Ara Kharazian

So you can draw the line about what counts as AI adoption and how significant that adoption needs to be.

Maybe you need some amount of paid adoption to really see productivity gains across a firm.

Google's offering right now, I think most researchers in econ are skeptical that

chat subscriptions on their own will be driving the kinds of productivity gains we want to see in the economy.

We'll probably need something more comprehensive than just the kind of usage you get out of Google Workspace, at least most people do.

But Google is definitely underrated.

It certainly has a distributional advantage in that it's at all businesses that use Google Workspace.

Well, I mean, I'll suggest actually that from a economic productivity measurement standpoint, the main interest is not to see, hey, which model company is ahead versus number two versus number three.

Adoption is going to trend toward multiple large players.

the next stage for our research is to measure not just business adoption, but the intensity of that adoption and try to come up with some definition of, hey, what does it look like to be a firm that adopts AI particularly well?

And what is the path to that?

And that's not an easy question to answer, you know, because

The instinct is, well, let's look at the firms that spend the most on AI.

But spend does not translate to productivity gains.

If you ask people a year ago, they would say, well, the price of AI is going to go to zero, so there's no point in measuring spend.

So there's a lot of really cool research happening, though, about kind of productivity gains that a firm might get and trying to come up with the...

outcomes that we would measure.

Head count, of course, is a big one.

How is it going to affect jobs?

Which jobs go up?