Reserve Bank of Australia sees AI not yet moving productivity or employment: the big impact is still to come

By Reuters · November 8, 2026.

According to the Reuters headline, Hunter of Australia's central bank (RBA, Reserve Bank of Australia) maintains that artificial intelligence has not yet brought a productivity boost or caused job losses. We only have the headline and a brief description. We do not have the full text, so we cannot attribute figures, methodology or nuances to the official.

The claim carries particular weight because it comes from a central bank. These institutions look at aggregate productivity and employment, not anecdotes from individual companies. For a central bank, productivity is how much is produced per hour worked, and it determines how much an economy can grow without generating inflation.

Our take: the fact that the effect has not yet shown up in the aggregates does not mean it won't. In general, general-purpose technologies (electricity, computing) took years to show up in the statistics, because companies have to reorganize processes before gaining efficiency. The absence of mass layoffs today also does not contradict what we see sector by sector: administrative and back-office work is the most exposed, and the adjustment usually begins with fewer hires of junior profiles, something aggregate figures are slow to capture.

There are two interpretive risks. The first is triumphalism: "not yet" does not mean "never." The second is the opposite catastrophism of taking for granted a collapse in employment that official data do not yet show. That distinction between demonstrated capability and narrative is the one worth keeping.

What matters in the long run is the direction. If AI ends up translating into productivity, that is the mechanism that generates the abundance we champion as a horizon: more output with less human effort. The transition will be uneven and hard for those in the most exposed jobs. That central banks are already monitoring the phenomenon is a good sign: it means there will be measurement and economic policy based on evidence, not panic.