{"id":242083,"date":"2026-08-02T22:02:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T03:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/fed-study-ais-slow-productivity-story-fits-a-century-old-historical-pattern"},"modified":"2026-08-02T22:02:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T03:02:58","slug":"fed-study-ais-slow-productivity-story-fits-a-century-old-historical-pattern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/fed-study-ais-slow-productivity-story-fits-a-century-old-historical-pattern","title":{"rendered":"Fed study: AI\u2019s slow productivity story fits a century-old historical pattern"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/fed-study-ais-slow-productivity-story-fits-a-century-old-historical-pattern.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>From the article<\/p>\n<p>Economists Ozkan and Aakash Kalyani, along with research associate Nicholas Sullivan, scanned roughly 490,000 earnings call transcripts from 5,198 publicly traded U.S. firms between 2000 and 2025, using an AI model to tag sentences about productivity and AI. The share of productivity commentary tied to AI rose from near zero before ChatGPT\u2019s late-2022 debut to roughly 15% of all productivity discussions by the end of 2025.<\/p>\n<p>Approximately 95% of AI-related productivity sentences describe gains executives expect in the future, not gains already realized, a share that has held steady since 2023. When executives do describe AI\u2019s effect, they\u2019re almost uniformly bullish: 95% describe productivity as rising, compared with 75% for non-AI commentary.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers say this is exactly what history predicts.<\/p>\n<p>Ozkan said he wasn\u2019t surprised by the future-tense findings, since aggregate data already showed no meaningful bump in productivity once capital investment was accounted for. He invoked economist Robert Solow\u2019s famous quip that \u201cyou can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,\u201d drawing a direct line to electrification; it took \u201cseveral decades,\u201d Ozkan said, to reorganize factories, retrain workers, and change workflows before its productivity payoff showed up in the data.<\/p>\n<p>Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson called this the \u201cproductivity paradox\u201d in a 1993 paper for MIT, and lately has taken to describing the current situation as the modern sequel.\u201d<\/p>\n<hr>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/fed-study-ais-slow-productivity-story-fits-a-century-old-historical-pattern\">Continue reading \u201cFed study: AI\u2019s slow productivity story fits a century-old historical pattern\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the article Economists Ozkan and Aakash Kalyani, along with research associate Nicholas Sullivan, scanned roughly 490,000 earnings call transcripts from 5,198 publicly traded U.S. firms between 2000 and 2025, using an AI model to tag sentences about productivity and AI. The share of productivity commentary tied to AI rose from near zero before ChatGPT\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":715,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/715"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}