Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
The case against the usefulness of AI in the workplace continues to grow.
one in New analysis of a survey Published by National Bureau of Economic Research and highlighted by LuckNearly 90 percent of the nearly 6,000 CEOs, chief financial officers and other top executives interviewed at companies in the US, UK, Germany and Australia said AI had no impact on productivity or employment in their business.
To be clear, the question was about the impact of AI generally, not just implementing it in the workplace. But about 70 percent of companies reported actively using AI, meaning most of them are admitting that adopting the technology hasn’t yet made a difference for them.
CEOs themselves don’t seem to be achieving much from their use of AI tools. While two-thirds of people said they personally use AI, their average use is only 1.5 hours a week, the survey found – less than the time most people spend doomscrolling on their phones in a single day. This is surprising, given that executives tend to be far more enthusiastic about technology than their subordinates. For example, another recent survey found that 40 percent of rank-and-file white-collar workers thought AI did not save them any time at work, while 98 percent of bosses did.
These latest findings continue to raise questions about AI’s economic impact and its promise to supercharge productivity in the workplace. In another recent survey, more than half of nearly 4,500 CEOs said their companies were not getting financial returns from investments in AI. a notable mit study Alarm bells were ringing across the industry after the finding that 95 percent of companies incorporating AI are not seeing any meaningful increase in revenue.
Why this is so is no mystery. Studies have found that AI fails to perform remote work and other white-collar tasks, and slows down rather than speeds up human programmers because they often introduce errors into their code. Meanwhile, a new line of research exploring the impact of AI on the workforce is already producing damning insights. One report found that the technology may actually speed up work and accelerate burn-out, and it’s also leading employees to produce lower-quality “workslop” that their co-workers are forced to fix, disrupting workflow and creating dissatisfaction, another found – leading researchers to believe that its “most dangerous cost may be interpersonal.”
Despite this, AI adoption has increased since the beginning of 2025, with the new survey finding that the percentage of businesses using AI technology increased from 61 percent in February-April 2025 to 71 percent in November 2025-January 2026.
Perhaps what AI brings to the table is difficult to measure from an economic perspective. Decades ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow correctly predicted that the advent of information technology would not lead to measurable increases in productivity, but would instead slow productivity growth. This phenomenon is now called the Solow paradox: although computers were clearly transformative, they did not bring immediate economic benefits.
But still, the business world remains hopeful that the promises of the technology will be fulfilled in the long run. Executives surveyed estimate that AI will increase productivity by 1.4 percent and output by 0.8 percent over the next three years – while also reducing employment by 0.5 percent. It’s hard to say which part they’re more excited about.
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