[rising-sky]

I guess this is trend now because it's a contrarian / attention grabbing headline. See:

- "Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity..." https://fortune.com/2026/02/17/ai-productivity-paradox-ceo-s...

- “Over 80% of companies report no productivity gains from AI…” https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

But fundamentally, large shifts like this are like steering a super tanker, the effects take time to percolate through economies as large and diversified as the US. This is the Solow paradox / productivity paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

  > The term can refer to the more general disconnect between powerful computer technologies and weak productivity growth

[XenophileJKO]

I keep seeing the "Productivity Paradox" highlighted over an over again. I think one thing people are missing with this specific technology is that unlike many of the comparisons (computers, internet, broadband, etc), AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side. Everyone already has everything they need to use it.

There will be a period like we are in now where dramatic capability gain (like recent coding gains) take a while for people to adapt to, however, I think the change will be much faster. Even the speed of uptake in coding tools over the last 3 months has been faster than I predicted. I think we'll see other shifts like this in different sectors where it changes almost over a series of a few months.

[afavour]

> AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side. Everyone already has everything they need to use it.

That isn’t actually true though, right now everyone has a hard dependency on a cloud service. That is currently sold to them at deep discount by companies that are losing billions.

When the market eventually corrects it’ll be interesting to see how much AI ends up costing. At the very least it will be comparable to the broadband internet connection you mentioned. Possibly a whole lot more.

[fallinditch]

At the large insurance company I'm doing some work for the big capability gains have yet to materialize. There are some pockets of workflow innovation but big institutions can carry a kind of inertia and are slow to adapt.

But as the organization slowly learns and adapts I'm sure the capability gains will materialize.

[sifar]

> AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side

Effective use of these AI tools need high critical thinking skills which are in short supply.

[Lalabadie]

I would argue that the leadership and financial support behind AI (in its current form) does not have the patience or level-headedness to treat it as a long-term change, and is very much trying an all-or-nothing approach to making a long shift happen in a few years instead, or burn through nation-level budgets trying.

To my eyes, the problem is not the productivity gain arriving slowly, but the immediate draining of funding from virtually all other areas of innovation.

[camillomiller]

This. They created an innovation black hole and we will all pay the long-term consequences of it

[slongfield]

This isn't new.

"The Productivity Paradox" is what they called it when people were skeptical that computer would end up finding a place in the office. There are articles from the 90s complaining about how much people are spending on buying computers for no real impact on productivity https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/163298.163309

[ej88]

Even the source article in the first link, https://www.nber.org/papers/w34836

the same firms "predict sizable impacts" over the next three years

late 2025 was an inflection point for a lot of companies

[camillomiller]

All of the technologies mentioned eventually made things better. In order to work, gen AI requires a general acceptance of widely spread mostly mediocre outcomes. I don’t see how the comparison stands.

[edgyquant]

Seems like it’s an ever shifting goalpost when we are told that tons of layoffs etc are already happening due to the tech and yet when quantified it’s debatable if there’s been any gains at all

[surgical_fire]

How to reconcile this with all the narratives of how powerful AI is, how it can perform right now at the same level of engineers and so on?

Once confronted with reality we have a "productivity paradox"?

[dodu_]

I'll take it over seemingly endless deluge of FUD-slop from the past 4 years that claims you better get ready for the AI takeover coming for all the jobs in just-long-enough of a timeline that nobody will remember to hold the author accountable when their prediction is woefully incorrect, where the "advice" in the article is conveniently to pay for more AI tools.