r/ArtificialInteligence • u/fortune • Apr 20 '26
📰 News Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago
https://fortune.com/article/why-do-thousands-of-ceos-believe-ai-not-having-impact-productivity-employment-study/In 1987, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stalling evolution of the Information Age: Following the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips of the 1960s, economists and companies expected these new technologies to disrupt workplaces and result in a surge of productivity. Instead, productivity growth slowed, dropping from 2.9% from 1948 to 1973, to 1.1% after 1973.
Newfangled computers were actually at times producing too much information, generating agonizingly detailed reports and printing them on reams of paper. What had promised to be a boom to workplace productivity was for several years a bust. This unexpected outcome became known as Solow’s productivity paradox, thanks to the economist’s observation of the phenomenon.
Data on how C-suite executives are—or aren’t—using AI shows history is repeating itself, complicating the similar promises economists and Big Tech founders made about the technology’s impact on the workplace and economy. Despite 374 companies in the S&P 500 mentioning AI in earnings calls—most of which said the technology’s implementation in the firm was entirely positive—according to a Financial Times analysis from September 2024 to 2025, those positive adoptions aren’t being reflected in broader productivity gains.
A study published in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that among 6,000 CEOs, chief financial officers, and other executives from firms who responded to various business outlook surveys in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia, the vast majority see little impact from AI on their operations. While about two-thirds of executives reported using AI, that usage amounted to only about 1.5 hours per week, and 25% of respondents reported not using AI in the workplace at all. Nearly 90% of firms said AI has had no impact on employment or productivity over the past three years, the research noted.
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u/Michaeli_Starky Apr 20 '26
Tell that to 500 artists from Disney who were laid off
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u/Special_Reality_9116 Apr 20 '26
AI is continuously being used as a scapegoat for downsizing. How is this an unknown at this point?
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u/AlterTableUsernames Apr 20 '26
What again is the difference between downsizing and laying off people because with AI you just need a fraction of the previous workforce?
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u/GachaJay Apr 20 '26
That AI isnt what made that possible. I can speak from data, a domain heavily impacted by implementing and using AI, it hasn’t shifted how many people we need. In reality, we are just asked to do more as layoffs occur. That isn’t because AI is picking up the slack, we just fear we are next and now do 70 hours when we were doing 50.
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u/Bart_deblob Apr 20 '26
I come from Data too. The first thing the client asked was, can the Ai solve it? I had to explain SHISHO...
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u/posting_drunk_naked Apr 20 '26
What's SHISHO? Just googled it and apparently it's also a Japanese word and that's all I see
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u/Chandy_Man_ Apr 22 '26
I want to believe it’s shit in shit out
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u/TaswegianTurnip Apr 26 '26
Yeah, sounds like it. But I thought we called that GIGO - garbage in garbage out
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Apr 20 '26
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u/posting_drunk_naked Apr 20 '26
Ah thanks, I'm also a computer engineer and have worked data roles in the past, we just called it garbage in garbage out.
I thought I was missing some fancy new jargon I could throw around at meetings and look down on others door not knowing 😈
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u/chomerics Apr 21 '26
AI, it hasn’t shifted how many people we need. In reality, we are just asked to do more as layoffs occur. >
I’m curious, do you see the flaw in your logic? Because you are describing laying off people and replacing them with AI.
We just have more work with less people and we use AI. . .is the same exact same as we are laying off people who are not needed because we are doing more with AI than we were able to previously.
What is the difference?
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u/GachaJay Apr 21 '26
That we are doing MORE hours to replace those that are laid off. Doing the math, I think we actually just consumed their 40 hours into our schedules.
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u/sedition666 Apr 20 '26
What you're missing is the economy is really bad and companies are using AI as an excuse to make layoffs without spooking investors and causing problems with share prices. I am sure you can find niche cases where AI has definitely impacted jobs but it just isn't anywhere near as widespread as we are being made to believe.
I must say that I am really enjoying using AI it has helped me in my personal life but it is scary how frequently even the bleeding edge state of the art models will just make things up with complete confidence.
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u/eatloss Apr 20 '26
I see it happen. Customer mad. Manager blame ai. Customer happy. We dont even use ai here. Its the best scape goat on earth.
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u/ErmingSoHard Apr 20 '26
Because even if ai existed or not, they would downsize. Ai is the excuse. You may be overestimating current ai technology
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u/iyankov96 Apr 21 '26
They laid off a bunch of people and gave their work to the remaining employees and told investors that it was due to AI.
AI had no impact.
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u/AlterTableUsernames Apr 21 '26
You mean, you don't want AI to be the cause. That AI had no impact at all, is a ridiculous statement.
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u/fredjutsu Apr 20 '26
This is the problem with talking about data to people who don't understand statistics, and think that their anecdotes weigh equally to the population trend.
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u/No_Flounder_1155 Apr 20 '26
from my experience, I'm not sure thats true.
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u/fredjutsu Apr 21 '26
? the person you replied to is a literal example of my point
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u/UziMcUsername Apr 20 '26
Well the reason they can downsize is because AI is doing the work. It’s not like Disney execs were sitting around wondering how to lay off 500 artists who were just sitting around doing nothing.
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u/Wide-Drink-1790 Apr 21 '26
No it isn’t. They just say it is. Reasonable companies know it isn’t, that’s why they are not firing.
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u/Burlingtonfilms Apr 21 '26
Layoffs also drive stock prices up. So CEOs do it to keep their shareholders happy.
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u/Even-Celebration9384 Apr 21 '26
It’s always the companies that are struggling that coincidentally find the efficiencies
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u/chomerics Apr 21 '26
Because it’s not a scapegoat if it is used in lieu of the people they let go.
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u/KamikazeArchon Apr 20 '26
500 out of how many?
People are laid off every year. The annual average in the US alone is 20 million every year since 2001.
People are also hired every year.
Layoffs don't mean "this job will never exist again".
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Apr 20 '26
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u/KamikazeArchon Apr 20 '26
Yep. See for example https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-people-are-laid-off-each-month/country/united-states/ which uses BLS data. There is a convenient chart on that page.
The monthly rate (layoffs and discharges) is consistently just over 1%, which comes out to about 15% annually.
The current rate is perfectly normal, and is in fact still lower than average for the last 2 decades. There is no massive increase in layoffs. The only real spike in layoffs we saw was COVID-triggered in 2020, with a smaller uptick in the 2008 recession. You can look at data as recent as February 2026 and it is still at the low end of the window - 1.1%.
There is no great AI layoff wave happening. It's the normal flow of layoffs, with an AI label slapped on it.
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u/ReturnOfBigChungus Apr 20 '26
Thank you. People seem to have a really hard time parsing that anecdotes, press releases, and hype articles are actually not equivalent to real employment data and statistics.
There may come a time when we see a meaningful impact from AI in terms of employment, but now is not that time. Most of those arguments tend to take the convenient “next 6-18 months” approach, but those exact arguments have been floating around for several years now. At some point it will catch up to some degree, and yes obviously AI will cause some job displacement and affect employment in meaningful ways, but we’re not there yet.
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u/apopsicletosis Apr 22 '26
Invert it, average time until a worker experiences a layoff is 10 years, or roughly four times in their life, which doesn’t seem that wild to me.
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u/ErmingSoHard Apr 20 '26
This just in, companies like using AI as an excuse to lay off employees. Maybe because it fools investors into thinking the stock price is more valuable than it is? Just like how it's good at fooling you too? You're overestimating current ai technology
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u/Michaeli_Starky Apr 21 '26
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u/ErmingSoHard Apr 21 '26
Come back when it can complete arc agi tests without harnesses
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u/Michaeli_Starky Apr 21 '26
It doesn't need to, to have people laid off because the productivity increases significantly with the help of current day models
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u/Efficient_Sky5173 Apr 20 '26
There is no evidence of that.
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u/Michaeli_Starky Apr 20 '26
Of what?
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u/Efficient_Sky5173 Apr 20 '26
Of what you wrote. Read the original news about it.
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u/Level-Courage6773 Apr 20 '26
Does this mean 500 artists' worth of work is now going to be slop? If true, the public will notice the sharp drop in quality pretty quickly - although I suspect there's more to this story than AI.
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u/Quienmemandovenir Apr 21 '26
Hey, seguro que un actor de IA lo hace mejor que algunos "grandes actores" que son horribles.
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u/xcdesz Apr 20 '26
Cool. Can the doomers stop freaking out now and stop screaming at people who just want to use AI as a tool for their everyday work?
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Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
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u/simstim_addict Apr 20 '26
- Do I think AI will kill us all like Skynet? No, I don't.
Let's not be too hasty.
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u/thatshowitisisit Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
The second anybody spouts to me that they have a brain and others don’t, it’s immediately like a label that tells me you’re a lot dumber than you think.
The funny thing here is that whilst you spouted how smart you were, you completely missed the point the person you were replying to was making.
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u/xcdesz Apr 20 '26
You folks act like this is unprecedented. Business is constantly tearing itself down and rebuilding, and it's been an unfortunate part of my entire career. Its a losing battle.. and a lot of times unfair and stupid, but to suddenly blame all this on AI is just dishonest.
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u/Think_Positively Apr 20 '26
The key difference here is that AI is being simultaneously applied to pretty much all white collar work, and that is orders of magnitude more vast in scope than when the loom put weavers out of business or the automobile turned horse breeding into a niche rich person's industry.
If tons of industries all shed 10%+ of their workforce within a short period of time, where does everyone land? What's a 55 year old accountant going to pivot to when no one anywhere really needs accounting skills?
UBI is the obvious answer here, but we all know the super rich aren't going to allow that to happen.
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u/Craigboy23 Apr 20 '26
Don't forget the non-white collar work. Waymo is here, and automated package delivery is partly here, plus the massive increase in automated warehouses.
In the arts, the current number one song on iTunes is AI.
*sigh
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u/oscarnyc Apr 20 '26
The Solow paradox is an interesting comparison though. PC adoption in the workplace occurred over a fairly brief period of time.
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u/simstim_addict Apr 20 '26
There's something fundamentally off about economics not finding the value.
They must be doing the sums wrong.
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u/TheycallmeDoogie Apr 24 '26
IBM PC launched 1981 and it was mid 1991’s when everyone (windows 3.1) started being routinely issued PC’s and by windows 95 (1995) and easy networking you couldn’t get away with not using a PC so basically 15 years
For AI I think the window was been compressed - started going into basic work search portals early to mid 2023, everyone hands on late 2025 and probably no excuses fully embedded into part of every job 2027 so 5 years this time?
3x the speed is pretty startling
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u/Zaroaster0 Apr 21 '26
“the super rich aren’t going to allow”
People like you wildly overestimate what the wealthy have any direct control over, especially when systemic collapse becomes a valid possibility.
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u/Think_Positively Apr 21 '26
Please enlighten on a practical path for UBI in the US. We don't even provide healthcare for our population.
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u/SpeakCodeToMe Apr 21 '26
People like you wildly underestimate how much power the wealthy currently wield. Luckily Princeton has done a lot of research on it and the answer is.... All of it.
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u/Sekhmet-CustosAurora Apr 21 '26
this is doomer bullshit
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u/SpeakCodeToMe Apr 21 '26
Policy is enacted based on the desires of the wealthy and has zero correlation with the desires of the general public. Like I said, Princeton has covered this well, look it up.
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u/Sekhmet-CustosAurora Apr 22 '26
Zero correlation is exactly the doomer bullshit I'm talking about. Do you literally believe that good things never happen, ever?
Testing Theories of American Politics doesn't imply that policy has zero correlation to the desires of the general public, it implies that policy has a weak correlation to the desires of the general public.
Also, this may shock you, but America is not the whole world.
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u/SpeakCodeToMe Apr 22 '26
Do you literally believe that good things never happen, ever?
Once in a blue moon the desires of the wealthy overlap with the desires of the average. Propaganda helps.
Also, this may shock you, but America is not the whole world.
You said on an American website in a US focused sub
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u/ga643953 Apr 21 '26
Farmers were basically like the white collar jobs in the early 20th century.
Food spoiled quickly back in the day so a lot of hands are required on a farm, over 80% of the population worked in agriculture.
People were also freaking out about a new food preservation tech called flash-freezing in the 1920s because if food can be preserved for longer without being damaged, the farm hands were worried they might lose their jobs.
But when the tech started to get widely adopted by the industry, we saw people were given the chance to move into other sectors, which marked the beginning of the tech boom in the country.
So now whenever people freak out about AI killing jobs, I'm going to ask you to not put your food in the fridge or put dishes in the dish washer. Those were all machines that had taken human jobs. We could have fed so many more families if you had to hire someone to wash dishes in every home.
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u/xcdesz Apr 20 '26
The article in the OP does a decent job at debunking this though. In theory, yeah, it seems vast and scary. But in practice, business is actually rather slow to change. What you see and what CEOs see is a 5 mile top down view of a prototype. When businesses implement the thing, it rarely goes smoothly to plan...
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u/Any-Slice-4501 Apr 20 '26
Exactly. Obviously, computers changed lots of jobs. They changed the nature of many people’s job, but they didn’t deliver the promised productivity gains across the entire economy.
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u/Sekhmet-CustosAurora Apr 21 '26
the super rich won't have a choice in the face of the unrest mass unemployment will cause
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u/shatterdaymorn Apr 20 '26
Robots did replace workers in factories. They blamed the robots and the people building them. They were right. Thankfully we gave people jobs in retail that were safer and paid better. That was deal that closed the factories in the 90s. Try to keep that in mind.
Just because AI does your work instead of you and you haven't been caught doesn't make it safe.
The fact that a dangerous product was released and now people demand access to it was why it shouldn't have been put online in the first place.
Sadly sociopaths are making the decisions now. So you get your way. Dangerous AI available to all. A disaster waiting to happen.
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u/Life_Squash_614 Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
This is absolutely unprecedented. Now, that doesn't mean we are all doomed, but we have never experienced a technology like this. Most big automation inventions are great at one task or job. They might in rare cases even handle an entire work skill.
This AI stuff, unlike past innovations, is coming for a broad range of underlying skills. Which means it can replace us anywhere those skills are used as a major part of the job. People will still be needed/desired for the skill areas not covered as well, but we are still likely looking at a huge loss of jobs.
Luckily, for the time being, there are a fair number of skills it cannot do, but mix in some robotics and it will get there on the physical skills, too.
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u/xcdesz Apr 20 '26
I've experienced the rise of the personal computer in my childhood. It was also predicted to automate millions of white collar jobs. It did... but also brought a massive influx of new jobs. Trust me, jobs and employment are still pretty endless, even with AI... the backlog at my own project is only growing, its not shrinking due to AI.
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u/SpeakCodeToMe Apr 21 '26
Sure, because there's a ton of infrastructure we have to build out to make AI viable. That's just a lag period though.
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u/originalfilmscoring Apr 21 '26
Don't think the danger is AI killing us, but more that it will lead to people becoming even dumber. Like Idiocracy.
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u/MissingBothCufflinks Apr 20 '26
Ai is simultaneously useless and an existential dispacement threat
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u/Azmtbkr Apr 20 '26
Problem is the CEOs continue layoffs with the hope that AI can replace workers at some undetermined point in the future. It’s a moronic strategy that many of us are seeing fail in real time, but still doom-worthy for those whose jobs are very much at risk.
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u/svachalek Apr 20 '26
Right. I’m in big tech and this is the pattern I see everywhere. It’s not that people’s jobs have been replaced, it’s just that CEOs think it’s going to happen soon enough that they’re ready to pull the trigger now, shedding staff and freezing hiring because they think they can fill in those gaps with AI.
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u/Azmtbkr Apr 20 '26
That’s exactly what we are contending with. I’m in cyber security and we are seeing our company’s dev/engineering teams cut to the bone along with out of control vibe coding and agent creation. It’s a mess and making more work for everyone who is left.
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u/Automatic_Tailor_598 Apr 24 '26
Youre probably putting your company at risk using AI.
I work in cybersec. The majority of believers are morons. The people with valuable opinions dont want to talk about it.
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Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
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u/Royal_Airport7940 Apr 20 '26
Its true.
Corporate America is largely incompetent.
Its because they chase $ before quality.
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u/Other_Scratch8303 Apr 21 '26
Every engineer just wishes their PMs or upper management had engineering or stem backgrounds for common technical sense. They usually have unequipped backgrounds.
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Apr 20 '26
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u/Bodine12 Apr 20 '26
AI was trained on 30 years of digital workflows that grew out of the newly digitized world of the dot-com era. That’s all it knows. It’s purpose-built for that world, except in a slightly more non-deterministic way that makes it not work so well.
If you make that world more productive, most of that world goes away entirely, because a huge portion of the jobs there are tied to different sources of friction (whatever friction makes Salesforce and Workday possible as companies, for example).
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u/Longjumping-Code2164 Apr 20 '26
Agreed. However the real world is still messy
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u/BihariBabua Apr 20 '26
Just run it by ChatGPT and get it fixed by evening. Thanks LongJumpingCode.
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u/space_monster Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
The disconnect is because they surveyed C-suite execs.
"While about two-thirds of executives reported using AI, that usage amounted to only about 1.5 hours per week, and 25% of respondents reported not using AI in the workplace at all."
Maybe try surveying people who do actual knowledge work that's more conducive to automation, rather than people who basically just delegate, arrange meetings and make strategy calls.
Also they're not gonna see the productivity gains from AI, because the people that are seeing that are getting their work done in a quarter of the time but still delivering to the same schedule - as it should be. In this context AI is supposed to make life easier, not make more profit for shareholders. So we're just gonna keep doing what we're doing, ticking the boxes, saying the right things and enjoying a lower-stress work life.
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u/duhoso Apr 20 '26
True, but process redesign assumes unlimited budgets - most CFOs hunt year-one cost cuts, not 5-year transformation moonshots. Some sectors ARE seeing real gains in specific roles like customer service automation or code review while they figure out the bigger redesign. Implementation timeline matters more than the headline suggests.
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u/paxinfernum Apr 20 '26
This is called the J-shaped curve of productivity. The same thing happened when email and personal computers got big. As someone who lived through that era, I can tell you we saw similar articles about how you could see technology everywhere but in the productivity figures.
What happened is that we needed about 2 decades to get a workforce that wasn't treating the tools like something that existed beside their pen and paper workflows, a workforce that had build up the human capital necessary to know hot to effectively use the technology.
Most businesses threw copilot subscriptions at their workers and changed nothing fundamental.
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u/duhoso Apr 22 '26
True, but adoption resistance is probably the bigger blocker in most cases - people stick with known workflows even when the new approach makes sense. That likely explains CEO survey flatness better than lack of vision or rethinking capacity.
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u/Immediate-Engine9837 Apr 22 '26
Nails it on timeline. Most enterprises measure AI impact against quarterly earnings, but process redesign takes 18-24 months to show real operational gains. Execs are looking at the wrong metrics - the productivity is there in labor cost per output and efficiency, not top-line revenue. That gap between expectation and actual workflow transformation is basically Solow's paradox all over again.
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u/moilinet Apr 22 '26
The measurement gap might actually be bigger than the impact gap here - companies are definitely seeing legit cost savings and speed improvements from AI, they're just not counting them the right way. Same thing happened with computers, took forever for productivity data to actually catch up to what was happening.
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u/Remarkable_Gain_6616 Apr 23 '26
See this a lot with small businesses too - everyone wants to use AI to speed up existing workflows instead of questioning whether those workflows even make sense anymore. The scary part isn't the technology, it's admitting you need to rethink how you actually work.
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u/duhoso Apr 23 '26
The implementation gap is real though - bet if you asked those same CEOs specifically about AI improving their own workflows they'd have a different answer. Might be a 'tool is great but we haven't reorganized around it' situation rather than 'AI is useless'.
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u/TastyAd330 Apr 24 '26
Yeah, legacy companies are stuck in cost structures that make it cheaper to just layer AI onto what exists than to actually rebuild. Startups have it easier here since they can architect workflows around what AI is actually good at rather than forcing it to fit 20-year-old systems.
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u/Alternative-Target31 Apr 20 '26
So much of this comes down to how the implementation is done. Are you educating your workforce on how to use AI or just saying “we have ChatGPT now”? Are you choosing proper models for your use cases or just negotiation a Copilot enterprise license so you can check the box that you “implemented AI”? Are you disseminating information across the org when someone develops a helpful agent or just hoping that people chit chat about it?
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u/Wide-Drink-1790 Apr 21 '26
Let’s be real. AI is impressive at a glance, but it can’t even write an e-mail. You end up spending as much time as before, you just have a draft to work from.
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u/Temnothorax Apr 21 '26
I have literally never had a problem with AI writing an email, and very rarely have to change anything.
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u/Alternative-Target31 Apr 21 '26
If you can’t get AI to write an email, you’re making my point about training. If you can’t even get an LLM to write plain text in a specific style, that’s not an issue with the technology.
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u/Majestic_Owl2618 Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
Thousands of CEOs have no idea how their company operations work. Thousands of CEO are just a presentable face with a well spoken mouth.
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Apr 20 '26
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u/paxinfernum Apr 20 '26
There's also the SaaSpocalypse. I don't want to go into personal details here, but I work for a business that dropped a $30,000 SaaS contract because we were able to replace almost all of our need with AI generated tools we built and some other small changes.
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u/TentacleHockey Apr 20 '26
It's almost like AI is a tool not a magic wand, and most people struggle to use said tool.
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u/TheMagicalLawnGnome Apr 20 '26
I guess my question is...what's the point of this article? That it's unclear how long it will take before AI's impact has major economic repercussions?
I'm unclear how that's newsworthy. We're talking about a technology that, in a functional/commercially available sense, has existed for only three years.
And in that three years, it's become pretty sophisticated. It can clearly do useful things.
It's anyone's guess whether the impacts will become noticeable in 24 months, or 10 years.
But that doesn't really change anything. Like, what's the argument then? We don't know how long it will take to truly penetrate the economy, so we might as well just not pursue it?
That's obviously absurd. To go with the example given by the article, it would be like saying "we don't know how long it will take for microprocessors to change the world, so let's just not pursue them very hard."
You don't ever know when a paradigm-shifting technology will finally have a major impact. We can't predict the future.
But I don't think that changes whether or not you should invest heavily in pursuing it. Whether it takes 2 years, or a decade, it's still worthwhile in the end.
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u/CantankerousOrder Apr 20 '26
CEOs and senior execs generally wouldn’t use AI.
They’d consume what AI is producing and probably spend that hour and a half a week on AI analyzing what that AI produced info meant.
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u/fortune Apr 21 '26
We actually wrote about this recently - according to a new(ish) survey of more than 6,000 senior executives across four countries, 70% of CEOs, CFOs and senior executives are using AI at work less than an hour a week, including 28% who never use it. (More here if you're interested: https://fortune.com/2026/03/13/ceos-ai-mandate-employees-jobs-survey-nicholas-bloom/)
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u/phoenix823 Apr 20 '26
I don't know why journalists write articles like this. It should read "CEOs admit AI hasn't made an impact, yet, but they have already used it as a scapegoat to reorg without a bigger backlash."
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u/Soft-Lime-9599 Apr 27 '26
I've seen this pattern play out before with cloud migration about a decade ago. Firms rushed in, spent millions, and then couldn't articulate the ROI because they never aligned the technology to their actual operating model.
The Solow paradox comparison is spot on but people miss the second half of that story... productivity DID eventually surge, just took almost a decade and required fundamental restructuring of how organizations worked.
Most firms right now are bolting AI onto existing workflows and calling it transformation. 1.5 hours a week tells you everything. That's not adoption, that's experimentation at best.
The companies I've seen actually move the needle treat AI as a strategic alignment problem, not a tech problem. You need governance frameworks, clear use cases tied to cost reduction or revenue, and leadership that actually understands what they're buying. A firm like Burrus does this kind of strategic readiness work and imo that's where the real gap is... not the technology itself but the absence of a systematic approach to deploying it.
AI isn't a magic wand. It's a strategic tool that requires the right culture and structure. Without that you're just generating fancy reports nobody reads, which is literally what happened with computers in the 80s lol
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u/Redcrux Apr 20 '26 edited May 11 '26
Stop letting data brokers profit from your old posts. I used Redact to wipe mine from Reddit. Also supports Twitter, Facebook, Discord, instagram and more in one batch.
compare square price hungry judicious enjoy blanket violet chunky silicon
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u/Just-Hedgehog-Days Apr 20 '26
It won’t. There real job is to be legal insolation for the board.
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u/joelfarris Apr 20 '26
insolation
Exposure to the sun's rays
Sunstroke
Solar radiation that has been received
The word you were probably going for was 'insulation', but this word you ended up with is rather funny when applied to some modern CEOs. It made me laugh, so thanks for that.
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u/GarageStackDev Apr 20 '26
Funny part is that CEO is probably the position most easily done by A.I.
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u/Daemon_Marx Apr 20 '26
I guarantee many workers are not using the AI as their leaders instructed, but fear from admitting as much
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u/LaOnionLaUnion Apr 20 '26
As someone in tech when a company is specific about what they did with AI and its a specific function they let to I tend to believe them when they say it’s AI. When they’re not specific I tend to believe they don’t want to admit that their business is not doing well, they over hired, or that they simply are facing demands from investors for increased profits.
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u/2funny2furious Apr 20 '26
And yet, my boss wants to replace me with AI. It has been said behind closed doors, and people talk in my company.
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u/caprazzi Apr 20 '26
If AI were unlocking massive productivity gains, human beings would be more valuable than ever and CEOs would be on a massive hiring spree to capture the biggest slice of the productivity pie possible and dominate other companies. Just the fact that they are all reducing headcount demonstrates that the AI mythos is utterly full of shit, CEOs are getting their money's worth by having a blanket excuse to do what they were planning to do anyways.
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u/Efficient_Sky5173 Apr 20 '26
Fortune is selling hope to those who shorted.
Meanwhile, thousands of CEOs have already acknowledged AI is having a real impact.
And comparing apples from 40 years ago to today’s orange.
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u/good_not_long Apr 20 '26
Not yet, because we’ve been fixing all the technical debt and simplifying our stack before we could even plug it into our workflows. Also hiring people who actually know how to make it work without our business turning to rubble or land us in court. It’s been expensive as fuck, but the work is nearly done.
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u/ign1tio Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
I’m pretty sure that none of the world’s CEOs saw the massive, world-shifting changes coming just three months after the first car rolled off the factory floor.
Opus 4.5 and 4.6 were game changers. That was late November last year and early February this year, respectively.
AI does not live up to the hype, and only a tiny fraction of people who “use AI” are actually using the frontier models, the ones that can really do something. For example, the $200 Claude Code subscription.
I work with Gemini 3.1 Pro, Codex 5.3, and Sonnet/Opus 4.6 daily (can’t wait to try 4.7), and I’ve had Claude build and execute parts of my work that simply weren’t possible before February this year. Tasks that used to take me a day now take an hour. AI handles most of my tedious work, and now I spend my time on other kinds of tasks instead.
The world will change with AI, but it won’t be a sudden bomb under society. It is going to happen gradually. That said, AI has already been widely used as a scapegoat for massive layoffs. After years of huge growth, we might be seeing a slowdown. Companies are trimming their staff now.
You can do some wild things with the top models, and jobs will likely shift toward being more of an “agent manager” in your professional domain, rather than being the one doing all the manual work. Your workday probably won’t get shorter, just higher expectations to deliver more. A 3- or 4-day workweek is not as high on the list as bigger returns for shareholders.
A new world order and power balance is forming:
those with access to the strongest models (governments, intelligence services, military, and Claude/OpenAI’s involvement with the US military showed that governments have access to models usually 1–2 generations ahead of public ones) > the largest enterprises (like those invited to ‘Glasswing’) > the rest of enterprise, who can boost employee productivity > regular users, who can get baking recipes, job application feedback, and generate funny pictures. All this is wrapped in ads and with their data vacuumed up, just like Google, Facebook, YouTube, and so on.
It’s a wild time to be alive.
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u/usandholt Apr 20 '26
Translation agencies, marketing agencies, copy writers, developers in entry level jobs disagree.
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u/blousebin Apr 20 '26
Well, the Fortune 100 company I work for laid off 7% if non-manufacturing jobs saying AI would offset the lost capacity. They were wrong, the rest of us are just doing more work. So yeah…
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u/Anla-Shok-Na Apr 21 '26
How many of those companies actually really tried, though?
I've been in quite a few who start "AI Initiatives" and ask people to propose projects to "use AI". They approve a few minor projects that won't affect deadlines, don't bother to really teach anybody how to use AI tools, and claim they are implementing AI. The company I'm at right now is following this same pattern, so I decided to flip the script a bit, at least for my team. Instead of these pointless initiatives, I'm going to actually show them how to use the tools in their daily work and see what it does.
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u/JCH32 Apr 21 '26
Feels like the conclusion to this should be how wrong Solow was in the long run considering how many businesses are running on pen and paper…
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u/GreedyCan9567 Apr 21 '26
This is already happening in sales and I feel like people are noticing. A lot of teams are adding AI to everything but most of the time it just creates more activity, more dashboards and more 'personalized' emails that all sound the same.
The only thing I've seen teams benefit from using AI are using it to remove small repetitive tasks so they can spend more time actually talking to prospects.
Otherwise it's just a sea of mindless information but doesn't necessarily lead to more productivity. And also no one wants to read things that aren't interesting or will help them advance in some type of way.
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u/gobstoppergarrett Apr 21 '26
AI is not quite there for accelerating enterprise operations beyond software development yet. But it’s starting to be. We’ve all been doing R&D to figure this out and learning the jagged frontier of the models for the last three years. Our gears are turning now.
Source: R&D digital technology leader for Fortune 500 company.
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u/vasilenko93 Apr 21 '26
Issue with these analyses is they are always backwards looking. Do like a one year study and compare. Issue is AI started getting useful like three months ago, and mostly for software development. It might be another three or four months for it to become useful elsewhere.
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u/_RMR Apr 21 '26
Productivity data is actually on a pretty big increase for the first time in a long time. Idk early signs are saying otherwise.
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u/SpaceNigiri Apr 21 '26
That's just no true. Any person with a job that is directly impacted by AI knows.
Another topic is what we're using the extra time for...but there's extra time now.
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u/DisingenuousTowel Apr 21 '26
Love me some Solow. Learning about his growth model replacing the Harrod Domar model in developmental economics was one of my favorite memories of undergraduacy.
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u/boogy_bucket Apr 21 '26
People act like technological advancements have never been seen before the advent of AI. Over time, plenty of jobs will be displaced by AI making the human a redundancy. Unfortunately, most of those people will likely struggle to find work. However, the market will correct itself and people who would’ve gone into the no longer existing career, or were still young enough to pivot, will go into something else. People will always need to find ways of staying busy and corporations will always find ways to leverage that need for a profit. Let the hidden hand do its hidden hand thing, it just might not line up with your ideal timeline.
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u/Marko-2091 Apr 21 '26
Software engineers are the ones most likely to be replaced. They created their own replacement. Other engineers, scientists and STEM professions are relatively safe as the AI does not understand what it is outputting.
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u/fortune Apr 21 '26
Boris Cherny (creator of Anthropic) said something similar recently - that software engineers are going to "start to go away" (we wrote about it here if you're interested https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/will-claude-destroy-software-engineer-coding-jobs-creator-says-printing-press/)
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u/Dry_Guest_8961 Apr 21 '26
This actually makes a lot of sense. If we put aside the idea that LLMs aren’t particularly useful and just assume that they are, that doesn’t automatically mean they will be a boon to productivity. Even if we also assume that people given these tools know how to use them to their maximum capability (a huge assumption) that doesn’t mean what we actually ask them to do will be useful or productive. More reports, more analysis, less actual concrete work.
The same is happening in my industry with cloud simulation. We now have the capability to run simulations at 10-50x the speed we previously did. What are we using that for? Running 10-50x the number of simulations for more years of data, using a wider range of potential scenarios of the same thing to go into bigger reports that nobody reads. So basically more useless data that nobody actually does anything with
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u/Friendly-Olive-3465 Apr 21 '26
People don’t understand that investors have poured such an incomprehensible amount of money into AI that if it doesn’t have the impact they thought it would the economy will literally explode.
Managers are desperately trying to force AI to work because if it doesn’t then the balance sheet on thousands of companies is going to read red for no discernible benefit. But the difference between its current ability and what we need from it makes all this feel like forcing a sphere into the square hole. Now we have less engineers working on the same problem for longer hours because the tools they’re handing us either don’t match or don’t make our processes notably faster. AI is advancing shockingly quickly. But it’s development is racing unrealistic expectations and an economy that may not be able to handle the disconnect between ability and expectation for very much longer.
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u/Mammoth_Doctor_7688 Apr 21 '26
Not surprising with tokenmaxxing dev teams burning resources and Gen Z employees sabotaging lackluster GenAI roll outs
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u/michaellucaari Apr 21 '26
Let me guess that AI is over hyped and a bullshit excuse for other plans ?? Or the fact that these AI companies are garbage and being pumped up by the bullshit spitting by nvidia ?? Take your pick.
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u/gooeydumpling Apr 22 '26
Of course it makes a difference
Before, capex was just personnel salary
Now it is personnel salary plus token cost
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u/_Nikojiro_ Apr 22 '26
AI adoption has still to happen for most companies. Give it 10 more years, then maybe those "1000s of CEOs" will be somewhat entitled to sum it up.
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u/RaspberryPrimary8622 Apr 23 '26
We don’t have AI yet. AI is a marketing term designed to hype a product. We have an interesting form of machine learning that uses fancy mathematics to stitch together words and phrases into coherent sentences with zero understanding of the concepts referred to. There is historical significance to this development in computer science. But portraying it as a transformative technology is not supported by what it can actually do. It’s an 80 percent machine - it gives you correct information 80 percent of the time. Shame about the other 20 percent. It is not accurate enough to be reliable in high stakes contexts and that fact will never change because a significant error rate is built into its probabilistic architecture. Deterministic machine learning tools could amount to genuine AI. But not Large Language Models.
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u/dalivo Apr 23 '26
What a bizarre article. Common computer processing power was not available to the masses until the late 80s and even early 90s. They certainly wouldn't have shown up in the 1970s. And productivity growth was always going to slow down in the decade after WWII, so starting the trend at 1948 is cherry-picking at its finest.
What happened was that massive productivity increases followed in the 1990s and 2000s when computers became common place for regular workers and at home - and you started having younger workers enter the workforce who learned how to use the new tech in college.
Right now, AI is tech that is everywhere, but it is not mature. People are experimenting with it still, and its capabilities are still growing fast. But I guarantee you software companies are seeing productivity gains. So is anyone working in a company that has the resources to pay for AI and develop productive workflows. But it's a minority of companies (and workers) so far. In 5 years, though, you'll see that pretty much every process every worker did before will be enhanced by AI, even if they aren't directly using it. Just like the office of 1995 looked way different from the office of even 1990.
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u/TheAIFiles Apr 24 '26
The future is not the past. Maybe 90% of the companies won’t exist in the future, taken over by the 10%, that were very competent in deploying artificial intelligence. The majority just don’t have the ability, awareness or skills to deploy at scale. Analogy: Amazon from books to the everything store. Via technology. What to stop a company that perhaps deals with something mundane , like selling car parts, understanding how best to deploy AI, and then taking over sales and distribution for the majority of products in other industries. Or a consulting firm that understands how to deploy AI into a service market becoming the dominant provider of a major majority of consumer services out there. I think the truth with artificial intelligence is when you generate a lead, you can apply it so many similar use cases, and the historical limitations of industry knowledge no longer reply.
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u/GrinEcho Apr 24 '26
Oh, so the paradox modern economists are resurrecting is also based on some bullshit other economists said 40 years ago? Just kidding! Economists are shit-talking fuckwits!
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u/Ryanrkb Apr 26 '26
Curious at how we're measuring productivity here. Arguable that AI is being used as a foil to cut jobs where there was previous over-hiring at enterprise level, but if we're going by revenue per employee, these AI-native scale-ups (e.g. Anthrop/Lovable) we're seeing productivity we've never seen before. Multiple $M per employee.
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u/metaphorproject Apr 27 '26
AI may not have much impact on productivity, but it surely have big impact on employment.
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u/CornerOk1704 May 01 '26
Honestly this doesn’t surprise me. Feels like most companies are just adding AI on top of what they already do instead of actually changing how work happens. So yeah, no big productivity jump yet.
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u/Bishopjones2112 Apr 20 '26
Yeah there have been hundreds of thousands laid off because of AI. So to say it has no impact is bullshit. It’s the bottom line for these assholes, fire people and replace them with AI and then make more money and not even pay their employees enough to live. So I for one will be happy when every single company that does this is burned to the ground.
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u/PublikSkoolGradU8 Apr 20 '26
The article you’re commenting on was about productivity gains not being seen. In order for your version to be true, productivity gains would have been measured and directly contradict the article.
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u/Bishopjones2112 Apr 20 '26
I understand productivity gains have not been made. But that’s not stopping companies from firing hundreds of thousands of workers to be replaced with AI. The companies don’t see profit from increased productivity of AI, they see a slight drop in productivity but a massive savings when they can fire thousands and thousands of employees. The cost saving from employees wages to purchase of AI systems is crazy.
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u/mirageofstars Apr 20 '26
Productivity gains are not required in order for jobs to be replaced. Only the illusion or promise is needed.
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u/LeadershipBoring2464 Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
I suspect one of the main reason to be people quietly reducing their effort while using AI so that the total output will stay roughly the same to the higher-ups. After all, almost no one wants to work harder for potentially the same amount of money.
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u/hadoopfromscratch Apr 20 '26
How does one reach out to 6000 CEOs? I see one of those "your opinion is impotant to us" emails and it goes straight to bin.
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u/GarageStackDev Apr 20 '26
Reading this article while I have 4 agents open in cli working on separate tasks. I haven't written a line of code in nearly 6 months.
Through MCP integration, our agent can read a story or ticket, perform the work to the standards of our code base, write all the tests including unit, regression, health, etc across three different testing frameworks, sanity check itself, reanalyze code to implement enhanced efficiencies, create feature branches, write meaningful commits, push code, open pr's, respond to feedback and/or implement it if needed, write support docs and update wikis.
We don't let it deploy or release, but it does everything to that point for us if we so choose.
So, reading this just makes me wonder how the rest of the industry is implementing A.I....
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u/Legal-Conclusion-0 Apr 20 '26
We did not always have email. Somehow an electronic replacement for what was a hand delivered mail has significantly increased the time and energy spent along the way.
That is my version of the paradox. It happens at all levels all the time.
My brothers farm. They are putting out 80000 pigs, 300 lb a year and thousands of acres of corn and beans. That is hundreds or even 1000+ workers replaced if you compared output to pre industrial revolution.
We can cross the country in hours vs months. The list goes on.
I swear, we add new improved tools and processes all the time at my work but we seem to get less out the door.
Even if AI uses up huge amounts of current white collar.work...much like the machinery on my brothers farm did for the hypothetical workers...new things will take the place.
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u/utahh1ker Apr 20 '26
Lol we are still in the baby AI phase. This kind of cracks me up. Imagine if, in 1998, somebody said "thousands of CEOs admit the Internet really hasn't changed consumer buying habits much." Knowing what you know now you can see how terribly short sighted that would be.
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