AI deployment has become a defining strategic priority for the private sector, promising to enhance productivity, innovation, and competitiveness. Ensuring the technology drives prosperity and progress for every American is a top national priority. As companies race to adopt AI, significant questions are emerging about what it means to pursue these new business imperatives in ways that empower American workers, strengthen local communities, create good jobs, protect consumers, and build trust in business and capitalism.
Today, Just Capital released new findings from a survey of corporate leaders and a combined report of these corporate perspectives alongside previously released surveys of investors and the American public. The inaugural American Public, Investor, and Executive Perspectives on Responsible AI Deployment report and the organization’s ongoing research initiative aim to identify key considerations for responsible AI deployment at scale.
Just Capital will conduct quarterly pulse surveys through 2026 and beyond, providing ongoing insight for corporate leaders, investors, and policy makers as perspectives continue to evolve on what exactly responsible AI deployment means and how to pursue it.
The research identified key areas of agreement between the three audiences:
Majorities of all three groups believe AI will be a net positive for society within the next five years. Corporate leaders’ enthusiasm (93%) outpaces the general public (58%) and investors (80%).
Majorities or pluralities of each group rate AI safety and security a top concern (general public: 53%, investors: 62%, corporate leaders: 46%).
Significant majorities of the general public (90%) and investors (97%) say it is critical that companies ensure that AI training and development is available to employees, and roughly three-quarters of corporate leaders say they are planning to implement AI training to support their workers.
Some diverging views also emerged including:
The Degree of Expected Investment in Safety and Workforce Support: Investors and the public expect companies to spend more than 5% of total AI investment on safety, while corporate leaders say they plan to allocate between 1 and 5%. When asked about how they plan to redistribute AI-related profitability gains, executives evince less emphasis on worker training efforts (17%) than on delivering gains to shareholders (28%) and reinvesting in R&D (30%).
Environmental planning: Roughly a third of both the public and corporate leaders say increased corporate AI usage will have negative impacts on the environment. Currently, only 17% of leaders are including environmental impact planning in their AI roadmap, and 42% say it is not a part of their strategy.
“This is a defining period for every business leader. How to deploy AI the right way in order to create value for their companies, their shareholders, and all their major stakeholders – not to mention for society at large – is the strategic question of the moment,” says Just Capital CEO Martin Whittaker. “The insights in this initial report and the quarterly tracking we will do moving forward are designed to help leaders navigate this transformation, make responsible decisions, and ultimately win in an AI-powered economy.”
The surveys were conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll, Robinhood Foundation, and Gerson Lehrman Group. The complete report, including detailed findings and methodology, is available here.
NEW YORK, NY October 28, 2025 – As executives across industries race to deploy AI’s transformative potential, another urgent question looms: What do the people who determine a company’s success — employees, consumers, communities, and investors — actually expect from corporate AI implementation?
Today, Just Capital released new survey findings as part of a comprehensive effort to define responsible AI deployment through the eyes of the key population groups. Drawing on a decade of polling the American public, this research, conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll and Robin Hood Foundation, reveals areas of alignment and divergence across two core audiences: the American public and investors.
Just Capital will be tracking these perceptions quarterly as the technology evolves, offering leaders a real-time compass as they navigate a rapidly changing business landscape. The organization will also begin surveying business leaders this fall to compare stakeholder and corporate expectations.
“We’re at an inflection point. Every day, leaders are grappling with both the opportunities AI creates and the risks it poses at scale. What responsible AI leadership looks like is being defined in real time,” says JUST Capital CEO Martin Whittaker. “Our research aims to equip corporate leaders with additional insights to realize AI’s full promise including the business value it can unlock and the wider prosperity we all need it to deliver. If we can get this right, everyone wins.”
1. Expectations of productivity
The vast majority (96%) of investors believe AI will have a net positive impact on worker productivity. However, only 47% of the public say AI will result in a net positive impact on productivity.
2. Distribution of AI-related gains
The public is in favor of distributing AI-driven corporate profits across several efforts, including lower prices for customers, workforce supports including for laid-off workers, and investments in safety and security. Investors believe the majority of gains should be allocated to shareholders, but do believe in gains going to other efforts including lower prices for customers.
1. AI safety as a top concern
Despite recent emphasis on an AI race between the United States and international rivals, both the American public and investors are more concerned about preventing accidents, misuse and other consequences of AI. Both groups also see impacts on social stability as a greater concern than U.S. competitiveness.
2. A significant amount of spend toward safety
The majority of the public and investors believe companies should be spending more than 5% of total AI spend on the safety of these tools and platforms. Given recent capital allocations to AI investments, 5% represents a dollar amount in the hundreds of billions. According to JUST Capital tracking to date, top AI developers and users have not publicly disclosed the amount spent on safety.
Are you a corporate executive? Please take our AI-focused survey here to inform how we continue to define and measure AI leadership.
Ten years ago, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon made a bet that flew in the face of conventional retail wisdom: invest heavily in frontline workers through higher wages, better training, and expanded benefits. The result was increased value for the company, shareholders, and their associates. Just’s analysis frequently highlighted this. This week, in a powerful LinkedIn reflection and in remarks from the company’s workforce conference in Bentonville, McMillon connected that decade-long commitment to how the company plans to navigate AI-related transformation.
The timing is striking. Headlines have focused on AI-driven job cuts, and McMillon himself acknowledged that “AI is going to change literally every job”. But he’s using this moment to double down on the philosophy that got Walmart here: “investing in wages, benefits, and education shouldn’t be seen as a line item, it should be valued as the strategic enabler that it is.”
This approach aligns perfectly with what the majority of Americans want. Worker issues such as fair pay, well-being, and training and advancement consistently rank as top priorities in our polling. And our data supports the business case: since 2021, companies excelling on worker issues in our rankings have outperformed the Russell 1000 equally-weighted index by over 20%. McMillon noted that Walmart’s shareholder returns are up about 490% since 2015, outperforming the S&P500.
Behind fair wages, the #2 issue for the American public this year was ethical leadership. McMillon’s remarks may offer the blueprint for ethical leadership in the AI era. He didn’t sugarcoat the challenge. AI will eliminate some jobs and create others. He outlined that the composition of Walmart’s 2.1 million-person workforce will change dramatically over the next three years, even as headcount stays flat. That transparency builds trust.
As we work over the next few months to begin to define what just AI deployment looks like, Walmart’s strategy is an exciting place to start.
Be well,
Martin
(Getty Images/Bill Pugliano)
“Old-timers in our plants were saying, ‘It’s no longer a career, Mr. Farley. Working at Ford is no longer a career.’”
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is encouraging Gen Z to go to trade schools, stating that the AI future will require “hundreds of thousands” electricians, carpenters, and plumbers to help build data centers and AI infrastructure. Fortune has the story.
The Wall Street Journal asks when we will see results of the “epic” levels of AI spending, citing worries many investors have that there is no clear timeline for when they’d see any return, echoing the dotcom bubble.
The New York Times reports that California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a sweeping new AI law that will force companies to report the safety protocols they’re using in development, the greatest risks posed by their technologies, and more.
Fortune reveals that 62% of white collar workers would transition to a trade job if it meant more employment stability and better pay, particularly for younger workers.
The New York Times takes a deeper look at the ways in which the Trump Administration could solve issues with the H-1B program and argues that the proposed $100k fee per new hire is not the solution.
Bloomberg worries that large swaths of Americans no longer have meaningful spending power to impact the economy, which is why stocks continue to grow despite American sentiment being down on the current state of the economy.
Nearly 100,000 government workers resigned this week as part of the Trump administration’s “Deferred Resignation Program” implemented in April of this year, which claims to save taxpayers $28 billion dollars. Newsweek has the story.
Pew Research released several pieces of data on how Americans are using AI. One important insight for company leaders? Most Americans believe it’s important to tell the difference between AI- and human-generated content, but very few feel like they can.
Last week, we explored how internship programs can deliver real business value when done right. This week, I’m putting our money where our mouth is by sharing findings from one of our own summer intern projects: an analysis by Sofia Maria Giorgianni that reveals crucial insights about how America’s most just companies are approaching AI workforce development.
Sofia’s research couldn’t be more timely. Our polling shows that AI is a critical issue to the American public with 70% of respondents agreeing that CEOs have a key role to play in the ethical use of AI, and Americans consistently rank worker advancement and training as a top issue. As AI reshapes the private sector, a critical question emerges: How are companies investing in their workers to ensure they can thrive in an AI-powered future? The answer, according to our data, is encouraging.
Among the 2025 Just 100, 84% of companies mention AI in their disclosures, yet only 20% specifically disclose AI talent development initiatives. This represents both a challenge and an opportunity. The companies leading the way – including Salesforce, Constellation Energy, Boston Scientific, Visa, and The Hershey Company – span 13 different industries, showing that AI readiness isn’t just a tech sector concern.
Interestingly, companies with AI training initiatives tend to rank higher overall in our Rankings of America’s Most Just Companies while those without such programs skew toward the bottom. This suggests a link between future-readiness and just business behavior. Companies that invest in their workers’ AI capabilities are often the same ones excelling across other stakeholder dimensions.
Sofia’s work demonstrates how fresh perspectives can illuminate critical business challenges. Her proposed AI talent development metric will help us track – and encourage – this emerging dimension of corporate performance going forward.
Be well,
Martin
Fortune looks at how AI is already flattening organizational structures, removing managers and distance between staff and the C-suite.
The New York Times reveals 21 ways people are using AI to cut down their workloads.
AI startup Perplexity makes a $34.5 billion dollar bid for Google Chrome’s browser. Bloomberg has the story.
Pew Research Center finds Americans remain split on whether companies should issue public statements on political or social issues — roughly half view them as important, but opinions vary significantly by race and political affiliation.
The Wall Street Journal digs into the data that shows the era of big pay raises for low-wage workers is over.
The Washington Post reports that Nvidia and AMD have agreed to remit 15% of their revenue from AI chip sales in China to the U.S. government as part of an unusual arrangement tied to export licenses, sparking warnings about potential constitutional conflicts.
Axios outlines the mounting pressures on consulting firms as both AI efficiency gains and government contract cuts disrupt the traditional billable hours model.
Fortune reveals that despite CEOs across the country instituting RTO mandates, only 7% of them regularly appear in their own offices.
The New York Times explains that Big Tech’s net-zero proclamations are on shaky ground due to the massive spike in energy usage from their AI investments.
Axios examines how companies have used economic downturns to replace workers with automation and how another recession would likely accelerate businesses replacing workers with AI.
Just Board Member Xavier de Souza Briggs and his colleagues at Brookings Institution released a major new report on generative AI, the American worker and the future of work this week, alongside a TIME guest essay on how the AI revolution is poised to affect workers in the least unionized industries. Amongst other things, they find that more than 30% of all workers could see at least half of their occupation’s tasks disrupted by generative AI, and that the disruptions will be felt across “cognitive” and “nonroutine” tasks, especially in middle- to higher-paid professions.
What can business leaders do to prepare? The authors identify several options including fostering worker engagement in AI design and implementation, and elevating worker voice in mitigating harms such as job loss and inequality. It’s a thorough, insightful study that will help anyone trying to make sense of this increasingly complex and worrying issue.
Also this week, The U.S. Department of Labor released its AI best practices roadmap for developers and employers seeking to safeguard worker well-being. The wide-ranging guidance covers everything from the development of more responsible AI standards and governance structures to ensuring meaningful human oversight for significant employment decisions. Investing in employee training on AI and increasing transparency with workers about the use of AI at work are also important principles. For examples of how 3 JUST 100 companies – Accenture, ServiceNow and T-Mobile – are putting these principles into practice, see below.
Clearly, the scaffolding around which a just approach to deploying AI in the workplace is now being constructed. What’s also important, as noted at the WSJ’s recent CIO Network Summit, is the ROI for AI in business. Leveraging LLMs to boost productivity, grow revenue, improve the employee experience, create higher quality jobs, better serve customers, reduce waste and environmental impact, and improve transparency – things that also constitute just business behavior – are coming into sharper focus too.
Be well,
Martin
This week marks the release of The Competitive Advantage of the Win-Win Workplace, a collaboration between Future Forward Strategies, The Burning Glass Institute, and JUST Capital. The report introduces 9 key strategies for aligning employee well-being with business success, and includes real-world case studies from companies like Intel and Cigna. Get all the insights here.
JUST Board Member Xavier de Souza Briggs and his colleagues at The Brookings Institute released a new report on generative AI, the American worker and the future of work, with a TIME guest essay on how the AI revolution is poised to affect workers in the least unionized industries.
As Martin noted above, here are three examples of AI and worker well-being coming together at JUST 100 companies.
Fortune takes a look at why ESG assets continue to grow in investment despite recent pushback against them.
The Conversation examines the underpaid, overworked workforce supporting the AI explosion: data labellers who must review everything fed into an AI system to correctly define the type of information.
The Washington Post reports that Boeing is planning to layoff nearly 17,000 jobs (10% of its workforce) after losing nearly $25 billion in the last few years thanks to ongoing security and safety concerns, legal battles, and union strikes. Competitor Airbus also announced plans to lay off 2,500 jobs in its defense and space division.
The Times reports that BP has abandoned its target date to cut oil production after falling significantly behind.
Axios highlights an interesting piece of research – at the very top, the gender pay gap flips, and women CEOs actually make more than men. However, this is likely a matter of small sample size as women represent just 40 CEOs in the analyzed index.
This chart comes from our review of Q3 Stakeholder Performance. Companies that lead in our Workers stakeholder delivered strong performance over this period (with a long-short spread of 1.17%). Year-to-date, our flagship JULCD index is outperforming its benchmark by 0.46% and the JUST 100 has significantly outperformed its benchmark by 7.38%. Explore the data here.
At a private JUST webinar this week, Brookings Institution’s Xavier de Souza Briggs (also a JUST Board member) and Molly Kinder (read her latest article on how Hollywood writers went to war on Gen AI here) joined MIT’s Tom Kochan and Stephanie Bell from Partnership on AI to expound on the impacts of Gen AI on America’s workers.
The central question? How companies can think about their human capital as a value creator in the implementation and deployment of generative AI technologies. The discussion highlighted the importance of deliberate implementation strategies and highlighted the potential for empowering workers by incentivizing their engagement with AI in their respective roles.
We often dwell on the possible negative societal impacts of AI when we contemplate its future – instinctive fear of the unknown perhaps – but there are also some clear and very immediate positive applications.
The mission of Karya, for example, is bold and simple: they are tackling poverty in India by working with big tech companies (who spend billions of dollars to collect training data for their LL models) to bring that digital work to local communities. Their partnerships with Google, Microsoft, The Gates Foundation, and the Government of India will help bring digital employment to 100,000 low-income Indians this year.
Humanitas.ai, led by Bay Area tech leader Phil Chow, is exploring the application of Gen AI in America to create personalized support for frontline workers and their families in accessing benefits, emergency needs (such as food), and other forms of urgent care. Turnover and unused benefits cost employers hundreds of billions of dollars every year; Humanitas.ai’s concept could help corporations improve efficiency and directly benefit the lives of millions of their workers.
These are just two examples of how companies could find alignment between driving business value and deploying worker-centric AI. JUST’s work will help make sure the issue remains a priority.
Be well,
Martin
“Technology fosters jobs. It fosters opportunity. I think gen AI is the biggest opportunity. It is the iPhone moment for enterprise for sure. In terms of reskilling and retooling people, that will have to happen. Six out of 10 people will need to be retrained for this new economy, but it is a great opportunity. Most of the jobs they’re doing right now are soul crushing.”
CNBC covers the leaders in our Top 5 Companies for Parents list and explores some of the policies each company has on top of parental benefits, including specific pay equity initiatives.
JUST Board Member Dan Hesse interviews Ambassador John Negroponte as he shares life and business lessons from four decades of diplomacy.
Fortune examines how the AI data center revolution is happening in people’s backyards, as major server farms are being installed in the same areas where enormous shipping warehouses were erected over the past two decades.
Fast Company sits down with four CEOs of publicly traded companies to hear their vastly different ideas of how AI will impact their business and their workers.
The New York Times takes a closer look at the growing trend of CEOS staying longer than a decade at their company and the hidden downsides–like becoming more risk-averse–this can have on corporations.
Impact Alpha covers the latest report by WORC (Workforce & Organizational Research Center), “Thinking Beyond the C-Suite Pays Off”, which examines the role of human capital management in value creation at private equity firms with more than $5 billion in assets.
Fortune chronicles the uphill battle facing Nasdaq’s diversity rule, where every company listed must list and meet certain representational quotes in the boardroom, and why its greatest legal challenges are coming up.
Fast Company explains why, on average, most workers want a boring boss.
This chart comes from Axios, and shows the stock market hitting a new record high, something almost unthinkable two years ago, despite general economic pessimism from workers and a divisive election later this year. Learn more inside.
