This post is intended as a living resource. I will update it periodically as new evidence accumulates. The current version reflects research available through January 2026.
In this post I review and summarize the current literature on the productivity impact of AI. There has been a lot of debate on the news and social media on whether AI is actually having the promised impact on productivity, if yes, where it is showing up, and who is becoming more productive. This debate has been particularly urgent with the rolling out of AI agents such as Claude Code, which seem to be able to automate a really huge array of tasks (though it’s too early for these tools to show up in the numbers):