:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-21946227141-ffc08e75d1d6413e89ab4ab18c44f4f1.jpg "How Much Will S&P 500 Companies Benefit From AI Adoption?")
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Key Takeaways
- Morgan Stanley estimates AI adoption could translate into annual net benefits of some $920 billion for S&P 500 companies, though it could take years to achieve and there is substantial risk that the benefits won’t be fully realized.
- AI could address shortfalls in the labor market “rather than killing jobs,” according to Morgan Stanley.
- Wells Fargo economists say the “high-tech” category currently accounts for a modest portion of U.S. manufacturing, but is poised to expand.
Artificial intelligence giveth and taketh away, but it might be more of the former than the latter.
Morgan Stanley estimates the annual net economic benefit in AI adoption alone could lead to roughly $920 billion, or about 28% of S&P 500 estimated consensus pretax earnings for 2026, after implementation costs. That would translate into $13 trillion to $16 trillion in market value creation. The firm’s analysts note, however, that it would take many years to achieve, with substantial risk of companies not realizing the benefits of full adoption.
That economic value creation is expected to come from a mix of cost cutting as well as new revenue and margin generation, Morgan Stanley strategists including Stephen Byrd wrote in the report. The value is expected to come from an almost even split between agentic AI, or software, and embodied AI, human-like robots.
Adoption of new technology, including artificial intelligence, could be a net positive for the job market, contrary to fears of becoming obsolete, or FOBO, per analysts and economists.
Though job displacement is possible, underlying labor market trends point to a glass half full. “Rather than killing jobs, AI might address a shortfall in workers,” the analysts wrote in the report.
Consider comparably impactful technological advances including the adoption of the computer, which in the 1990s led to an influx of jobs for computer scientists and programmers, and the biggest declines for secretaries, bookkeepers, accountants, and auditing clerks, the report said.
Microsoft has applied quantitative analysis to identify jobs that were the most and least exposed to AI, using a dataset of 200,000 anonymized conversations between users and its public generative AI system Bing Copilot. Jobs most exposed to AI involve brains, and those least exposed, brawn.
Spending in new tech taken together—in software; research and development; information processing equipment; and manufacturing facility construction—show business leaders’ prioritizing investments of that ilk more than any other category, Wells Fargo economists wrote in a report published Monday. Analyzing spending solely in equipment also shows firms putting a down payment on a “high-tech future,” allocating more in information processing than transports and industrial equipment, combined, they said.
“This might be just the beginning of a high-tech production boom,” the firm’s economists Shannon Grein and Tim Quinlan wrote. “High-tech currently accounts for just around 3% of domestic manufacturing in the U.S., but capacity looks set to expand amid the evolution in the sorts of factories we’re building in America today.”
