AI may be everywhere, but it's nowhere in recent productivity statistics

Interview Analyst firm Forrester’s vice president and principal analyst J. P. Gownder remains unconvinced that AI will revolutionize productivity.

“Where we are today, we're not seeing it,” he told The Register in an interview this week.

During our conversation, Gownder cited US Bureau of Labour Statistics that suggest the advent of the personal computer also did not improve productivity, which improved by 2.7 per cent annually from 1947 to 1973, but just 2.1 percent between 1990 and 2001.

“So despite all those PCs, it [productivity growth] was a lot lower. And [from] 2007 to 2019 it was 1.5 percent. If you look at these numbers, productivity is the foundation of job replacement and of job growth and a whole bunch of things. But when you look at this … you begin to get the picture that information technology isn't measured always in as linear a ...