The AI Productivity Paradox: Workers Say Yes, Executives Say No

Shanaka Anslem Perera highlights a striking paradox in the current AI adoption landscape: workers report that AI is making them more productive, while executives say AI is not making their companies more productive. Both groups are evaluating the same software, yet arriving at opposite conclusions.

Perera argues that this gap between individual productivity gains and organizational productivity gains is the central tension underlying the largest capital expenditure cycle in technology history. The observation raises fundamental questions about whether massive AI investments are translating into measurable business outcomes, or whether the benefits are accruing at the individual level without scaling to enterprise-wide impact.