Productivity is, in essence, the ability to generate more value with the same amount of resources or to maintain that value using fewer inputs. Therefore, it is often considered a key indicator of efficiency. Economic theory shows that productivity is a central factor for nations, among other reasons, due to its positive impact on wages, competitiveness, economic growth and, ultimately, on people’s well-being.
There are multiple factors that drive productivity, such as technological adoption, innovation, workforce skills, infrastructure, education and even an improvement in working conditions. In this context, it is inevitable to ask to what extent artificial intelligence (AI) has already managed to impact productivity. A recent article in The Economist, titled There will be no immediate productivity boost from AI, argues that we won’t see immediate uptake, mainly because the business sector is typically slow to adopt new technologies. As examples, he points out that it took decades for companies to incorporate electricity once it became available and that, despite the invention of tractors at the beginning of the 20th century, in 1940 only 23% of American farms had one.
The article integrates data from the United States Census Bureau, where a business survey revealed that only between 5% and 6% of companies use AI for the production of goods and services, beyond the basic use that can be given to tools like ChatGPT. Along the same lines, another text from The Economist (Stop panicking about AI, start preparing), highlights that since the launch of ChatGPT the number of white-collar jobs (professionals) has increased by around three million in the United States, while blue-collar jobs (manual or technical) have remained practically unchanged. Even sectors that have intensively incorporated AI, such as programming, have seen employment grow.
Taken together, these indications suggest that there has been no AI-related job losses to date. Both articles agree on a central point: the diffusion of technologies takes time. This does not imply that the potential of AI to generate added value in companies cannot be quickly realized in the future; However, expectations for an immediate and significant increase in productivity remain, at least for now, conservative.
Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) helps put the debate in perspective. Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica and Chile are among the countries where the longest hours are worked per year, on average, while Germany, Denmark, Norway and Austria record the shortest days. When contrasting this information with the levels of labor productivity—measured as GDP per hour worked—it is observed that the former also present the lowest levels of productivity, in contrast to economies such as Ireland, Norway, Luxembourg and Belgium, which top the ranking. The cases of Mexico, with many unproductive hours, and Norway, with few highly productive hours, suggest that efficiency is a key factor in impacting a country’s productivity.
The OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators 2025 adds another relevant element: although between 2022 and 2023 the average productivity of member countries grew by a modest 0.6%, the improvement was far from being generalized. In the same period, European Union countries recorded a drop of 0.9%, the steepest since 2009.
In Mexico, the low economic growth of the last seven years—around 1% annually on average—is linked, at least in part, to low productivity in our country. It is worth remembering that economic growth depends on the interaction between employment, labor productivity and hours worked, and that the weight of each variable varies between countries. The OECD analysis further shows that nearly half of the countries with a negative change in labor productivity were also those that recorded the largest falls in GDP, such as Ireland, Estonia, Finland and Luxembourg. In contrast, improved productivity was the main driver of growth in economies such as Costa Rica, Romania, Slovenia and Korea.
In this context, it is urgent that Mexico comprehensively address its problem of low productivity and low economic growth. Going through another six-year term under these conditions would be particularly risky. The challenges are structural: educational lag, deficiencies in the quality of the workforce, high informality, low levels of investment – aggravated by legal uncertainty -, limited capacity for technological adoption, especially among small companies that concentrate a large part of employment, and an environment that is not conducive to productive activity, among others. It is essential to assume that neither the increase in the minimum wage nor monetary transfers can replace, in the long term, all the benefits of a healthy economy that grows sustainably.
