Azeem Azhar

It is a tracker and it is available publicly.

And they, by their numbers, say that US generative AI adoption has reached 54.6% in August 2025, up from 44.6% a year prior.

They try to do a like-for-like comparison.

They point out that at the same...

point in history, PCs were at 19.7% and the internet was at 30%.

So roughly twice the adoption rate of the internet.

The absolute numbers there, 44.6, 54.6, aren't, I think, particularly helpful because it's a self-reported survey and because other surveys use different methodologies, but the direction of travel and the historical comparison is quite helpful.

Now, I'm going to just quote from their report.

So what they say is, when we feed these estimates into a standard aggregate production model, it suggests that generative AI may have increased labor productivity by up to 1.3% since the introduction of chat GPT.

And that's consistent with recent estimates of aggregate labor productivity in the U.S.

non-farm business sector.

So, you know, what they're saying is that you can see in the productivity numbers economy-wide, that thing that I said at the beginning of my discussion, we're not seeing, you can see some measure of labor productivity going up and it's consistent with the survey results they're getting through their tracker survey.

They also looked at industry level adoption and there is a weak positive correlation.

So it's a correlation of 0.32.

So that's not up in the 0.8, 0.9, but it's definitely negative and it's beyond being completely random.

Now we should be skeptical.

Self-reported survey, so many confounding factors, but it is at least plausible.

So when we conclude, when I think about this, it is a complicated picture, but the evidence illuminating that picture is growing.

It's not enough to satisfy anyone, I expect.

For those of you who believe that this AI boom is one gigantic hallucination and a titanic waste of time and will end indeed the way the Titanic did with a calamity,