Goldman Names the 53 Stocks Best Positioned to Cash In on AI Productivity, and CoStar Tops the List

How Goldman Built the List

The screen hunts for Russell 1000 companies with two traits: high labor intensity and high exposure to AI automation.

Each company is ranked within its sector on two measures. The first is labor costs as a share of sales, the bigger the wage bill relative to revenue, the more there is to save. The second is the share of that wage bill exposed to AI automation, based on occupation-level data from Revelio.

To make the cut, a stock had to rank in the top half of its sector on both measures and mention AI in the context of productivity or efficiency on either its Q2 or Q1 earnings call. Goldman excluded companies already in its AI infrastructure basket and those in its AI disruption-risk basket, so these are neither the sellers of AI picks and shovels nor the businesses AI threatens to eat.

The Top of the Table

The highest-ranked names by average sector percentile:

• CoStar Group (CSGP): 37% of wage bill exposed to AI, labor costs at 31% of sales, 97% average rank
• Dollar Tree (DLTR): 34% exposed, 13% labor costs, 89%
• eBay (EBAY): 38% exposed, 20% labor costs, 89%
• Arthur J. Gallagher (AJG): 40% exposed, 31% labor costs, 89%
• Brown & Brown (BRO): 40% exposed, 29% labor costs, 88%
• Axon Enterprise (AXON): 36% exposed, 31% labor costs, 87%
• Trade Desk (TTD): 38% exposed, 29% labor costs, 86%
• CMS Energy (CMS): 34% exposed, 18% labor costs, 86%
• Jacobs Solutions (J): 35% exposed, 31% labor costs, 85%
• Edison International (EIX): 35% exposed, 16% labor costs, 84%

The Insurance Broker Cluster

One pattern jumps out: insurance brokers and benefits consultants dominate the upper ranks. Arthur J. Gallagher, Brown & Brown, Aon, Marsh & McLennan and Willis Towers Watson all appear high on the list, each with roughly 39% to 40% of their wage bill exposed to AI automation and labor costs approaching a third of sales.

The logic is straightforward. These are paperwork-heavy, people-heavy businesses built on tasks AI handles well: processing, comparing, drafting and analyzing.

Household Names in the Mix

The basket runs far beyond finance. Consumer giants PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Kimberly-Clark and Clorox make the list, alongside retailers Target, Lowe's and Dollar Tree. Defense contractors RTX, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and L3Harris qualify too, as do travel platforms Airbnb and Expedia, and financial names Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab and Capital One.

Moderna stands out for a different reason: its labor costs run at 54% of sales, the highest ratio in the basket, making any AI-driven efficiency gain disproportionately valuable.

The Catch: Talk Is Still Cheap

Goldman's own earnings-season data explains why this remains a watch list rather than a victory lap. In Q2, 65% of S&P 500 companies mentioned AI and 46% discussed it in the context of productivity or efficiency. But only 11% quantified the impact on a specific use case, and just 2% quantified the impact on earnings.

The companies in the basket have discussed AI productivity initiatives on earnings calls but have not yet shown a meaningful earnings trajectory from AI adoption. That gap is why investors remain focused more heavily on AI infrastructure beneficiaries, the companies selling the compute, rather than the ones promising to save money with it.

What Comes Next

The basket amounts to a bet on the next phase of the AI trade: the moment savings stop being a talking point and start showing up in margins. Watch the coming earnings seasons for which of these 53 companies move from mentioning AI productivity to measuring it. The first ones to put hard numbers on the savings will separate themselves from a list where, for now, everyone is still talking.