Canaries in the Gold Mine: Early Productivity Gains from Artificial Intelligence Creating Organization Capital

Using a new firm-level measure of AI investment based on AI-skilled employment—spanning machine learning through generative and agentic AI—we show that AI investments are associated with productivity growth in recent years, but not over the previous decade. We trace the productivity gains to the accumulation of organization capital that AI helps create: durable firm-specific knowledge acquired through learning-by-doing that enables more efficient production. We build a novel measure of organization capital based…