Usefulness aside, I see little evidence AI is making money (profit, not revenue) for any firm whose profit doesn't come from the AI itself or the infrastructure, including supply chain. I'd love to hear a counterexample. One such example would be of a hypothetical company that does translations for payment, and with AI they now are making more profit because they use AI to do the translation rather than pay a translator.

Duolingo is such a company you would expect AI to help a lot. Surely AI could allow it to cut costs substantially. And yet, in the past year its stock is down 70% and in Q1 2026 profit has not seemed to increase compared to Q4 2025. In fact, other than Q3 of last year which had some tax shenanigans, their profit is relatively flat. Not a great look given that AI is highly disruptive to their product.

BIS released a larger report in June that identified AI financing/sustainability as one of the biggest risks for the global economy:

https://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2026e.htm

High growth scenario and medium growth scenario (Graph 2). I feel like an idiot asking - aren't we missing some, or at least one, scenario? Is "medium growth" for the next 4 years really the worst people can think of?

Thinking out loud, is productivity the ultimate macro benefit of AI? Should we expect macro AI investment to be a leading indicator of macro productivity gains?

For example, did macro investment in factory automation predict future productivity gains?

At least if the datacenters usage crashes, we'll have cheap power from all the infra that got built.

I’d rather see capital invested rather than being hoarded on a corporate balance sheet with minimal utility.

Good to see GDP growing.

I've seen other reports that suggest the level of investment for eclipses the internet buid out in 2000 and the railroad boom more than a century earlier. I wonder if they use different ways of landing on these wildly different assessments

(January 2026)