Eforts to change behaviors should look beyond simply targeting leaders to consider the structure of the social circles around the leader.
The study, a
National Bureau of Economics Research working paper, is coauthored by Nicola Borri, associate professor of finance at Luiss University in Italy, and Yukun Liu, associate professor of finance at the University of Rochester.
Yale’s Data-Intensive Social Science Center supported the researchers in licensing and managing the OpenRouter dataset.
For their analysis, the researchers created what they call the “AI Factor,” a weekly measure of growth in worldwide AI consumption. Then they looked at which companies’ stock prices tend to rise as AI usage increases. The analysis showed that those companies generally earned higher future stock returns than companies with lower exposure to AI consumption, which is the “AI Premium.” Beyond the tech sector, they found that the retail and consumer durables industries benefit from the exposure as well as companies with large physical assets, such as manufacturers.
(In this context, “exposure” is a measure of market expectations. It means that investors expect companies to benefit from increased productivity caused by AI adoption, not that those companies are directly benefitting from AI today.)
The study found that the beneficiaries of the AI “premium” are most concentrated in the United States, Europe, and other developed markets where investors and companies are deeply connected with leading-edge AI development, infrastructure, and construction. It is less pronounced in China and other emerging markets (defined as countries whose economies are transitioning from developing to developed status).
“The equity markets now reward the proximity of companies to the most frontier models in the United State and Europe,” Liu said.
The study also showed that investors value intensive AI consumption that involves proprietary, advanced models, experienced users and paying customers, and longer, sophisticated prompts over people casually experimenting with free or open-source models.
“Despite the widespread and fast adoption of AI tools by everyday users, the AI premium is mostly determined by the exposure to the frontier AI consumption by sophisticated and professional users,” Borri said.
The researchers combined stock market data, government labor data, and the data on AI consumption to gain insights into how AI’s continuing emergence will affect workers across fields and industries.
They found that occupations involving non-routine tasks — such as persuasion, teaching, communication, and interaction with people — have more positive exposure to AI consumption compared to occupations that involve routine work, such as jobs in health care and those that involve scientific analysis and other kinds of analytical work. This means that investors believe that AI will create greater economic opportunity in jobs that feature communication and coordination over those that involve scientific analysis, the researchers noted.
“Our analysis suggests that interactive job skills will be rewarded while analytical skills get penalized with the rise of AI,” Tsyvinski said. “Occupations in science are among the most negatively affected, which may seem surprising. There is a distinction to be made here between more routine lab work and the kind of cutting-edge scientific research that occurs at major research universities. It is the routine work that our analysis indicates will be most affected by AI.”
The study also showed an increase in the use of what is known agentic AI — systems that don’t just answer questions but can operate autonomously to complete a task — over the period covered by the OpenRouter dataset. In 2024, use of agentic AI models accounted for only a small share of AI consumption. But by 2026, more than half of AI tokens involved agentic systems, according to the study. Additionally, the researchers found early evidence that the exposure of companies to the rise of agentic economy is starting to play an important role in determining their equity market valuations.