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The SURGE FRAMEWORK

Is your AI spend shipping code, or just reporting usage?

SURGE connects every AI dollar to the code it actually shipped - across Spend, Utilization, Recovery, Gains, and Efficiency. It runs on real engineering telemetry from 100,000+ engineers, not survey estimates, so you can justify, scale, or right-size AI with numbers that hold up in a board meeting.
The framework

Five pillars. One measurement model. Real engineering data.

SURGE follows the full value chain from AI investment to delivered outcome. Each pillar answers a question your current dashboards can't.

Spend

One ledger for every AI dollar - by tool, model, team, and project, including the per-developer token spend flat budgets miss.

Utilization

Active developers vs idle seats, power users vs week-one churners, so you stop paying for licenses no one opens.

Recovery

The budget you can win back, sized by root cause - idle seats, tool overlap, wrong-model spend, over-committed contracts, zombie agents.

Gain

The AI code that actually reached production, and whether shipping more of it moved the outcome, not just the IDE acceptance rate.

Efficiency

Where AI sped delivery up, where it just moved the bottleneck, and where the speed was an illusion that review and rework absorbed.
Benchmark findings

What 100,000+ engineers reveal about AI ROI.

Four numbers from the SURGE benchmark dataset, every figure pulled from real customer telemetry, not survey estimates.

26%

of paid AI licenses show near-zero activity
UTILIZATION

$2 M

in recoverable AI spend left on the table annually per org
RECOVERY

50%

of merged production code is AI-attributed
GAINS

78%

higher throughput in top-quartile SURGE teams
EFFICIENCY

Unlock the true efficiency of AI in your workplace

AI spend became a board question before anyone built the instruments to answer it. SURGE measures the full path from dollars to delivered code, so you can prove the return instead of estimating it.
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The problem

AI spend is on the board. No engineering org can prove what it returned.

Vendor dashboards report seat counts. Survey-based ROI frameworks estimate from assumptions. Neither connects AI dollars to shipped code, recovered waste, or measurable engineering output. By the time the renewal conversation lands, the data still doesn't exist.

Adoption is Not output

A developer with a seat counts as a user. Whether they merged AI-assisted code, how often, and with what effect on delivery is a completely separate question, and the one that matters.

Estimates don't survive Finance

A survey-based ROI calculator gives you a number built on assumptions. The moment Finance asks for the underlying data, the methodology folds. Telemetry-grounded measurement is the only answer that holds.

Waste hides in five different places

Idle seats, duplicate tools on one engineer, premium models doing boilerplate, contracts committed above actual burn, zombie agents. Each is invisible alone. Together they eat a real slice of every AI budget.

The questions Jira reports can't answer. Investment Profile can.

Spend

See every AI dollar and who's actually using it

A high spender can be a power user or an expensive churner. SURGE surfaces the patterns survey data never catches and joins spend to merged output, so the number you act on reflects value delivered, not activity logged.

See how Spend is measured →
Utilization

A seat assigned is not a tool used.

Track the complete lifecycle of AI-generated code from the IDE straight through to production. By analyzing long-term engagement patterns, SURGE automatically clusters developers into distinct adoption archetypes: Fast & Sustained, Fast Then Cliff, or Slow Then Stick to reveal true organizational behavioral shifts.

See how Utilization is measured →
Recovery

See the recoverable AI investment before your next renewal

Recovery surfaces the recoverable AI spend across idle licenses, model mismatch, overlapping tools, and zombie agents. Every dollar tied to a cause, every cause traceable to a team, ready for procurement.

See how Recovery is measured →
Gain

Count the PRs that AI actually helped ship

Gain shows AI-assisted PRs merged, AI code percentage, and acceptance rate from real production data. Skip the IDE counters and survey estimates. Measures what reached production and what each delivered change actually cost.

See how Gains is measured →
Efficiency

Surface the highest and lowest performing teams on AI ROI

Efficiency is where SURGE delivers the bottom line. Efficiency Multiplier, Cost per PR, AI-Assisted PRs Merged, and Rework Rate, calibrated continuously. The board-grade AI ROI number every engineering investment conversation needs.

See how Efficiency is measured  →

What teams shipped after measuring AI with SURGE.

Measurable business impact and vetted customer outcomes from industry leaders.
+16%
more features shipped 26% fewer hotfixes
Freshworks · Gains
56%
faster release cycles
AvidXchange · Efficiency
19%
faster cycle time
Sopra Steria · Efficiency

Frequently asked questions

What does SURGE stand for?

Spend, Utilization, Recovery, Gains, Efficiency — five pillars that measure the full value chain from AI investment to delivered engineering output. The E does double duty as the audience anchor: the framework is built for engineering teams.

How is SURGE different from DORA's ROI framework?

DORA's framework is a calculator powered by survey-based assumptions. SURGE replaces those assumptions with real telemetry from 100,000+ engineers — the output is a measured benchmark, not an estimate. We adopt DORA's amplifier thesis and J-curve directly, then measure what DORA could only estimate.

What does Hivel mean by "recoverable" AI spend?

Recovery aggregates five waste patterns most orgs can't see: idle licenses with near-zero activity, multiple paid tools on one seat where only one gets used, premium models used for low-value tasks, contracts committed above actual burn, and abandoned or zombie agents still calling APIs.

How does SURGE measure AI-attributed code without IDE telemetry?

Hivel's AI Code Telemetry classifies merged code as AI-generated or human-written directly from PR diffs — tool-agnostic, with no IDE plugin dependency. It catches contributions from Copilot, Cursor, Claude, and ChatGPT, including code pasted in from chat tools.

Is SURGE only for CTOs and engineering leaders?

No. Each pillar serves a specific audience. Spend and Recovery are Finance and Procurement conversations. Utilization and Gains are platform and engineering-leader conversations. Efficiency is the board conversation. The framework holds across all of them.

Trusted by 1000+ Engineering Teams

Vaibhav Bansal
V.P. Engineering
"Hivel has been phenomenal in helping us present our progress to leadership. Its insights into leading indicators have empowered our team leads to enhance review efficiency and ship features faster. Now, we are able to show the impact of our process changes, clearly identify areas of opportunity, and bring in a data-driven culture without spending time pulling manual reports."
Murali Swaminathan
Chief Technology Officer
"We were looking for a unique solution to understand engineering productivity and efficiency, with a single tool that could give leaders complete visibility. We evaluated other comparable tools, but none were comprehensive enough. When we came across Hivel, it checked all the boxes for measuring developer productivity across both AI and non-AI workflows."
Derek Mackie
Director of Engineering
"Using Hivel shone a light on the non-standard aspects of our work, emphasizing the need for crucial adjustments. The insights from Hivel helped us recognize areas for improvement, particularly in managing cycle times and streamlining development workflows. This guidance has been instrumental in our efforts to enhance operational efficiency and productivity."
Leonardo Pinheiro Ferrari
Chief Technology Officer
"Thanks to Hivel, we've seen a staggering 157% improvement in our deployment frequency. By identifying and addressing inefficiencies, and adopting best practices, we've significantly accelerated our progress. Hivel has been instrumental in our journey to operational excellence."
Chris Callander
Senior Engineering Manager
"Hivel has been instrumental in identifying areas for enhancement and guiding our strategic improvements. It has significantly contributed to our journey toward greater operational efficiency. The Activity and Dev360 features in Hivel have been particularly valuable for providing feedback to engineers during 1-1's, enhancing our communication and development practices."
Shiro Theuri
Chief Technology Officer
"Before Hivel, understanding our engineering team's dynamics was a game of guesswork. Now, with Hivel's clear dashboards and insights, our leaders have the clarity and time-saving tools they need to excel. It's been transformative in streamlining our operations."
Koti Reddy
Chief Technology Officer
"Incorporating Hivel into our daily operations has been a game-changer. It's not just a tool; it's a part of our strategic decision-making process, trusted by our leaders at every level. The impact on our engineering efficiency is undeniable and deeply valued."
Manoj Awasthi
Chief Technology Officer
"It has been great to partner with Hivel to get access to insights that help leaders at all levels gain visibility into bottlenecks and challenges that the teams face, build actionable plan to resolve them and track the progress over time. And thanks for the fantastic support!"
Ameen M
Engineering Manager
"Hivel has made a huge difference to how I manage my teams. Before every one-on-one or appraisal, I rely on it to dive into developer metrics and drive truly meaningful conversations. It helps me spot rework patterns, reward high performers, and benchmark our teams even against our US counterparts. The dashboards are intuitive, insightful, and honestly far more actionable than anything we get from Jira."
Paras Sood
Associate Director
"Hivel's insights have been pivotal in refining our engineering processes, elevating both efficiency and the developer experience. We're now making smarter decisions, faster, thanks to Hivel."
Vaibhav Bansal
V.P. Engineering
"Hivel has been phenomenal in helping us present our progress to leadership. Its insights into leading indicators have empowered our team leads to enhance review efficiency and ship features faster. Now, we are able to show the impact of our process changes, clearly identify areas of opportunity, and bring in a data-driven culture without spending time pulling manual reports."
Murali Swaminathan
Chief Technology Officer
“We were looking for a unique solution to understand engineering productivity and efficiency, with a single tool that could give leaders complete visibility. We evaluated other comparable tools, but none were comprehensive enough. When we came across Hivel, it checked all the boxes for measuring developer productivity across both AI and non-AI workflows.”
Vaibhav Bansal
V.P. Engineering
"Hivel has been phenomenal in helping us present our progress to leadership. Its insights into leading indicators have empowered our team leads to enhance review efficiency and ship features faster. Now, we are able to show the impact of our process changes, clearly identify areas of opportunity, and bring in a data-driven culture without spending time pulling manual reports."
Derek Mackie
Director of Engineering
"Using Hivel shone a light on the non-standard aspects of our work, emphasizing the need for crucial adjustments. The insights from Hivel helped us recognize areas for improvement, particularly in managing cycle times and streamlining development workflows. This guidance has been instrumental in our efforts to enhance operational efficiency and productivity."
Leonardo Pinheiro Ferrari
Chief Technology Officer
"Thanks to Hivel, we've seen a staggering 157% improvement in our deployment frequency. By identifying and addressing inefficiencies, and adopting best practices, we've significantly accelerated our progress. Hivel has been instrumental in our journey to operational excellence."

"The only tool our entire leadership team actually trusts"

- CTO, Enterprise
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