Are Businesses Seeing Productivity Gains from AI?

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Much of the excitement around AI rests on it fulfilling one big promise: that it will make us dramatically more productive. But all the time we’re saving with AI may be getting eaten up by checking AI’s work.

As Sarah Kessler at The New York Times explains:

• In a survey of nearly 6,000 senior executives, roughly 90% said AI had made no difference to employment or productivity, even though 69% reported using it at their firms.
• The problem can be partly explained by the “verification tax”: the time humans spend checking, correcting, and rewriting AI-generated work. A Workday survey found that employees and business leaders spent an average of 37% of their time fixing AI-generated output. So much for getting your afternoon back.
• The bottleneck has shifted from producing work to verifying it. And as AI becomes better at performing complex tasks, verifying AI-generated work could require increasingly advanced skills.
• Why not just have AI check AI? Because the same blind spots can affect both systems, particularly when tasks require expert judgment.

Our take? The lesson for business leaders is not to confuse faster output with greater productivity. AI may have allowed you to generate a report in five minutes, but you still need time to verify its accuracy.

We’ve written about this before in Check Your Work: The Growing Problem of AI Hallucinations in the Workplace. This story highlights another side of the problem: verification doesn’t just protect against costly mistakes. It also takes time, potentially eating into the very efficiency gains AI promises.

The real measure of productivity is not how quickly AI produces its work, but rather how much time and effort it takes to get that work across the finish line.