Every gold rush has a quiet second act. The prospectors grab the headlines, but the people selling jeans, building railroads, and running the banks often walk away with the money.
Wall Street has spent three years telling one story about technology. Chips, data centers, and power plants got the attention, and the stocks attached to them got the gains.
That spending hasn’t slowed. Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), Meta Platforms (META), Oracle (ORCL), and CoreWeave (CRWV) are on pace to pour about $785 billion into capital projects this year, with the total closing in on $1 trillion in 2027, Moody’s projected, as reported by DatacenterDynamics.
The productivity boom all that money is supposed to buy is much harder to find in the data. Your paycheck, your 401(k), and your employer’s hiring plans are all quietly pricing in a payoff that hasn’t fully arrived.
One of the most powerful people in asset management thinks the market may be reading the wrong scoreboard.
Real productivity gains from artificial intelligence are still to come as companies move past building AI infrastructure and start using it to unlock new revenue and efficiency, Franklin Templeton (BEN) CEO Jenny Johnson said in an Oct. 12 interview with CNBC.
Johnson runs a firm that oversaw about $1.83 trillion in client assets at the end of August, according to Franklin Templeton. When she says the payoff is still ahead, she is talking about where trillions of retirement dollars could flow next.
Jenny Johnson puts a later date on AI’s productivity boom
Her most striking line was about everything else. “AI probably masks so many other technological advances,” Johnson said, CNBC noted.
That’s a telling remark from a CEO whose firm has made early bets on other new technology. Franklin’s OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, launched in 2021, was the first U.S.-registered fund to record share ownership on a public blockchain, according to Franklin Templeton.
Related: AI won’t trigger mass layoffs yet, Fed study says
Johnson has been building toward this argument all year. Companies that “get it right will take off, leaving the others behind,” she said at Davos in January, Bloomberg reported.
Back then, she also noted that market enthusiasm had centered on the picks-and-shovels suppliers. Her Oct. 12 comments suggest the spotlight is about to swing toward the businesses actually using the tools.
Big Tech is on pace to spend about $785 billion on data centers and other capital projects in 2026, according to Moody’s.
Fed survey of nearly 6,000 executives tells a slower story
I wanted to know whether the hard data backs Johnson up, so I went to one of the largest firm-level AI surveys available. The March working paper polled nearly 6,000 CFOs, CEOs, and senior executives across the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Australia, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
The results line up with Johnson’s timeline almost exactly.
- About 70% of firms actively use AI.
- More than 80% of firms report no AI impact on employment or productivity over the past three years.
- Executives expect AI to lift productivity by 1.4% over the next three years.
- U.S. nonfarm business productivity rose 2.2% in the year through the second quarter, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Run the math on that third bullet, and it works out to less than half a percentage point a year. That’s a modest return on a capital program approaching $1 trillion.
The fourth bullet is the more interesting one. My analysis is simple: If eight in 10 companies saw no AI effect on productivity, AI can’t be doing most of the work behind that 2.2% gain.
Cloud and older digital tools are doing the heavy lifting
Johnson has said as much before, crediting cloud computing and earlier digital advances for recent productivity gains rather than AI, according to TheStreet.
I’ve covered payment rails and fintech for years, and the pattern feels familiar. Real-time payments, cloud-based banking cores, and tokenized funds rolled out with far less fanfare than chatbots, yet they changed how money actually moves.
More Artificial Intelligence:
- Bots playing fake AI songs siphoned $8 million from real artists
- AI Is Deciding What You Pay for Groceries — And It Knows You
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has a biblical-level warning about AI
That is the hidden story in Johnson’s comment. AI gets credit for gains that older, less glamorous technology is quietly delivering, while AI’s own payoff sits further out.
Franklin’s own portfolio managers see that delay as an opportunity. AI-driven productivity benefits “may not yet be fully reflected in earnings expectations,” Franklin Templeton portfolio manager Grant Bowers wrote.
Bowers added that the bottleneck is moving from chips to power, cooling and transmission, which can take years to permit and build. That pushes the timeline out further.
What Franklin Templeton’s CEO means for your 401(k)
If you own a broad index fund, you already have a big stake in the AI build-out through the largest tech companies. You are paying for the shovels whether you meant to or not.
What Johnson is describing is the next phase, when the winners are companies that turn AI into lower costs and new revenue. Those could be banks, insurers, retailers, or logistics firms that rarely show up in AI headlines.
A practical check takes five minutes. Pull up your fund’s top 10 holdings and ask how many of them sell AI capacity and how many buy it. If the list leans heavily toward the sellers, you are betting on the first act of this story far more than the second.
The point of the exercise is knowing which half of Johnson’s argument your retirement money is riding on.
The risk cuts the other way, too. Moody’s warned earlier this year of a possible “reassessment of creditworthiness” if hyperscaler profit growth fails to materialize, according to DatacenterDynamics.
The next test arrives in late October, when the biggest spenders report third-quarter results. Watch the capital spending guidance, but watch the customers more closely.
The AI trade so far has rewarded the people building the mine. Johnson is betting the next fortune goes to whoever figures out what to do with the gold.
Related: Franklin Templeton CEO drops 7-word verdict for AI stock investors
