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OpenAI and Anthropic have released a pair of new reports on how the use of their AI products helps to grow enterprise productivity. The reports serve as the AI industry’s latest response to a wave of recent academic studies amid a sea of public discontent pushing back on the AI data center boom, as the big AI firms seek to stow doubts in the value of enterprise AI spending.

OpenAI’s report released today, "The State of Enterprise AI", hinges on two major points: companies are using AI more, and workers are saving time as a result. OpenAI claims that in a survey of 9,000 workers across 100 companies, workers reported having saved 40 to 60 minutes of work per day on professional tasks with the use of ChatGPT. Of these 9,000 workers, 75% of respondents reported that AI has improved either the speed or quality of their work.

OpenAI may be looking to contradict studies from educational institutions published earlier this year. An August study from MIT showed that 95% of organizations that invested in AI business products "found zero return" despite corporate investments of $30-40 billion. The study shows that the "vast majority" of AI pilot programs stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on profit. Shortly after, a research initiative from Harvard Business Review found that most professional AI use constituted little more than "workslop", or work content that "masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”

In late November, Anthropic published its own research to respond to these allegations. The internal survey, submitted without peer review, found that using Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, cuts down the time it takes people to complete work tasks by 80%, from an average of 90 minutes down to 18 minutes, based on a look at 100,000 private Claude conversations. But as the company admits, buried deep in the website copy, these numbers have no promise of actually reflecting real-world efficiency. "This doesn’t account for the time that humans might spend on these tasks beyond their conversation on Claude.ai, however, so we think these estimates might overstate current productivity effects to at least some degree," says Anthropic’s own study.

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In a statement to Bloomberg, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap directly addressed the MIT and Harvard Business studies. "There’s a lot of studies flying around saying this, that and the other thing. They never quite line up with what we see in practice."

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Sunny Grimm is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware. He has been building and breaking computers since 2017, serving as the resident youngster at Tom’s. From APUs to RGB, Sunny has a handle on all the latest tech news.