Will AI Grow the Pie or Just Hand It to Fewer People?

I think AI makes the economy a bit more productive, but so far it mostly changes who gets the money. The pie grows a little, and a bigger part of it goes to fewer people. Those are the owners of the companies that use AI and the AI labs they pay.

Say a company sells payroll software to 3,000 restaurants, and each restaurant pays $100 a month. The company has 50 developers. With Claude Code or Codex, five of them can now do what all 50 did before, so the company lets 45 of them go.

The restaurants still use the same payroll software and still pay $100 a month. Nobody buys more payroll software because it got cheaper to make. So the company makes the same money as before, but the money goes somewhere else. The 45 salaries are now profit for the owners, and a small part goes to Anthropic or OpenAI for the AI subscriptions.

In the statistics, this counts as higher productivity, because the company makes the same software with a tenth of the hours. But the pie didn't grow. It only grows if the 45 developers find other work that someone pays for.

That's the hard part. AI makes it cheap to build things, but people don't have more money or time to buy and use them. The New York Times reported that the App Store got twice as many new apps in the first half of 2026 as a year earlier. Downloads grew only 2%. So when the 45 developers start making apps, they mostly fight over the same downloads.

Across the US economy, productivity in businesses grew 2.2% over the past year, which is faster than in the years before the pandemic. Workers' hourly pay after inflation fell 0.1% in that time. The share of business output that goes to workers is now 52.8%, the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started counting in 1947.

Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, told Fortune that the productivity gains behind this mostly came before the AI boom. About the workers' share, he said, "I don't think there's a floor." To me that makes it worse. If the share already fell this far without much help from AI, AI will push it further, because it makes it so easy to replace people.

I also don't think this can last. The 45 developers have less money now, so they spend less, and they eat out less too. If this happens at many companies, the restaurants get fewer guests and some of them close. Then the payroll company loses customers as well.

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