THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AI AND LABOR PRODUCTIVITY – MYTH OR REALITY

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the latest technologies to raise the interest of mainstream media, world leaders and investors. In certain scenarios, AI is expected to augment human capabilities and, therefore, profoundly change macroeconomic labor productivity. Such a change would be greatly welcomed, considering that labor productivity in advanced economies has registered sluggish growth for many years. Despite these expectations, the reality remains disappointing. Even with continuous AI breakthroughs, labor productivity growth in the US, where world’s leading AI companies operate, has remained lower in the period 2019-2024 than in the period 1990-2007. In essence, the relationship between AI and labor productivity is not yet visible in macroeconomic statistics. Consequently, we tried to find evidence in scientific literature. We performed a bibliometric analysis, employing two scientific databases: Scopus and Web of Science. Our main goal was to determine the number of scientific publications which established a clear relationship between AI and labor productivity, be it on a macroeconomic level or on a firm level. Our results showed that not many researchers investigated the link between AI and labor productivity. In this study, we provided statistics per authors, journals and countries. We also provided an overview per content and epistemological orientation, to describe the research status in this field.