There has been a lot of discussion recently about the products, especially among political leaders. One reason for this is that Australia’s labor productivity growth rate is at the lowest level of 60 years. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will organize a conference next month to solve this problem. This productivity will be with the release of the Commission report, which is considering 5 columns of improvement. One of these is the role of data and digital techniques including artificial intelligence (AI).
This will be a good news for technology and business sectors, which are enthusiastically promoting AI’s productivity benefits. In fact, Australia’s ‘Business Council’ also said last month that AI is the biggest chance for this generation to increase productivity.
But what do we really know about how AI affects productivity?
What is productivity?
In simple words, the productivity is that we can produce how much production (goods and services) from a certain amount of materials (such as labor and raw materials). This is important because high productivity usually converts to higher standard of living. In the last three decades, productivity growth has been 80 percent of Australia’s income growth.
Productivity can be seen at individual, organizational or national level. Your personal productivity depends on how efficiently you manage your time and resources to complete the tasks. How many emails can you answer in an hour? How many products can you check malfunction in a day?
Organizational productivity is how well an organization achieves its goals. For example, how many high-quality research papers are prepared in a research organization?
National productivity is the economic efficiency of a nation, which is often measured as gross domestic product (GDP) working per hour. It is effectively a group of other forms. But it is extremely difficult to find out how a change in personal or organizational productivity is converted into a national GDP when working per hour.
AI and personal productivity
Research investigating relations between AI and personal productivity has led to mixed results.
But AI does not always increase personal productivity.
A survey of about 2,500 professionals found that generative AI actually increased the workload of 77 percent of the workers. About 47 percent of the professionals said they do not know how to get productivity benefits.
AI and organizational productivity
It is difficult to give credit for the change in productivity of an organization to AI if it is not impossible. Businesses are sensitive to many social and organizational factors, any of which may cause changes in productivity.
The summary letter of 2024 cited independent studies showing an increase in organizational productivity from AI in Germany, Italy and Taiwan.
AI and national productivity
At the national level, the picture is even more blurred. Apparently, AI has not yet affected national productivity. It can be argued that technological development takes time to influence national productivity, as companies have to find out how to use technology and develop the necessary infrastructure and skills.
However, there is no guarantee. For example, while on the one hand there is a consensus that the Internet has improved productivity, there are more differences over the effects of mobile phones and social media and their impact in some industries (such as entertainment fields) is more pronounced than others. Language edited by: Sudhir Sharma
