Mary Daly

productivity gains, and then on the other side of that, are the productivity gains already affecting the cost structure of firms?

Do they see that?

And even if a series of one-off adjustments can actually change the cost structure, and if you look at profit margins, when prices haven't been rising as rapidly as they once were, and firms are saying they don't have as much power to pass through, you would think that they're doing something to help margin protection.

And so I think this is, there's something going on here, whether we want to link it all back to AI,

and then use that as a demonstrated proof that we're in a transformative state.

I think that's a little bit too far, but certainly something's happening.

And thinking about the productivity growth is exactly what we did back in the 1990s.

We saw evidence firms were being more productive.

We were interrogating how long that would last.

And interestingly, the 1990s, when I said it was the roaring 90s that followed, it was good growth, but it was also a good labor market.

a really strong labor market.

And so those two things went together because ultimately we had this conversation in the roundtable and one of the participants made a great point.

It's true.

This is how economics works is if an employee using AI gets much more productive, you hire more of them, not fewer of them.

So the economy grows faster.

The product development goes faster.

goes faster and demand gets stronger.

Well, I think we have to separate what we're talking about into now, next, later.

So let's think about now.

Right now, we have more demand than we have supply for energy, for electricity, right?