According to an analysis by Stripe economist Ernie Tedeschi, AI is barely responsible for the US productivity growth, which stands at approximately 2.5% annualized over the past year, well above the 1.6% average of the previous two decades. This productivity surge actually stems from companies getting better at utilizing existing capital, not from artificial intelligence. Total factor productivity, the metric measuring genuine technological progress, has remained near zero according to the San Francisco Fed, with only 0.8% growth reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2025. Industries that adopted AI more aggressively did not show superior productivity gains, and the probability of transitioning to a high-TFP growth regime is estimated at less than 20%. This finding has significant implications for Stripe, which is developing Tempo, a Layer-1 blockchain oriented toward payments and designed for stablecoin transactions with target fees below one millidollar.
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