Investors are pricing in a 32.6% AI productivity boost for software engineers

Investors appear to be betting that AI will deliver substantial gains in software engineering productivity, according to economists who used stock market movements to estimate the technology's expected impact. Economists affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) say that between November 2022 and December 2025, "AI increased the market's expected present value of software engineering productivity by the equivalent of a permanent 32.6 percent productivity increase." Alex Blumenfeld (UCB), Jonathon Hazell (LSE), Chen Lian (UCB), and Andreas Schaab (UCB) describe their findings in a National Bureau of Economics Research paper titled "The Macroeconomic Effect of AI: Sizing the Software Engineering Channel." The authors argue that investors have increasingly priced anticipated gains from AI development tools into company valuations since the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022. …