Business leaders and employees are not on the same page about AI 

A Monday morning earnings call ends, and the chief financial officer opens a chat window to draft the board update in minutes. Down the hall, a frontline finance team still works the old way, because access, training and incentives for the use of artificial intelligence never arrived there.

That split reality sits at the heart of the new internationally representative firm survey of almost 6,000 CFOs, CEOs and senior executives across the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany and Australia, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.

In the paper, titled Firm Data on AI, executives describe fast diffusion but limited realized impact, with large expected gains coming soon. They also forecast a smaller workforce that will be brought about largely through slower hiring rather than layoffs. But the real story for leaders sits in the gap between ambition and daily use, and the widening disconnect between executive expectations and employee beliefs.

Senior leaders in the survey expect AI to move the productivity needle in a way that dwarfs most operational initiatives. Across the four regions, executives forecast about 1.4 percent higher productivity over the next three years from AI adoption, with the U.S. at about 2.3 percent over the same time horizon — a pace that translates to roughly 0.77 percentage points per year. This would nearly double the anticipated baseline growth of about 1 percent annually.

Yet the paper also reports that realized impact over the past three years stayed modest, with an average realized productivity gain around 0.29 percent across firms. That “quiet period” matters, because it explains why many organizations still treat AI as a pilot program rather than a system........

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