Crypto▼ Bearish
Stripe economist finds AI isn't driving US productivity boom, hitting crypto AI narrative
US productivity is up 2.5% but AI isn't the cause, says Stripe's Tedeschi. Zero correlation between AI adoption and gains. Implications for crypto AI tokens and Stripe's Tempo stablecoin chain.
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US labor productivity has been growing at a 2.5% annualized clip, well above the 1.6% average of the prior two decades. The driver isn't artificial intelligence, according to a new analysis from Stripe economist Ernie Tedeschi. Companies are simply getting better at using the capital they already have.
At the task level, AI looks impressive. Customer service agents using AI tools see a 14% productivity bump. Writing gets done 40% faster. Zoom out to the economy-wide view and the picture changes. Total factor productivity, the metric that captures genuine technological progress, has been essentially flat. The San Francisco Fed's estimates show TFP growth near zero. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported just 0.8% growth in 2025.
Tedeschi's analysis went further. He examined whether industries adopting AI more aggressively were seeing bigger productivity gains. After adjusting for pre-pandemic trends from 2016 to 2019, the correlation was essentially zero. Industries that went all-in on AI weren't outperforming those that didn't.
A Markov-switching model, a statistical framework for detecting regime changes, puts the probability of transitioning to a high-TFP growth regime at less than 20%.