Welcome to this week’s AI Brief. Despite billions poured into chatbots, a new National Bureau of Economic Research study finds they’ve barely moved the needle on productivity. “Despite substantial investments [in chatbots], economic impacts remain minimal,” write economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard. Their report, “Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects,” estimates only a 3 percent time‐savings boost—and no significant impact on earnings or hours worked in any occupation, with effects ruled out above 1 percent.

Researchers studied 7,000 Danish workplaces—from law and journalism to teaching—and discovered that time saved often vanished fixing AI errors or monitoring for student cheating. Earlier claims of big gains came from narrow fields like customer support. Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu predicts U.S. GDP may rise just 1.6 percent over the next decade, with productivity up only 0.05 percent. For now, AI hype may be fueling FOMO more than real economic lift—so businesses might want to think twice before writing off their human teams.
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