AI Delivers Major Individual Productivity Gains and Rising U.S. Labor Productivity, But Company-Wide and Aggregate Impacts Remain Limited So Far

Software engineer Iren Azra Zou said Anthropic's Claude Code has helped her complete software engineering tasks in a day that used to take as long as a week. "It saves an insane amount of time," said Zou, who works at the trucking logistics startup Double Nickel. " "That upfront investment is real," Gupta said while building out pipelines, integrating AI tools, and onboarding existing workflows.

"The bigger unlock isn't the speed on any single task, it's that the same pipeline keeps paying off every month, every quarter, every time the work repeats," he said. The word "AI" appeared in proximity to the word "productivity" in 637 earnings calls in Q2 2026, up about 25% from the same period a year earlier, according to an analysis by AlphaSense for Business Insider.

U.S. Labor productivity growth has risen above its pre-pandemic trend since 2020 and strengthened further after late 2022. Roughly 90% of firms actively using AI reported the technology had no impact on productivity over the prior three years, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper based on a survey of nearly 6,000 executives and released in February.

"So far the productivity impacts from AI appear to be small and haven't really moved the dial on aggregate productivity growth," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's, told Business Insider.

A new Wharton paper by Jessica and Jonathan Wachter finds that tech companies are spending as if they expect a productivity boom. " It warns that some major tech companies could risk bankruptcy if they do not quickly increase productivity. Alexander Sukharevsky, a senior partner at McKinsey, said a "gen AI paradox" persists at many companies because they have not figured out how to scale AI across their operations.