Firm Data on AI

Ivan Yotzov, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Chanya Chawla, Steven Davis, Kevin Foster (), Aaron Jalca, Brent Meyer, Paul Mizen, Michael A. Navarrete, Samil Oh, Katia Garcia Loredo, Monique Reid, Pawel Smietanka, Gregory Thwaites and Ben Zhe Wang

No 34836, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We survey nearly 9,000 CFOs, CEOs and senior executives at firms in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, Canada, Mexico and South Africa in Summer 2026 on AI adoption and its effects on jobs and productivity. We establish four key facts. First, 78% of firms use AI, with US firms expecting to spend $2,000 per employee on AI-related expenditures in 2026, implying around $300 billion in aggregate annual firm spending. This AI spending is highly concentrated, with just 2% of firms accounting for over 50% of total spending. Second, 80% of executives report regularly using AI, with an average use of 2.1 hours per week, up from 1.5 hours per week in Winter 2026, highlighting the rapid growth in managerial AI use. Third, executives report that AI has had essentially no net effect on firm employment over the last 3 years, and predict little net impact over the next 3 years. These small net effects, however, mask considerable job churn: more than 40% of firms anticipate positive or negative employment effects that roughly offset only in the aggregate. Fourth, executives report AI adoption has raised annual labor productivity growth by 0.2% over the last 3 years, a modest impact, but expect a substantially larger 0.6% per annum boost over the next 3 years.

JEL-codes: C83 D22 D84 J23 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ain and nep-bec
Note: DAE EFG ITI LS ME PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34836.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Firm Data on AI (2026)
Working Paper: Firm Data on AI (2026)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34836

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34836
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().