Just Capital released the second edition of its monthly National AI Monitor, which asks Americans how they are experiencing AI in their daily lives and what drives positive and negative experiences.
The results show that despite the heightened national dialogue around AI safety, Americans are positive about their experiences with AI on a day-to-day basis, with productivity at work cited as a primary driver. Worries about environmental impacts, the trustworthiness of models, and threats to employment weigh heavily on their outlook for the future, especially among women, lower-income Americans, and older adults.
“There’s an assumption that Americans are against AI, but the people we’re hearing from continue to tell a more hopeful story,” said Just Capital CEO Martin Whittaker. “Americans’ optimism may be one of the most underappreciated signals in the AI conversation today. Leaders who listen closely have a real chance to build public trust.”
Scores are calculated as the percentage of positive responses minus the percentage of negative responses, producing a range from -100 to +100. Changes between September and August were not statistically significant.
Productivity at work
“AI takes care of the structured and logical work; this allows me time for bringing human expertise to bear.” – Male, 59, middle income, very positive respondent on AI at work
“I can do 10x the work I used to do, and can more confidently work in areas I dont have as much experience in.” – Male, 39, upper income, very positive respondent on AI at work
Speed, convenience, and personalization
“As a customer, I think companies’ use of AI makes products and services more convenient and personalised. It helps me get faster customer support, better recommendations, and quicker answers to my questions. At the same time, I am concerned about privacy and want companies to use my personal information responsibly.” – Female, 42, middle income, very positive respondent on AI as a customer
Exposure as an investor
“My 401k is doing pretty well and AI is driving the market.” – Male, 34, lower income, very positive about AI as an investor
Environmental impacts including data centers, water use, electricity use, and grid strain
“Water waste, water pollution, energy waste, the drain on resources of communities too poor to fight back against them.” – Male, 50, upper income, very negative respondent on AI and the environment
Distrust
“I do not trust AI or the makers. I don’t think it can be controlled.” – Female, 65, lower income, very negative respondent on AI overall
Job loss
“It’s very sad to see that AI is quite literally taking people’s jobs and copying people’s content and reusing their face and videos without their knowledge of consent.” – Female, 19, lower income, very negative respondent on AI at work
Attitudes vary considerably by respondent demographics:
The survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Just Capital from September 30 – October 2, 2026 among 1,010 U.S. adults ages 18 and older. The sampling precision of Harris online polls is measured by using a Bayesian credible interval. For this study, the sample data is accurate to within +/- 3.6 percentage points using a 95% confidence level. This credible interval will be wider among subsets of the surveyed population of interest.
Respondents were asked seven questions: one on AI’s overall effect on the respondent to date, one for each of the five stakeholder groups in Just Capital’s framework (workers, customers, communities, the environment, and shareholders), and one forward-looking question on how optimistic respondents are about where AI is headed and how it may affect them. All questions use a five-point scale ranging from “very negative” to “very positive,” with “I don’t know” offered as an additional, non-forced option so that uncertainty is not recorded as a neutral rating. Every question except the final one is followed by an open-ended “why,” which is synthesized to identify what drives responses and to serve as a diagnostic on how effectively companies are deploying AI. Scores are calculated as the percentage of positive responses (“somewhat positive” and “very positive”) minus the percentage of negative responses (“somewhat negative” and “very negative”), producing a range from -100 to +100. “I don’t know” responses are excluded from the calculation rather than counted as neutral.
For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables and subgroup sample sizes, please contact Just Capital.
Americans are clear about what they want from AI. Our latest polling shows they prioritize safety over speed, prevention of harm and deception (especially for vulnerable populations), protecting privacy and personal data, and keeping humans in charge. They also hold deployers of AI just as accountable as the developers.
Business is starting to respond.
This week the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure, a CEO-led coalition, added new members to prepare for AI-powered attacks on banking, technology, energy, telecommunications, and transportation. Citigroup‘s Jane Fraser told Axios that capturing AI’s upside means accepting “the responsibility that comes with it.”
Banks are also fighting AI deception where it hurts most: in people’s accounts. Today the American Bankers Association relaunched its #BanksNeverAskThat and #PracticeSafeChecks campaigns. Banks across the country can use the new videos and materials to help customers spot scams. As the ABA’s Paul Benda told the Senate this summer, generative AI “is not replacing traditional scams. It is industrializing them.”
On innovation, Vertex Pharmaceuticals is using AI to speed up its research and development, and is hiring business talent with quantitative training. Zoom has committed $10 million over three years to AI education and opportunity, with $5 million going to K-12 AI literacy through partners including Code.org.
Commitments like these are still rare. In our corporate disclosure analysis, only 9% of Russell 1000 companies report investing in community AI initiatives. Only 10% disclose a policy that explicitly addresses harm, deception, or manipulation, which is the public’s top priority.
Still, these are incredibly positive actions. We need more of them, and our monthly National AI Monitor, which tracks how ordinary Americans are experiencing AI in their lives, will help us gauge the impacts.
Be well,
Martin
14% of companies disclose a policy or set of principles that specifically mentions keeping humans in charge, human oversight, or maintaining human-in-the-loop.
The Wall Street Journal examines a small Pennsylvania town and explores the varied responses to a tactic companies are using to build local data centers – by offering locals cash payouts.
ABC looks at how the construction boom around AI data centers is so large it’s halting progress on other important construction projects.
OpenAI cancels their latest model update, citing major safety concerns. The Washington Post has the story.
At the same time, The New York Times reveals that OpenAI was previously ignoring employees who warned it wasn’t doing enough for security.
Axios reports on The Alliance for Critical Infrastructure, a recently formed CEO-led coalition that aims to protect critical infrastructure from AI risks.
Yahoo! Finance examines research that shows nearly one-third of Americans cannot pay their bills on time.
The Financial Times looks at how Starbucks’ growth plan is rolling back many of their sustainability promises.
The Century Foundation examines how debt payments have grown since 2022 and are eating away at Americans’ pay.
Conversations around AI safety reached a fever pitch this week. AI leaders shared manifestos, and policymakers are set to meet next week behind closed doors. As always, I found myself asking where the American people stand in the debate. How are they experiencing AI? Are they really as negative as some would have you believe? Is it making their lives better, and what if anything are they afraid of?
This week we launched the National AI Monitor, a unique new research initiative that objectively tracks if-and-how people are feeling the effects of AI in their daily lives. Incorporating quantitative and qualitative responses, it captures how Americans truly see AI today – as workers, customers, community members, investors, and stewards of the environment – and their expectations for the future.
So what did we learn? We see a public that is generally positive about the many ways AI can make their lives more fulfilling and more productive – a headline that runs contrary to recent reports. 57% of Americans say AI positively impacts them at work, compared to just 9% who say it affects them negatively. Positive qualitative responses most commonly cite productivity and quality gains (27%), efficiency and time savings (19%), and automating routine tasks (8%).
Conversely, there is very real anxiety around ensuring AI systems are safe and secure, protecting jobs in their communities, and, most notably, mitigating harm to the environment. On the last point, 23% of Americans say AI is positively impacting the environment, compared to 40% who say it is producing a negative impact.
We also learned that many Americans are not aware of any effects of AI on their economic wellbeing – 42% say it has had no effect on them as an investor. This is key. As I wrote in Forbes this week, capitalism does not survive on efficiency alone. It survives thanks to its social license. If people see the benefits of AI flowing to fewer and fewer people, they’re apt to stop believing in the underlying systems of capitalism and democracy on which AI’s future success depends. That is not a good outcome for anyone.
AI leaders and enterprise deployers should see this as a guide for how to build trust in AI’s future. People don’t want promises and pledges. They want concrete improvements in their daily lives. The National AI Monitor will be the benchmark by which that is measured.
Be well, Martin
56% of Americans say AI is having a positive effect on them right now, 21% say the effect is negative. Explore the rest of the findings here.
The Wall Street Journal reveals that many CEOs believe the AI apocalypse threat is a real problem, and are urging Trump to work with China for a global slowdown on development.
The New York Times looks at how AI is affecting the job market – not through job loss – but through stagnant wages and diminished hiring.
Axios reports that OpenAI has disclosed six new AI safety incidents, revealing that the Hugging Face hack was not an isolated incident.
CEO Daily reveals one of the major themes of Fortune’s latest Leaders Forum is CEO’s calling for businesses to avoid falling into the “efficiency trap” – bolting AI onto existing workflows rather than completely redesigning them.
Fortune released a report that the amount of Amazon workers on food stamps has tripled despite its record revenue.
Forbes reveals that America’s 400 richest people have only donated 4% of their wealth to charity.
Gallup reveals that workers’ fears about being replaced by technology in the near future continue to go up, matching our own polling that shows Americans get more pessimistic on AI as they think about the future.
September 16, 2026 New York, NY – AI innovators have made both bold promises and grave predictions about the ways AI will impact society, while companies continue to deploy the technology at scale and with increasing speed. Current research primarily measures public sentiment about AI in the abstract, which lacks actionable nuance for leaders aiming to understand real-time impacts of AI deployment on society at large.
Just Capital created the new National AI Monitor to consistently track whether and how people are seeing positive or negative effects of AI in their own lives. This monthly study aims to capture how Americans are experiencing AI today – as workers, customers, community members, investors, and stewards of the environment – and their expectations for the future. The study collects both quantitative and qualitative responses to surface the realities behind experience across demographics.
“AI is the most consequential issue of our time,” said Just Capital Founder Paul Tudor Jones II. “Understanding how the American people are experiencing it is critical to building public trust and making more informed decisions on future deployment. This new Monitor from Just Capital is filling that essential need. Leaders across the AI labs, business, markets, government, and civil society can rely on it every month to give an unbiased, objective assessment of whether AI is living up to its promises or taking us down the wrong path.”
Just Capital CEO Martin Whittaker continued, “As always, our goal is to uplift the voice of the American public to help leaders make smarter, more responsible decisions. As frontier labs, corporate leaders, and policymakers work to bridge public trust and technological transformation, this research aims to help them deploy AI in ways that drive innovation and support an economy and society that works for all.”
“In this first edition, we see a general public that is generally positive about the many ways AI can make their lives more fulfilling and more productive,” Whittaker added. “At the same time, there is real concern around ensuring AI systems are safe and secure, protecting jobs in their communities, and, most notably, mitigating harm to the environment. Importantly, most Americans are not aware of any effects of AI on their investments or savings. This all appears to add up to greater skepticism around the impacts of AI on the future. For leaders trying to help Americans see themselves in the future AI-powered economy, this is your roadmap.”
Overall, positive experience outweighs negative.
The greatest positive effect was found in how AI is affecting people at work.
Customer experience is mixed, and the human touch is a top priority.
Many respondents are not sure how AI is impacting their communities to date.
The majority of Americans are not aware of whether they are experiencing financial gains from AI.
The environment was the only lens producing a net negative effect.
Americans are more pessimistic about AI as they think of their future.
The survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Just Capital from August 13-17, 2026 among 1,008 U.S. adults ages 18 and older. The sampling precision of Harris online polls is measured by using a Bayesian credible interval. For this study, the sample data is accurate to within +/- 3.5 percentage points using a 95% confidence level. This credible interval will be wider among subsets of the surveyed population of interest.
Respondents were asked seven questions: one on AI’s overall effect on the respondent to date, one for each of the five stakeholder groups in Just Capital’s framework (workers, customers, communities, the environment, and shareholders), and one forward-looking question on how optimistic respondents are about where AI is headed and how it may affect them. All questions use a five-point scale ranging from “very negative” to “very positive,” with “I don’t know” offered as an additional, non-forced option so that uncertainty is not recorded as a neutral rating. Every question except the final one is followed by an open-ended “why,” which is synthesized to identify what drives responses and to serve as a diagnostic on how effectively companies are deploying AI. Scores are calculated as the percentage of positive responses (“somewhat positive” and “very positive”) minus the percentage of negative responses (“somewhat negative” and “very negative”), producing a range from -100 to +100. “I don’t know” responses are excluded from the calculation rather than counted as neutral.
For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables and subgroup sample sizes, please contact Just Capital.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Evangeline DiMichele: edimichele@justcapital.com
Is public opposition to data centers as uniformly intense as it seems? Our latest polling suggests perhaps not.
It’s a critical issue. The flow of capital into building AI infrastructure is off the charts right now, and it’s fair to say the future of the US economy hinges to a large extent on there being a strong return on this investment. In May, Gallup put local opposition to data centers at 71%, apparently worse than any nuclear plant has ever polled. At that level, it’s hard to see how the AI build out can ever be successful.
Our most recent polling reveals a different picture: 47% opposed, 39% in favor, 13% undecided. Local ‘not in my backyard’ concerns don’t appear to be the main motivator. When we asked how people feel about a data center ten miles away the numbers barely shifted: 49% opposed, 37% in favor.
Interestingly, only 16% want AI development stopped outright. Forty-three percent want it slowed to only use existing data center capacity and 24% are happy to see it continue at full speed. Thirty-four percent of those opposed cite rising electricity and utility bills; 22% reference environmental impact. Perhaps most important of all, 51% of opponents say they could still change their minds. And the thing most likely to move them is direct participation in the upside.
For all those with a stake in seeing the U.S. lead the global AI race, these data points should be encouraging. Show people how they’ll benefit economically, alleviate electricity and environmental pressures, and tie it to initiatives that help tackle kitchen table affordability, employment, health and education concerns, and the path forward for data center developers becomes clearer.
I explore more of our research — and what a modern version of aligned corporate responsiveness could look like — in my latest piece for Forbes.
Be well,
Martin
This newsletter was written mostly by humans with a bit of help from AI.
69% of college students worry AI will make it harder to find a job, per a recent survey of 2,000 U.S. higher education students by Superhuman (formerly Grammarly). Read the full report here.
The Wall Street Journal explains how tech companies have actually spent $3 trillion more dollars on AI than they’re showing on their balance sheets.
Axios looks at how college students are changing their majors to try and find careers that are more insulated from the growth of AI.
Fortune speaks to Dario Amodei on the “crisis of trust” people are having with AI.
New research by Gallup reveals that only half of CHRO’s trust their managers to guide employees through an AI transition.
Harvard Business Review interviews Just Capital Chairman of the Board and current Verizon CEO Dan Schulman on business, the promises and pitfalls of AI, and more.
The AFL-CIO reveals that CEO pay has reached its highest levels ever while worker pay is falling.
Axios investigated new data on how Gen Z is feeling about the economy, the labor market, and more. Read the full piece here.
Companies today are desperately searching for growth, better margins, and market-beating returns, especially amid ongoing AI-driven transformation. Our latest research offers clues where to look.
We scored 767 companies over five years on how they treated their workers, their customers, their communities, their shareholders (on governance factors), and the planet, then evaluated what happened in subsequent years to their revenue growth, margins, and excess returns.
TL;DR: the results suggest that strong stakeholder performance can indeed presage future financial and market performance, but not always. It varies by industry, by stakeholder, and over time. When the connections were statistically significant, positive links beat negative ones by nearly two to one, with strong clusters around the twin goals of revenue growth and alpha.
The key to success at the individual company level appears to be knowing when, how, and where the stakeholder-financial performance connections occur, anticipating future shifts and executing better than others; precisely what the new Financial Opportunity feature in Just Intelligence facilitates. In technology, for example, the firms that invested most in communities, environment, and governance went on to grow fastest.
None of this was a surprise to Jen Huffstetler, Chief Sustainability Officer at HP Inc. — our top-ranked company of 2026 — who joined me for a conversation last week. Culture, trust, and innovation, she argued, are essentials for overall leadership today. At HP, whose stock is up over 30% YTD, culture is grounded in accountability – a feature that can be traced back to the firm’s founders. You can read the full summary of our conversation on LinkedIn.
In a volatile market obsessed with AI-driven growth, profitability and returns, the stakeholder model might offer more value than expected.
Be well,
Martin
P.S. Just Intelligence now contains additional AI-focused insights. Explore them here.
79% of investors feel AI should face significantly more regulation than social media has, alongside 78% of corporate leaders. Explore the data here.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang speaks to Axios about how AI is creating more jobs, pointing to how its use in radiology is creating demand for more radiologists.
Mark Zuckerberg writes an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal outlining his optimistic vision for an AI-driven future.
The New York Times looks at AI companies’ search for more electricians and plumbers for their data center build-outs, and how many are investing in the trades.
Inc. reveals that 55% of leaders regret AI-related layoffs, and more companies are hiring back roles they thought they could do without.
The Wall Street Journal looks at how after-tax wage growth has improved for low-income Americans, but those gains are likely being swallowed by rising gas prices and overall inflation.
Forbes takes a surprising look at why engineering majors are struggling to find jobs at higher-than-expected rates.
More companies than ever are turning to older and retired CEOs when their business is in need of stabilization. The Wall Street Journal has the story.
This chart comes from an Associated Press investigation on how the increase in food prices is affecting U.S. families, showing that prices have risen 33% since 2019.
