Absorptive capacity and who gains from AI
Absorptive capacity tops the list of growing keywords across the tracked journals, while AI adoption keeps rising. Do firms need prior know-how to profit from AI, so that AI widens the gap between leaders and laggards?
What prompted this#
On the trends page, "absorptive capacity" tops the growing keywords across all journals: 44 papers in July–September 2026 against 22 expected from its earlier share, with growth in both management (21 against 9) and economics (17 against 7). In economics, "artificial intelligence" (26 against 17) and "total factor productivity" (33 against 21) are growing too. Since October 2025, 123 papers carry an absorptive-capacity keyword, but only 11 of them also carry an AI keyword.
Questions#
- Do firms with more R&D, data infrastructure or skilled staff get larger productivity gains from adopting AI?
- Is the binding constraint people (hiring and training) or complementary assets (data and processes)?
- Can subsidies or training programmes narrow the gap?
Data that could help#
- AI adoption from online job postings, and total factor productivity estimated from firm accounts (see the equation ranking).
- R&D spending and patents as measures of absorptive capacity before adoption.
Next step#
Merge AI job postings with firm-level productivity for listed firms and test whether the gain from AI hiring rises with R&D intensity before adoption.