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