The National Bureau of Economic Research publishes working papers before formal peer review, making it one of the fastest channels for rigorous empirical economics research on AI's labor market effects to reach the public. “What Work Does Generative AI Do?” by Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin, David J. Deming, and Tyler Schumacher is among the more recent contributions to a growing NBER literature on generative AI adoption and productivity.
The paper builds on earlier NBER findings - including survey work showing that generative AI currently assists somewhere between 1 and 5 percent of all work hours, with users reporting time savings equivalent to roughly 1.4 percent of total work hours - by examining more specifically which tasks within a job generative AI tools are actually being used for, rather than treating “AI use” as a single undifferentiated category.