Welcome back to The AI Shift, our weekly dive into the evidence on how artificial intelligence is impacting the labour market. This week, as US software and professional services stocks tumble over fears of rapid disruption from the latest iteration of AI-powered tools, we ask whether the long-promised but long-missing impact of AI on robust measures of productivity in the tech sector is now here.

John writes

For much of last year, it felt like the AI-and-work story was a standoff between insistent anecdotes of massive productivity gains or impending layoffs on the one hand, and stubbornly stable trends in the hard labour market data. Evidence that AI is behind hiring slowdowns has proved equivocal at best, and as we covered at length in October, the productivity claims were generally refuted by directly measured evidence.