The question of who shares in the wealth AI creates is a defining one. Should there be an “AI tax” for hyperscalers? Or an AI-based sovereign wealth fund? Maybe you think no special measures are needed. What’s clear is that most of the debate is happening among the people building the technology and the people who will regulate it, not the people it will potentially impact the most. So, this week, we fielded a national survey to ask Americans directly whether the wealth AI generates should be shared, and how.
The headline finding represents a point of agreement across demographics. Nearly two-thirds of Americans, 65%, say everyone should receive a direct financial benefit from the wealth AI companies generate. That view holds across the political spectrum, with 75% of Democrats, 62% of Republicans, and 57% of Independents in agreement. It runs strongest among the 25-to-44 year-olds most exposed to AI in the workforce, where support reaches a massive 78 to 80%, and it stays steady across income levels and gender.
What people want done with that wealth is more revealing. Across nearly every group, a direct cash payment funded by a tax on AI profits is the first choice. The exception is the youngest cohort. They lean instead toward structural mechanisms like public ownership stakes and sovereign-wealth-style funds, share transfers, and investment in worker retraining and AI safety.
I find this striking. The generation most likely to be impacted by AI, and with the most working years ahead of it, is not asking for a check. It wants a stake in the future and the means to compete. Business leaders and politicians seeking to win the favor of young Americans should pay close heed.
Be well,
Martin
For the last three quarters, Just Capital has been polling the American public, investors, and corporate leaders on AI deployment, tracking where perceptions converge and where gaps are widening.
Our third installment of quarterly polling on responsible AI deployment is now available in Just Intelligence for all registered users.
This research is designed to offer a roadmap for companies looking to build trust in the AI era and make informed decisions as the AI landscape evolves. It is the first iteration of an ongoing series that will continually surface insights from key stakeholders as companies aim to build trust, manage risk, and unlock AI’s upside potential for workers, customers, communities, and shareholders.
Axios examines new polling that shows data centers are turning into the focal point for anti-AI sentiment across the nation.
Reuters reveals that despite the fears, AI proliferation is having a muted effect on wages and workers.
At the same time, Gallup writes that while downsizing is continuing across the U.S., laid-off workers are only citing AI as the primary reason 1% of the time.
The Wall Street Journal speaks with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about his belief that we “can’t let AI giants eat the economy”. Read the full interview.
While they are experiencing a harder job search, The Guardian reveals that Gen Z employees who managed to snag a job are actually making more money than millennials did right after college.
Fortune takes a look at why men continue to drop out of the workforce at higher rates.
Yahoo! Finance holds a magnifying glass to CEO pay, and how more CEOs than ever are making more than $100 million a year.
The Washington Post teams up with the Brookings Institute to examine which jobs are most-and-least vulnerable to AI-driven displacement.
63% of the American public and 67% of institutional investors and analysts believe AI-driven profit gains should be reinvested in workers. Corporate leaders instead prioritize reinvesting in R&D (72%) and delivering returns to shareholders (54%).
“Our research suggests some sizeable gaps exist between how corporate leaders think about AI deployment and what the public and investors would like to see,” said Just Capital CEO Martin Whittaker. “The public understands the economic upside AI helps to create – but they need convincing that they stand to benefit from the gains. Companies that are able to do that will be rewarded with greater trust and a stronger overall license to operate. As the impacts of the AI transition continue to take shape, this will be extremely valuable.”
Public optimism on economic growth climbed 12 points (47% Fall 2025 to 59% Summer 2026).
Worryingly, the share of corporate leaders expecting large-scale job losses within the next 2–3 years nearly doubled, from 13% in Spring 2026 to 22% in Summer 2026. The public remains equally concerned about large-scale job loss and fewer entry-level positions.
The share of corporate leaders willing to dedicate more than 5% of AI investment to support displaced workers has more than doubled in the past six months (9% in Fall 2025 to 17% in Summer 2026).
The analysis above comes from the third wave of Just Capital’s unique quarterly survey of the American public, investors, and corporate leaders, which is designed to offer executives insight from key stakeholders as they aim to build trust, manage risk, and unlock AI’s upside potential. By measuring how perceptions and priorities shift across these groups over time, Just Capital aims to help business leaders make fully informed decisions as the AI landscape evolves. The inaugural wave was conducted in Fall 2025, and the spring wave was released in April 2026
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.
