The 'Verification Tax': 90% of execs say AI hasn't moved productivity, NYT reports
asusarla · x · 2026-10-12
NYT's DealBook column examines the gap between AI efficiency promises and reality:
- A survey of 6,000 executives by the Atlanta Fed, Stanford, Bank of England and others found 90% report no impact on employment or productivity, even though 69% of firms actively use AI.
- Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok: AI's productivity payoff "remains a forecast rather than an observation."
- The key concept is the "verification tax": as AI automates office tasks, it creates a new type of human work — checking AI output — that consumes the time the technology saves.
- Quote: the binding constraint on growth is no longer intelligence but human verification bandwidth; using AI to verify AI fails where expertise hasn't been encoded, since both AIs share correlated blind spots.
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