Azeem Azhar

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7,268 appearances 34 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 25 Mar

Azeem Azhar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Azeem Azhar's Exponential View · Why the AI productivity gains haven’t arrived - yet · 21 Nov 2025 podcast

And the first time you do anything, it always takes longer than it will in a few years from now.

So if you're impatient about all of this, it feels really, really slow.

But the truth is, and here is the twist, it's the fastest rollout of technology we've ever seen.

The fastest adoption of a technology.

The St.

Louis Fed released a paper also this week looking at generative AI adoption, and it's based on a regular self-reported survey that they do.

So caveats, self-reported survey, not revealed preference or not monitoring real actual behaviors.

But they do have a consistent methodology.

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.

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