Thousands of CEOs say AI hasn't improved productivity. I think they're measuring the wrong things.
A Fortune survey doing the rounds this week has thousands of CEOs admitting that AI has had no measurable impact on employment or productivity. It’s being treated as vindication by the sceptics and a crisis by the vendors. I read it and thought: these people are using AI wrong.
I use AI tools every day. Claude helps me write code. OpenClaw handles the kind of loose, conversational thinking I used to do on paper or in my head. Granola transcribes my meetings and a plugin I built pipes the notes straight into Obsidian. My email gets triaged before I look at it. Research gets compiled in minutes instead of hours. This stuff has genuinely changed how I work, and I don’t think I could go back.
The CEO survey doesn’t prove AI is failing. It proves that most organisations have no idea how to deploy it.
What actually changed
The gains aren’t where the enterprise pitch decks said they’d be. Nobody handed me an AI tool that “transformed my workflow” in one go. What happened was slower and more specific: a dozen small frictions disappeared, and the cumulative effect was significant.
Meeting notes are the obvious one. Before Granola, I’d either scribble while half-listening or pay attention and try to reconstruct things afterwards from memory. Both were bad. Now the transcript happens in the background, a summary lands in my Obsidian vault automatically, and I can actually be present in the conversation. That’s 20 minutes a day I got back, every day, without thinking about it.
Code generation changed my relationship with side projects entirely. I’ve shipped things this year that I simply wouldn’t have started before: small tools, automations, scripts that solve a specific problem in an afternoon instead of a weekend. The AI doesn’t write production-quality code on its own, but it gets me from “I know what I want” to “I have something running” in minutes instead of hours. That speed difference matters. It’s the difference between “I’ll build that someday” and actually building it.
Summarising long documents, compiling research, triaging email: none of these are exciting. But they used to eat real time. Now they don’t. The compound effect of reclaiming 30 or 40 minutes across a day is that my actual focus hours go further. I wrote about protecting those hours last year, and AI tools have turned out to be one of the better ways to do it.
Why the survey got it wrong
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