Sceptics like economist Robert J. Gordon states that today's artificial intelligence is mainly a pattern recognition technology. While its feats are impressive, it is not transformational in the way electricity and the internal combustion engine were.

Others are more optimistic about productivity from innovations like cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford University's Digital Economy Lab, says that while the productivity pickup is not yet evident, it may be just a matter of time.

Anthem,  a health insurer whose plans cover more than 45 million people, said digital technology had spared its call centres from having to answer an estimated 10 million customer service calls.

Building the technical capability is just the beginning. It takes time for new technologies to spread and for people to know how to best use them. For example, it took the electric motor forty years before productivity gains were realised in mass production. Likewise, the personal computer took off in the 1980s, but economic productivity only surged in the second half of the 1990s.