What’s Dragging Down A.I. Efficiency? The ‘Verification Tax.’

Artificial intelligence is on the verge of pushing office workers to dazzling new heights of efficiency. It’s supposed to be obliterating busywork and rendering entire professions obsolete with its proficiency. At least, that’s the story told by A.I. companies.

But something isn’t adding up on the ground.

In survey after survey, executives and their employees report unimpressive gains from A.I. tools. Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Stanford University, the Bank of England and the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico recently published a poll of nearly 6,000 senior business executives in which about 90 percent said the technology had no impact on either employment or productivity. That’s even though 69 percent reported that their firms actively used A.I.

Major A.I. efficiency gains are also missing from the larger economic picture. As Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo, put it in a review of data from the San Francisco Fed this week: “The productivity payoff from A.I. remains a forecast rather than an observation.”

There are many explanations for the dearth of data supporting the superefficiency narrative. Maybe the most obvious is that it simply takes a while for companies to adapt and deploy new technologies.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/10/business/dealbook/ai-verification-tax-rework.html