Technology-driven productivity gains have historically been difficult to measure and often lag in official economic data.
Fortress Chief Strategist Elizabeth Burton joined CNBC's Fast Money recently to discuss the impact of the AI investment boom.
Transcript
Melissa Lee, CNBC
It is staggering to think about how much more spend there will be by the hyperscalers, but also in terms of this massive upgrade and what we were talking about in terms of the tremendous amount of productivity that could potentially be unleashed by all of us using agents, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Burton
Yeah, I'm a little bit of a skeptic on the productivity angle. I mean, we brought up bots. there's a study from the OECD that talked about how robots are, two out of every 1,000 workers, and yet they contribute about 10% to GDP in the places that they're used. But on the other hand, if you think about penetration levels, it took 84 years for the steam engine to reach 50% penetration. So, is AI a steam engine or is AI a bot? It has components of both. The steam engine took so long because you had to get that integrated. My least favorite class in business school was organizational behavior. I think we should all probably revisit it because we're going to need it for that productivity angle. But, you know, as Robert Solow said in 1987, you can see the computer age everywhere, but in the productivity statistics, I think it's really hard to determine when it's going to show up. There's some evidence right now that in the UK it's showing up in tenths of a percent. So, we'll have to wait and see.
Melissa Lee, CNBC
And what does that mean for the company spending on AI then, Karen? If we were to believe that AI is, you know, companies are increasingly going to spend on AI and gain efficiencies, and we're not going to necessarily see in productivity.
Karen Finerman, CNBC
I sort of think, I don't know, I want to take that to the other side a little bit. I think we'll see some areas of tremendous productivity, tremendous, and then other areas not. And so, it's going to be very uneven, I think.
Melissa Lee, CNBC
Yeah.
Elizabeth Burton
I think that's a fair comment. If you looked at past productivity cycles, like if you look at like the 70s, you could see productivity in certain parts of the economy, but it wasn't showing up in farmers and farmland, right? So, I think you have to look at how it's impacting the whole economy, not just the small financial world in which all of us here at this table live.
