Advanced Technologies Adoption and Use by U.S. Firms: Evidence from the Annual Business Survey
David N. Beede, Erik Brynjolfsson, Cathy Buffington, Emin Dinlersoz, Lucia Foster, Nathan Goldschlag, Zachary Kroff, Kristina McElheran, and Nikolas Zolas
This paper introduces a new survey module intended to complement and expand research on the causes and consequences of advanced technology adoption. The 2018 Annual Business Survey (ABS), conducted by the Census Bureau in partnership with the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), provides comprehensive and timely information on the diffusion among U.S. firms of advanced technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, robotics, and the digitization of business information. The 2018 ABS is a large, nationally representative sample of over 850,000 firms covering all private, nonfarm sectors of the economy. The paper describes the motivation for and development of the technology module in the ABS, as well as provides a first look at technology adoption and use patterns across firms and sectors. The paper finds that digitization is quite widespread, as is some use of cloud computing. In contrast, advanced technology adoption is rare and generally skewed towards larger and older firms. Adoption patterns are consistent with a hierarchy of increasing technological sophistication, in which most firms that adopt AI or other advanced business technologies also use the other, more widely diffused technologies. Finally, while few firms are at the technology frontier, they tend to be large so technology exposure of the average worker is significantly higher. This new data will be available to qualified researchers on approved projects in the Federal Statistical Research Data Center network.