Half of Europe now uses AI at work. The economy got 3.8% better.
The ECB measured the AI dividend. It is smaller than promised.
On 26 August, the European Central Bank published a blog post with the least exciting title of the week and the most useful contents. António Dias da Silva, Laura Lebastard and David Sondermann, economists in the ECB’s supply side and labour division, report that AI use at work in the euro area went from 26% in 2024 to 41% in 2025 to 52% in 2026. While adoption doubled in two years! The median user says they save three hours a week, roughly 7.7% of median working time. Aggregate that across everybody and the implied efficiency gain for the whole economy is about 3.8%. Adoption runs at 61% among the highly educated and 37% among those with lower education. And 41% of workers say they have no appetite for the technology at all. Among managers, that goes down to 34%. The first honest AI productivity number Europe has had Almost every figure in circulation about AI and work came from an organisation with something to sell attached to the answer. Vendors measuring their own tools. Consultancies measuring the market for their own advisory. Analyst houses forecasting a transition they then sell you a subscription to navigate. Maybe that ain't so much to be fraudulent, and some of it is careful work, but it is all evidence produced by interested parties, and the whole sector has been reading it as though it were not. So a central bank, with no product, is a different kind of fact altogether. One caveat the ECB makes and most coverage will skip: the time savings are self-reported, an…