Employees using AI are working faster, but the economy isn’t more efficient. A look at what happened in the pre-Internet era might explain why

Two curious things are happening to the economy in 2026. On one hand, economic expansion is still going strong despite job growth slowing to a trickle, suggesting productivity among those currently employed is rising. But by many measures, productivity growth has barely budged in recent years, and slowed in the first quarter of 2026. Those things usually can’t be true at the same time.

Technologists claim AI will help optimize workflows and supercharge the U.S. economy’s productivity—a measure of how efficiently resources such as labor are being converted to goods and services. While that growth has yet to show up in the data, AI might be responsible for the discrepancy in productivity statistics so far. 

In certain professions, employees who use AI are more likely to produce the same amount of work in less time, potentially saving an entire workday a week, according to a study by the London School of Economics last year. Economists call this an example of capital deepening, or when workers gain access to better tools and their individual productivity rises as a result—like when a construction worker trades in a shovel for a mechanical excavator.

There’s another example of t...