“I never imagined it would be so high”: unlike Europe, productivity is taking off again in the United States but not yet thanks to AI

The curve surprised even the president of the American central bank. “I never imagined seeing such high productivity for so many years,” Jerome Powell said in March, shortly before his departure from the Federal Reserve. After having slowed significantly after the 2008 financial crisis, productivity - or the capacity to produce more with the same resources - has actually started to rise again in the United States.

“Growth in hourly labor productivity reached an annual average of +2.4% between 2023 and 2025, compared to +1.3% between 2014 and 2019,” observed Anis Bensaidani, economist specializing in the United States at BNP Paribas, in a note published in May. Over the last three months, it has even climbed 3.6% at an annualized rate, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics published Thursday. This important indicator, since it tends to guide growth and salary increases, has returned to levels that had not been observed since the early 2000s and the massive deployment of the Internet.

It is also at a level higher than the average observed between 1973 and 2001, according to figures compiled by Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University, who publishes data on the Econvitals platform. For economist Anis Bensaidani, this renewed productivity is one of the drivers of strong American growth (+3.4% in the last quarter at an annualized rate), also fueled by the boom in investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure. This rebound led the Federal Reserve to revise upwards its long-term growth forecasts for the American economy, from 1.8% to 2%, a rate twice that expected for the major European economies, including France.

The weight of past investments It would be tempting to see the first effects of artificial intelligence. However, experts remain cautious. “At this point, it’s hard to say.

It is possible that there are a number of microeconomic gains today as AI is deployed. But the real change will come when companies massively reorganize their production,” estimates Anis Bensaidani, economist at BNP Paribas, with BFM Business. According to him, the gains observed in recent months are rather linked to previous investments in digital and to changes accelerated by the pandemic, such as teleworking.

“I think productivity gains started to show after Covid with the digitalization of work, teleworking and the implementation of machine learning. We are only scratching the surface of the potential of AI,” also considers Henry H. McVey, head of global macroeconomics at KKR, in the New York Times.

Machine-translated from French