The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis analyzed nearly 490,000 earnings call transcripts from 5,198 publicly traded U.S. firms between 2000 and 2025 to examine artificial intelligence’s impact on productivity. The study confirms that after three years, AI has not produced a measurable bump in aggregate productivity: AI investments represent only a 1.1% productivity increase by late 2024 relative to 2022, while overall productivity growth was 2.3% in 2024 and 1.6% in 2023. Among sentences mentioning AI and productivity, 95% describe expected future gains rather than realized ones, and researchers compare this lag to electrification, which took several decades before its productivity payoff showed in the data. One researcher suggests AI may be generating real but invisible gains, as it makes outputs so abundant they lose value, canceling out statistical gains through price decreases.
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