Measuring the Self-Reported Impact of Early-2026 AI on Technical Worker Productivity
METR (AI lab research) · 11 May 2026
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- Will AI actually boost productivity and growth? · its finding: it depends (why studies differ)
Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model (AI-written).
Source excerpt
Summary In February–April 2026, we ran a survey of 349 technical workers (including 87 software engineers, 71 researchers, 129 academics and PhD students, and 48 founders and managers) about their usage of AI tools. Compared to previous work, our survey is one of the more detailed surveys of technical workers’ self-reported gains from frontier AI tools. 1 We attempt to capture gains due to AI in terms of ‘value’ (how much more value are you creating with AI), rather than ‘speed’ (how long would it have taken you to do these tasks without AI). These can give different answers in principle, in particular if using AI changes the distribution of tasks you work on. For example, researchers could use AI to quickly build an interactive dashboard for their data, which would have taken significantly longer without AI but isn’t that important for their project. We provide more detail on the distinction between value and speed gains in our previous research . We think that the distinction between ‘value’ and ‘speed’ gains is important because value is closer to the idea that survey designers typically care about, whereas our sense is that it is common for respondents to think in terms of speed, and we expect that speed changes would typically overstate value changes. See methodological details here . Participants self-reported a median 1.4–2x change in the value in their work due to AI tools. The median self-reported speed change (which we expect to be higher than value change) is 3x. Using the same question wording, respondents retrospectively estimate 1.3x value of work in March 2025, estimate 2x in March 2026, and forecast 2.5x for March 2027. Responses are broadly internally consistent – correlations between different value change measures are moderate, only 3% of respondents showed anomalies in their answers that we feel is sufficient to remove them. There are tentative reasons to be skeptical of the magnitude of responses. METR staff give the lowest change in value answe
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- 2026 (5 months ago)
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