BofA says you’ll be 10x more productive with AI. Ignore the 0.1% result so far

Bank of America has a message for anyone who has grown skeptical of the AI boom: you are thinking too small. In a report published Thursday, the bank’s research team made a typically sweeping claim for a Wall Street bank assessing the supposed artificial intelligence boom. It’s not like electricity or even the internet, the global economics team wrote. It is more powerful than both — and the productivity boom it will eventually deliver could be 10x larger than anything the economy is currently showing. The problem is that the economy is currently showing 0.1%, “a small aggregate effect relative to all the excitement around AI,” the bank admitted. It’s a number so small that it barely registers against global growth of 3.5%. Whether that argument holds is the most consequential open question in economics right now — and not everyone on Wall Street is buying it. What 0.1% actually means The gap between AI’s micro-level fireworks and its macro-level footprint is real, documented, and striking. AI is already delivering task-level productivity gains that would have seemed implausible five years ago: software developers completing 55% more work with AI coding tools, customer support agents resolving 14% more tickets, professional writers finishing projects 37% to 40% faster. But these aren’t showing up as a boost to GDP, BofA said, explaining that while AI can currently transform about 20% of all workplace tasks, only 23% of those are actually cost-effective to automate at today’s prices. Automated tasks save roughly 27% in labor costs, and labor is about half of all costs. Multiply it out and the theoretical ceiling is a 0.66% gain in labor productivity — before organizational friction, skills mismatches, slow diffusion, and regulatory drag compress it further toward the figure BofA has landed on: 0.1% per year. The bank acknowledges the academic literature on AI’s aggregate impact is “inconclusive,” with