The case against AI’s usefulness in the workplace continues to grow.
In a new analysis of a survey published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and highlighted by Fortune, around 90 percent of the nearly 6,000 interviewed CEOs, chief financial officers, and other top executives at firms across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia, said that AI has had no impact on productivity or employment at their business.
To be clear, the question was about AI’s impact generally, and not just from implementing it in the workplace. But around 70 percent of the firms reported actively using AI, meaning the vast majority of them are admitting that adopting the tech hasn’t budged the needle for them yet.
The CEOs themselves don’t appear to be getting a whole lot out of using AI tools. While two-thirds said they personally used AI, their average use amounted to only 1.5 hours a week, the survey found — less time than most people spend doomscrolling on their phones in a single day. That’s striking, considering that execs tend to be far more enthusiastic about the tech compared to their underlings. Another recent survey, for example, found that 40 percent of rank-and-file white collar workers thought AI didn’t save them any time at work, while 98 percent of their bosses did.
These latest findings will continue to raise questions about AI’s economic impact, and in its promise to supercharge productivity in the workplace. In another recent survey, more than half of nearly 4,500 CEOs said their companies weren’t seeing a financial return from investing in AI. A notable MIT study rang alarm bells across the industry after findings that 95 percent of companies that incorporated AI experiencing no meaningful growth in revenue.
Why this is the case isn’t much of a mystery. Studies have found that AIs fail at completing remote work and other white collar tasks, and slow down rather than speed up human programmers because they frequently slip errors into their code. Meanwhile, a fresher avenue of research exploring AI’s effect on the workforce using it is already producing damning insights. The tech may actually be intensifying work and accelerating burn-out, one report found, and it’s also leading to employees producing low-quality “workslop” that their co-workers are forced to fix, bogging down workflows and leading to resentment, another found — leading the researchers to opine that its “most alarming cost may be interpersonal.”
Despite this, AI adoption has gone up since the start up of 2025, the new survey found, with the percentage of businesses using AI tech increasing from 61 percent in February-April 2025 to 71 percent in November 2025-January 2026.
Perhaps what AI brings to the table is tough to quantify from an economic standpoint. Decades ago, the Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Solow correctly predicted that the advent of information technology wouldn’t lead to a measurable surge in productivity, and instead would lead to a slow in productivity growth. The phenomenon is now called the Solow paradox: though computers were obviously transformative, they didn’t immediately translate to economic gains.
But the business world, nonetheless, is clinging to the hope that the tech’s promises will be borne out in the long run. The surveyed executives are predicting that AI will boost productivity by 1.4 percent and output by 0.8 percent over the next three years — while also cutting down employment by 0.5 percent. Hard to say which part they’re excited about more.
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