Stripe data: AI adoption predicts pre-pandemic growth too, making AI ROI causally hard to measure
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-11-02
Stripe Economics' Ernie Tedeschi analyzed US industry-level productivity growth: AI adoption shows only a weak relationship with growth since ChatGPT, but also predicts pre-pandemic growth — and the difference between the two shows no relationship at all.
Steve Hou draws the key implication: firms adopting AI most aggressively were already the most productive and most responsive to demand/productivity shocks, so the causal effect of AI and selection-based advantage can be observationally equivalent for a long time — the core difficulty in measuring AI ROI.
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