The US National Bureau of Economic Research has published the most extensive study to date on the use of artificial intelligence by international companies.
Economists from the US and British central banks and Stanford University surveyed 6,000 senior managers in the corporate sector across the US, UK, Germany and Australia.
The result: Even after three years of access to AI, companies report that artificial intelligence has had a negligible impact on their productivity and employment. More than four-fifths of those surveyed admitted that AI has not affected these two factors in their organisations.
Companies expect a more significant impact over the next three years. However, the outlook remains modest. Productivity is projected to rise by 1.4 per cent, production by 0.8 per cent, and employment to fall by 0.7 per cent.
Employees involved in the survey saw things differently, predicting that AI will instead increase employment by 0.5 per cent.
Debt-fuelled AI boom meets investor doubt
The leaders in the AI sector, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle, plan to borrow heavily for AI investments this year, with amounts approaching, for example, the annual GDP of the Czech Republic. Yet the market is increasingly sceptical about whether such vast investments, funded by massive debt, will yield satisfactory returns.
This may explain why social networks have recently been flooded with widely shared, obviously PR-driven posts presenting new versions of chatbots as revolutionary breakthroughs, even though previous versions were not. The public is being kept in suspense.
A few days ago, a dystopian report by the little-known company Citrini Research, which seeks to 'cheer on' AI in its own unusual way by predicting a gloomy impact on employment as early as 2028, succeeded in doing just that. Fear, like greed, remains a powerful market emotion.
Although without a true breakthrough or a qualitative improvement in AI capabilities, it is unlikely that we will see a significant rise in the shares of the major industry leaders or companies such as Nvidia.
The text was originally published on the website lukaskovanda.cz.