is striking. As Levels.fyi cofounder Zuhayeer Musa puts it, tech companies are no longer competing on headcount, they’re competing on efficiency. Growth is being redefined, and revenue per employee is becoming the scorecard.

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.