Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank’s global head of macro and thematic research, went on Bloomberg Television and said something investors in every asset class need to hear: AI’s productivity revolution is real, but it’s not showing up in the data yet, and it won’t for years.
Reid described AI’s productivity potential as unprecedented in his career. He also made clear that people are being “a little overambitious in their timelines” for when the technology will actually ripple through the economy.
The electricity analogy, again
Electricity was commercialized in the 1880s. It didn’t meaningfully reshape factory productivity until the 1920s, when manufacturers redesigned entire workflows around it. The PC arrived in offices in the early 1980s. Economist Robert Solow famously quipped in 1987 that you could see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics.
Deutsche Bank itself has been experimenting with an internal AI tool called dbLumina, which the bank deployed earlier in 2026 to analyze sector-level disruptions and job impacts. Even the bank doing the analysis, in other words, is still in the assessment phase rather than the productivity-harvesting phase.
