Commentary: Where is AI showing up in the productivity data?

WHAT THE DATA SAYS

More promising signs came from digging into the more granular data. I don’t mean the assortment of corporate anecdotes that have the informational value of parental boasting at the playground.

One compilation by Goldman Sachs put the average productivity boost from AI at 32 per cent. And based on the playground chatter, the average child is a chess prodigy, a lover of Swiss chard and a semi-professional trombonist.

Instead, I mean correlations at the industry level. If AI were helping companies squeeze more out of their employees, you would expect the industries adopting AI most enthusiastically to be enjoying the strongest labour productivity growth.

In the US that correlation has started to show up in recent data. Though of course, correlation isn’t causation and it could be that more innovative industries were most likely to adopt AI in the first place.

In a post published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, some economists try to improve on this analysis in two ways. First, rather than blunt AI adoption metrics, they ask people to estimate how much time AI tools saved them at work.

Second, they look at recent labour productivity growth between the introduction of ChatGPT and the second quarter of 2025, relative to its trend between 2015 and 2019. This was supposed to strip out any pre-existing trends that could mess up the results.

Combining these two metrics, they found that the industries where workers were saving the most time using AI were also the ones seeing unusually fast labour productivity growth. These included information services as well as professional, scientific and technical services. And updating the data to the third quarter of 2025, it looks like the correlation strengthened slightly.

I wouldn’t take the self-reported time savings too literally, not least because not everyone is as diligent as me, reallocating the time I save using ChatGPT (to find data) towards making my output even more jolly. If some people use the extra time to perfect passive-aggressive emails to their colleagues, again, that’s not really the kind of change we want to see.