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An NBER survey of 6,000 executives reveals a productivity gap that most boardrooms won't talk about honestly.

Late last year, I came across an article about a company’s AI strategy. Big claims. Millions in projected savings. A quote from their CEO about “changing how we build forever.” I read the whole thing. Then I pulled up their last two quarterly earnings calls and searched for the word “productivity.” It appeared once, in a boilerplate answer about operational efficiency. No numbers. No before-and-after. No specifics at all.

That gap between the press release and the earnings call is where a lot of the AI conversation lives right now.

The NBER surveyed nearly 6,000 senior executives and found that nine out of ten reported zero impact on employment or productivity from AI over the prior three years. Not “modest gains.” Not “early signs.” Zero. I wrote last week about the macro picture, the spending, the GDP numbers, the historical parallels. The economics are worth understanding. But the number that stays with me isn’t the $360 billion or the Solow paradox. It’s the nine out of ten. Because that’s not a macro statistic. That’s thousands of individual leaders looking at their own organizations and saying: nothing changed.

I’ve sat through enough industry conferences to recognize the pattern. A senior leader takes the stage. Slides with large percentages and upward arrows. A case study from one team, usually small, usually recent, usually cherry-picked because it worked. The audience nods. Everyone leaves feeling like they’re behind. Nobody asks: “What happened to the other 94% of your organization?”

McKinsey’s 2025 workplace research found that 62% of organizations report productivity increases of 25% or more from AI. Sounds impressive until you pair it with this: only 20% of engineering teams are actually using metrics to measure AI’s impact. Two thirds of companies are claiming results they haven’t instrumented. They’re reporting feelings, not findings.