Name: Erik Brynjolfsson: Productivity is 'Much Higher' Due to AI
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T01:39:00Z
Duration: 3 min 9 s
Description: The Stanford economist argues that the "J Curve" of AI adoption is turning upward. Brynjolfsson estimates 2025 productivity growth at 2.7%—double the previous decade’s average.

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The Stanford economist argues that the "J Curve" of AI adoption is turning upward. Brynjolfsson estimates 2025 productivity growth at 2.7%—double the previous decade’s average. Photo: WSJ Leadership Institute

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260212/cf9d0538-a797-4088-afaa-f297ed29b569/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

The Stanford economist argues that the "J Curve" of AI adoption is turning upward. Brynjolfsson estimates 2025 productivity growth at 2.7%—double the previous decade’s average.

Erik Brynjolfsson: Productivity is 'Much Higher' Due to AI

I wanna know where you think we are on it, this being the J Curve, where benefits sort of lag behind the technology introduction. Where are we and what industries are about to get out of pilot purgatory?

Sure, well, the J Curve's something I've been studying for a long time, and in previous technological revolutions it often played out over literally decades, like 20 or 30 years for electricity. And the amazing thing is how much faster it's happening. It's still happening, it's happening faster. And the Jobs Report this morning made me update even more and more quickly. You know, over the year of 2025, there were about 400,000 fewer jobs created than we thought previously, which is bad news for all those people who don't have jobs. But when you think about what that means for productivity, productivity is output, or GDP divided by workers, and so if you change the denominator, that means the productivity is much higher than we thought before. And now, I have to say, we're beginning to see the upturn of that productivity J Curve. My estimate of productivity that we'll see the real numbers come out soon, is that it's probably about 2.7% in 2025, which is roughly double what it was during the previous 10 years productivity growth rate. So that's a pretty encouraging number, and I think the fourth quarter is likely to be a pretty good number when it comes in, but the early 2026 is also. So we are seeing some evidence at the macro level, which, you know, until recently, we didn't see.

And let me just press you on this, are there any industries, let's say outside of coding, call centers, that you see firmly getting out of this pilot purgatory?

Erik: Took away my two favorite ones.

I know.

So yeah, we're seeing, you know, we've been hearing all about agents and so there some great examples. You know, ServiceNow has been helping, it's more in functions than industry. So I think like ServiceNow has been helping BT have agentic systems that technical problems for in the IT department instead of just saying, "Hey, here's a webpage where you can learn how to reset your password or something. It'll go in and it'll do a lot of that. Siemens, I was just talking to them, they have this amazing industrial copilot that creates like a twin for their big industrial partners like PepsiCo and others, and they have about a 25% reduction, because they can simulate what's happening in the organization. I was just came here from Half Moon Bay, met with a bunch of people, occur elsewhere, one of the things they're doing is working with lawyers, and capturing some of the knowledge to be able to answer questions better. There was a system that did, you know, going from just sort of document summary and document discovery to document, I call it document intelligence. It'll go through like tens of thousands of contracts in a company and find things that are written wrong, or they're problematic, sort of like giving basic legal advice. There's still a human lawyer in the loop. So those are some of the ones that come to mind.