Mary Daly

You don't get productivity growth.

You get one-time adjustments to the level of productivity of your employees or your process.

So what we're looking for is a technology to give us consistently good changes in productivity so that all industries at scale get better, industries figure out new ways to generate revenue, new ways to do product design.

new ideas to come and shape the economy.

That's the thing that has a sustained productivity growth part.

So it's undeniable productivity growth has gone up.

What's not as clear is how long will that last.

Absolutely.

It is absolutely possible and something we have to interrogate.

I mean, right now, as you know too well, inflation is still above our target, our 2% target, and

price level's been high, much higher for a long time, and people are feeling stretched by the high inflation that they see.

And now, oftentimes, people say, well, now AI is going to hurt the labor market, and so now I'm in double doom, as people say.

But I think, ultimately, the way many people think about AI is the investment part of any technology can actually boost demand for goods, services, and people

and can then raise the pressure on inflation.

But then the productivity part comes, and that's a disinflationary part.

You can see this is all about the timing.

And so what we end up investigating is not just the models, but asking questions.

Are the build-out of data centers raising prices for construction workers?

Are the build-out of data centers raising prices for metals and other things that go into them, the raw materials?

Are the