# Nearly 6,000 CEOs Say AI Hasn't Boosted Productivity, Yet Layoffs Continue > Source: > Published: 2026-08-22 16:16:38+00:00 *Executives keep promising that AI will make companies leaner, but the numbers still say the payoff is mostly missing.* Ninety percent of companies say AI has had no measurable effect on productivity or headcount over the past three years. That is the finding that should slow everyone down. According to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper revised in March 2026, nearly 6,000 CEOs, CFOs and other senior executives at firms in the US, UK, Germany and Australia were asked what AI had actually changed inside their businesses. More than 90% reported no effect on employment. Eighty-nine percent said the same about labour productivity, measured as sales per employee. Zero impact, nine times out of ten. Here is the awkward part: 69% of the firms surveyed are actively using AI. It just isn't showing up where boards usually look first. More than two-thirds of executives said they regularly use AI themselves, but the average use was only 1.5 hours a week, according to the paper by Ivan Yotzov, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Steven J. Davis and other co-authors. A quarter of the executives said they don't use it at work at all. The same executives still expect a very different future. They forecast a 1.4% lift to productivity over the next three years. Output would rise 0.8%. Employment would fall 0.7%. No proof now. Real impact later. Fortune compared the finding with Robert Solow's old line from 1987 that "you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." Torsten Slok, Apollo's chief economist, made the same point about AI in a note Fortune cited: AI is visible everywhere except where it counts - not in employment, not in productivity, not in inflation data. [Nearly 90% of Firms Report No AI Investment Productivity Gains, NBER Finds](https://startupfortune.com/nearly-90-of-firms-report-no-ai-investment-productivity-gains-nber-finds/) A new NBER survey of 6,000 executives across the US, UK, Germany and Australia finds nearly 90% report no measurable AI productivity or employment gains over the past three years. The findings, alongside MIT and PwC research showing similar gaps, challenge the narrative driving this year's record AI capex spending. - [why AI investments aren't improving productivity](https://startupfortune.com/nearly-90-of-firms-report-no-ai-investment-productivity-gains-nber-finds/) - [firms report zero AI productivity gains](https://startupfortune.com/nearly-90-of-firms-report-no-ai-investment-productivity-gains-nber-finds/) ## Companies are cutting before the proof arrives Companies aren't waiting for the gains to show up before reshaping payrolls around them. TechCrunch's layoff coverage this year has tracked companies including Intuit, Atlassian and Monday.com tying cuts or hiring shifts to AI. The Financial Times reported this week that Oracle, Salesforce, Lufthansa, Accenture and Standard Chartered have all cited AI in job-cut decisions, while economists warned that the evidence for mass white-collar automation is still thin. That distinction matters. A layoff memo can say AI. The operating data can say something else. Salesforce is a useful example because the story is more complicated than the slogan. In April, Salesforce said Agentforce had handled 2.6 million customer conversations on its help site, with a 63% resolution rate, and that hundreds of support engineers had been redeployed rather than backfilled. Fortune later reported that Marc Benioff said Salesforce had reduced its customer support workforce from 9,000 to 5,000. That is a serious change, but it still doesn't prove every lost role was cleanly replaced by software. It proves management believes fewer people are needed around that work. Amazon gives you the same caution from another angle. The company confirmed about 16,000 job cuts in January 2026, according to Computerworld and other reports, while saying it would keep hiring in strategic areas. Reuters reported in July that Amazon also cut roles inside its artificial general intelligence group. So even the companies spending heavily on AI infrastructure are trimming in some AI teams while hiring in others. That is not a simple automation story. It is corporate restructuring with AI language attached. ## The customer still notices Klarna remains the cautionary example executives should keep on the wall. In its SEC filing, the Swedish fintech said its OpenAI-powered assistant handled 69% of customer service chats in the twelve months ended June 30, 2025, did the work equivalent of more than 700 full-time agents and delivered about $39 million in 2024 cost savings. Those are real figures, and they are why the story travelled so far. Then came the human part. Bloomberg reported in May 2025 that Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the company's push for cost savings in customer service had gone too far, and that customers would always have the option of speaking to a real person. TechCrunch later reported his line at SXSW London: "Two things can be true at the same time." Exactly. AI can reduce the cost of routine support, and customers can still get angry when the company treats support as a cost line instead of a relationship. Forrester has already put a number on that risk. In its 2026 workforce predictions, the research firm said it expects half of AI-attributed layoffs to be quietly reversed, with jobs returning offshore or at lower wages. That is not a moral argument. It is an operations warning. If you cut first and redesign work later, you may just buy the same labour back in a cheaper and messier form. [Curative CEO canceled a $600,000 Salesforce contract after vibecoding a replacement CRM in two months](https://startupfortune.com/curative-ceo-canceled-a-600000-salesforce-contract-after-vibecoding-a-replacement-crm-in-two-months/) Curative CEO Fred Turner canceled a $600,000-per-year Salesforce contract after his team built a replacement CRM in about two months using AI agents. The company's monthly Anthropic bill has since grown sixfold, and Turner is targeting 80% of Curative's total SaaS spend for elimination in 2026. - [I'll help you extract two long-tail](https://startupfortune.com/curative-ceo-canceled-a-600000-salesforce-contract-after-vibecoding-a-replacement-crm-in-two-months/) - [AI built CRM replace Salesforce](https://startupfortune.com/curative-ceo-canceled-a-600000-salesforce-contract-after-vibecoding-a-replacement-crm-in-two-months/) The skepticism isn't only coming from bosses. PwC's 2026 Global CEO Survey of 4,454 chief executives across 95 countries found 56% had seen neither revenue nor cost benefits from AI, while only 12% reported both. A separate Section survey of 5,000 white-collar workers found 40% of non-managers said AI saved them no time each week, while 19% of executives said it saved them more than 12 hours. Only 2% of non-managers said the same. Frankly, that gap is the story. Executives are pricing in a productivity boom that many workers can't yet feel and many firms can't yet measure. AI may still follow the old IT curve, where the payoff arrives only after companies rebuild workflows around the technology instead of bolting it onto old processes. But that took years. The NBER paper doesn't say AI is worthless. It says the return, so far, isn't showing up in the numbers companies report to boards. If you are going to cut jobs over AI today, you should be able to show more than a forecast. **Also read:** [Fortinet Buys Virtue AI Two Months After Meta Poached Its Founders](https://startupfortune.com/fortinet-buys-virtue-ai-two-months-after-meta-poached-its-founders/) • [Stripe's Product Chief Says AI Agents Will Kill the Checkout Page](https://startupfortune.com/stripes-product-chief-says-ai-agents-will-kill-the-checkout-page/) • [Apple Music Will Slap Made With AI Labels On Songs This Year](https://startupfortune.com/apple-music-will-slap-made-with-ai-labels-on-songs-this-year/)