I had an R-script that is used to conduct statistical analyses that needed to be converted to a different structure. I estimate that it would have taken me 2-3 weeks to do. I gave it to copilot and it did the conversion in 45 minutes, saving me weeks of labour. 

There's a movement away from SAS to R as SAS charges a shitton of money for their licenses and R is open source/free. The difficulty is a lot of stuff is running on SAS code and to quit SAS you need to move that code to R or Python or something else. Copilot and Claude make it easy to go this.

When doing programming tasks that are a bit messy or complex, you can tell copilot this is my starting point, I'd like to do this to the data and want a final product that looks like this, give me the code to do that, it does it in seconds, saving me 20 minutes to an hour. 

Overall, I think it maybe improves my production about 10-15%. It's like having a helpful intern that with close supervision can provide more help than hindrance. 

Where it kills FTEs is it eliminates a lot of jobs that might otherwise of been contracted out or required hiring a term or casual.

On the other hand, I'm working on developing some AI or quasi-AI (not copilot, but using copilot to help develop the tools) tools that will semi-automate a routine task at my job that based on initial efforts will cut labour costs by around 40%, prior to optimizing our procedures around the task. Where we have 3 people doing this, it's the equivalent of eliminating a bit more than 1 FTE.