For years, the working assumption has been that performing well on so-called “non-financial” stakeholder metrics is detrimental to a company’s profitability and financial performance. New analysis from Just Capital finds that, in fact, the two move positively together in statistically significant ways much more frequently than they diverge.
The research compares Russell 1000 company performance across five stakeholder groups – workers, customers, communities, environment, and shareholders and governance – with four financial metrics: economic profit margin, excess return (alpha), gross margin, and revenue growth. Overall, the results provide insight into the connections between financial and stakeholder leadership, how it varies across industries and issues, and where it appears to be strongest and weakest.
1. All industries have at least one opportunity to improve financial performance through strengthened stakeholder performance. Each company’s unique opportunity is dependent on their industry, and the stakeholder and financial metric in question.
2. The research identified the strength of relationships between each stakeholder and each financial outcome. Among the relationships that reach high statistical confidence, positive links outnumber negative ones by nearly two to one.
3. The strongest relationships between worker performance and returns are in the Consumer Discretionary, Financials, and Real Estate industries; companies that led on worker-related issues subsequently posted the greatest improvements in excess returns, suggesting a potential cause-and-effect relationship.
4. In Technology, companies that made meaningful investments in communities, environment, and governance practices saw the highest subsequent gains in revenue growth.
5. In Telecommunications, the firms with the strongest customer and environment performance delivered the highest improvements in gross margin.
The strongest overall positive relationships across stakeholder metrics and industries were found to be with revenue growth and excess return (alpha), indicating that both the market and customers can reward companies for their stakeholder leadership.
To enable companies to explore how their specific financial and stakeholder performance profile matches up, Just Capital built a new Financial Opportunity module within the organization’s flagship Just Intelligence product.
Although these correlations do not represent a causal relationship with forecasted or guaranteed returns, they provide a valuable input to C-suite decision making and a directional signal for where and how stakeholder and financial performance appear to be linked.
“This is the connection leaders have long sensed but struggled to prove,” said Just Capital CEO Martin Whittaker. “We can now show, industry by industry, where strong stakeholder investment and impact can align with strong financial performance. That moves the conversation from whether the two are related to where a company should focus first.”
The Financial Opportunity module is currently available to subscribers of Just Intelligence.
Just Capital will conduct additional analyses related to financial performance including the mechanisms that underlie these relationships. Future analyses will explore issue-level performance and the relationship to other financial performance measures such as return on invested capital and total shareholder return. The organization will also be building additional modules within Just Intelligence to inform business strategy and responsible AI deployment.
“Our commitment is to keep improving Just Intelligence so leaders always have the sharpest possible view of what drives performance,” said Whittaker. “That work is in service of something bigger, a vision of business where financial success and the wellbeing of workers, customers, and communities move forward together.”
The research builds on Just Capital’s history of exploring how meeting the expectations of the American public drives business results. The organization’s Just 100 Index has outperformed the Russell 1000 equal-weighted benchmark by 79% since inception in 2019.
The research that underpins the Financial Opportunity module was completed in collaboration with New Constructs and used a statistical approach that involved all 767 companies present in the Russell 1000 universe between 2021 and 2025. The analysis was conducted industry-by-industry based on the 11 Industry Classification Benchmark Industries.
For each company, Just Capital compared their annual financial performance measured by economic profit margin, excess return (alpha), gross margin, and revenue growth to their annual performance on key issues that the public has identified as priorities in Just Capital’s polling. The issues are aggregated by stakeholder: workers, customers, communities, environment, and shareholders & governance.
The analysis contained two periods: Period 1 (2021-2023) and Period 2 (2024-2025). The research compared average stakeholder performance in Period 1 with the change in financial performance between Period 1 and Period 2, in order to determine whether strong stakeholder performance results in improved financial performance over time.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Evangeline DiMichele: edimichele@justcapital.com
As business leaders continue to transform their companies and strategies around AI, they face a new and largely unmapped set of stakeholder expectations. Calls for responsible development and deployment continue, yet leaders lack an organizing framework that objectively defines responsibility and enables consistent and comparable practice across companies. Just Capital’s ongoing AI-focused polling initiative aims to fill this gap.
In early 2026, Just Capital conducted its second quarterly survey of the American public, investors, and corporate leaders. The ongoing initiative is designed to offer a roadmap for companies looking to build trust in the AI era and a framework to begin to define what responsible business leadership in the age of AI really means. The inaugural wave of this research initiative was conducted in the fall of 2025, and quarterly surveys will continue through 2026 and beyond to track perceptions as the technology evolves.
The organization today published its second full report Spring 2026 American Public, Investor, and Corporate Leader Perspectives on Responsible AI Deployment: AI Optimism Rises but Concerns Remain. The research revealed key changes between Fall 2025 and Spring 2026:
Findings from the second wave of Just Capital’s AI-focused polling suggests we are entering a period of growing confidence, but also one that demands continued focus on transparency, accountability, and broad benefit-sharing. Recent analysis from Just Capital on the state of corporate disclosure reveals that just 37% of the 110 companies analyzed disclose responsible AI principles or guidelines.
“There’s no shortage of ambition around AI, but there is a shortage of clarity on what responsible deployment actually looks like in practice. That’s a gap we aim to fill,” said Just Capital CEO Martin Whittaker. “This research is designed to give leaders a clear, data-driven starting point for building the kind of trust that earns and maintains long-term social license to operate.”
Methodology
In January 2026, Just Capital surveyed 1,000 American adults in partnership with Harris Poll, 103 corporate executives (84 c-suite executives and 19 board members or senior-level executives) in partnership with Gerson Lehrman Group, and 100 institutional investors and analysts in partnership with NewtonX. This survey was the second wave of an ongoing quarterly polling initiative.
About Just Capital
Just Capital is the foremost independent organization advancing responsible business leadership. We translate insights from public polling, performance data, and financial analysis into actionable intelligence leaders can use to drive long-term business success and shared prosperity for people across America.Our flagship product Just Intelligence is designed to offer a comprehensive view of public expectations, stakeholder performance, and sector realities in order to drive responsible decision-making. When companies make better decisions, they can create lasting value for shareholders, contribute to stronger communities, and help drive broader economic and societal progress. For more information, visit justcapital.com.
Last week, Just Capital brought together some of the world’s most influential business leaders, philanthropists, and government officials at Nasdaq’s MarketSite for our 2026 Best of American Business Celebration — supported by sponsors Accenture, Bank of America, and many more.
The day was defined by candor with seven fireside chats moderated by leading media figures. The conversations occurred under Chatham House rules, so we cannot directly attribute quotes, but we’re sharing two themes that dominated the discussions.
One refrain we heard repeatedly was the importance of keeping humans in charge of AI systems. One organization said their ethos was “humans in the lead” not just humans in the loop. It’s a deceptively simple idea, but in a world racing to automate, it’s a radical one.
Speakers also emphasized that neither government nor business alone cannot absorb the disruption that’s coming. Addressing AI’s impact on workers will require public private partnership to fundamentally reimagine how value is defined, rewarded, and shared One speaker even mentioned how dealing with this impact will go beyond workforce issues, and will force us to rethink how America handles things like health insurance, childcare infrastructure, and the social safety net at large.
There was a pointed message to CEOs in the room about the choice before them: use these tools to help people do more and better work, or use them simply to reduce headcount. One speaker referenced NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s recent statement that leaders who laid off employees were “lacking imagination” in how AI tools could transform employee work, and it was clear the moral weight of how to handle this transition will define how history judges this generation of business leaders.On an optimistic note, there was general agreement that, with the right guardrails and widespread access, AI will provide significant value to society through innovations in healthcare, engineering, and education. Our latest polling shows that the American public agrees. Many leaders also believed that academia and nonprofits lack access to frontier models, which presents a structural problem that deprives these sectors of many of the technology’s gains if this continues.
On an optimistic note, there was general agreement that, with the right guardrails and widespread access, AI will provide significant value to society through innovations in healthcare, engineering, and education. Our latest polling shows that the American public agrees. Many leaders also believed that academia and nonprofits lack access to frontier models, which presents a structural problem that deprives these sectors of many of the technology’s gains if this continues.
If AI was the operational challenge in the room, the state of capitalism was the philosophical one.
Several leaders spoke with striking frankness about the erosion of public trust across the spectrum: in business, in capitalism, in the accessibility of the American dream, and in “brand America” abroad. It was clear that those in attendance were worried about the possibility of AI exacerbating these issues.
This concern was echoed from leaders across sectors – corporate leaders, investors, philanthropists, and policymakers. The idea that the very foundations on which markets depend is at risk was not an outlying perspective. It was a common thesis of the night.
There was also a belief that specific sectors were more vulnerable than others. One speaker drew a direct parallel between the major social media platform liability cases moving through the courts today and the first successful lawsuits against big tobacco, a flashpoint where public opinion decisively turns on one of the largest sectors of the American economy.
Leaders agreed that all of these issues could present an economic and social crisis soon.
In the end, the event left us debating profound questions: What kind of future do we want? How do we in this room shape it?
We at Just Capital believe in the power of markets and the private sector to advance society and build a better future for more people at scale. In an AI-powered future, the best of American business will continue to do just that.
Thank you to our insightful speakers and moderators, and thank you again to our sponsors!
Recent research on public attitudes toward AI reflect a rising level of unease and concern about the technology and its potential impacts on the workforce, relationships, and education. A closer look at public priorities suggests the views of the public are more nuanced than other polls may indicate and the path forward for AI-focused corporate leaders is clearer than overall sentiment polling implies.
In March 2026, Just Capital prompted the American public to prioritize AI-related issues rather than measure general sentiment. The results reveal that public support for AI is not absent but conditional: it depends on whether companies can demonstrate how they are managing risk responsibly while delivering on AI’s greatest potential to improve society. An early review of corporate disclosure suggests most companies have not yet made that case clearly or consistently.
When asked to rank priorities rather than express general views, Americans reveal a more balanced perspective than headline sentiment polls suggest. They highly prioritize the use of AI to advance innovations in health, education, and engineering to solve complex societal problems, even ranking this above concerns around workforce disruption and environmental impacts.
At the same time, the three highest-ranked priorities are focused on safety concerns: preventing harm, deception, and manipulation; keeping humans in charge; and protecting personal data and privacy. This suggests public support would be bolstered by companies articulating the guardrails around the technology. Americans are watching to see whether companies can deploy AI responsibly.
We reviewed AI-related disclosures at six hyperscalers and 104 additional companies that rank highly in the organization’s measure of overall responsible business practices. Even among these 110 companies, most with strong disclosure track records across workforce, community, environment, customer, and governance issues, AI-related reporting is inconsistent and lacks common definition.
Two of six hyperscalers publish dedicated AI Transparency Reports. Fifty percent of companies disclose board-level involvement in AI risk oversight, but just 37% of the 110 companies analyzed disclose responsible AI principles or guidelines. Among those that do, disclosure is uneven on the issues Americans rank highest: only 16 companies mention preventing harm, deception, and manipulation; 27 mention human oversight; and 37 mention customer privacy and data protection.
Across Just Capital’s broader analysis of 933 public American companies, the picture is even less clear. The share of companies committing to not selling user data in any context dropped 3.5% year over year, and 3% fewer companies commit to not using user data for advertising. The average number of employee training hours fell from 24.34 per employee in 2024 to 21.96 in 2025, despite calls for more AI-focused training and reskilling opportunities. Among the smaller group of 110 companies analyzed further, 39 disclose formal AI training programs for employees.
As companies accelerate AI deployment, clearly and consistently defining responsible AI development and deployment will be a meaningful point of distinction for the American public. This analysis suggests the public will be more likely to extend trust to companies that demonstrate they are using AI to deliver genuine social benefit while protecting people from the greatest risks.
The full list of public priorities identified by Just Capital is below. These priorities are being translated into trackable metrics for ongoing analysis.
Methodology
Just Capital regularly conducts independent surveys to track Americans’ priorities, values, and expectations for corporate behavior, which serve as a foundational input into its Just Intelligence tool, rankings, and research products. Priorities weights were determined via maximum-differential (Max-Diff) to quantify the relative importance of each of the AI-related issue statements.
This survey was conducted online within the United States by Just Capital from March 12–16, 2026 among 2,012 U.S. adults ages 18 and older. Data from this survey have been weighted to align with known population parameters from the U.S. Census Bureau on key characteristics including [age, gender, geography, etc.]. While weighting adjusts for demographic imbalances, this survey is based on a non-probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. Findings should be interpreted accordingly.
