Welcome back to The AI Shift, our weekly exploration of the latest evidence of how AI is changing jobs and the world of work. This week we’re looking at new research into whether AI is making knowledge workers more productive, and taking a step back to consider how one should even go about answering – or indeed asking – that question.

John writes

We’re now three and a half years into the generative AI era and a year into the agentic AI era, and while there is increasing consensus around AI’s capabilities and utility in general terms, there is remarkably little hard data on how much of a productivity boost it is providing. One of the earliest attempts at quantifying this at the level of individual workers was carried out by the AI research non-profit METR, which found the striking result that while software engineers felt AI was helping them do their work 20 per cent faster, when precisely measured it was actually making them 20 per cent slower.