The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Macroeconomic Productivity

Artificial intelligence has diffused rapidly in recent years, but its impact on aggregate productivity is not clear. This column uses data from original surveys to estimate the impact of AI on macroeconomic productivity in Japan. Using data on the use of AI in the workplace and its impact on work efficiency, it estimates a 0.5-0.6% boost to labour productivity at the macro level. The productivity impact is likely to grow over time, but with diminishing additional gains. Furthermore, higher adoption of AI among high-wage and highly educated workers may widen overall labour market inequality in the near term.

With the rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI), its impacts on productivity and the labour market have attracted attention. Many studies have been conducted on the impacts of industrial robots on productivity (e.g. Graetz and Michaels 2018, Kromann et al. 2020, Cette et al. 2021, Dauth et al. 2021) due to the availability of International Federation of Robotics (IFR) data on robot utilisation by country and industry. However, the quantitative impact of AI on productivity is not yet well understood, mainly due to a lack of statistical data on the use of AI.

Recently, several studies have reported findings from randomised experiments on specific tasks in which AI has a large positive effect on productivity (e.g. Brynjolfsson et al. 2023, Kanazawa et al. 2022, Noy and Zhang 2023, Peng et al. 2023). These studies are valuable contributions that reveal the causal effect of AI on productivity, but it is impossible to infer macroeconomic impacts from these results because the studies only cover the very narrowly defined tasks of customer support, taxi driving, writing tasks, and software programming.

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