How Pre-Distribution Can Shape a Fairer AI Economy
By Elkin Hoyos
June 02, 2026
Right now, inside companies across every sector, decisions are being made that will shape how AI impacts inequality. Who gets trained, how productivity gains are shared, and whether workers have a stake in what they build are being determined before any policy framework exists. By the time policy catches up, the pattern may already be set.
That is the problem pre-distribution is designed to solve — and it sits at the heart of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism’s Framework for building a more equitable and resilient economy.
| What is pre-distribution and how does it align with Inclusive Capitalism? |
There are two fundamentally different ways to address economic inequality: after the fact, or at the source.
Redistribution reallocates income after the fact through taxes, transfers, and social programs. It plays a critical role in reducing hardship and stabilizing economies; however, it operates downstream after value has already been unevenly distributed. And because it depends on political will, it remains contested and subject to reversal.
Pre-distribution works differently. It is how income and wealth are distributed in the first place, before government redistribution even enters the picture. If Thomas Piketty diagnosed the problem — in his seminal Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that capital tends to accumulate faster than economies grow, concentrating wealth over time — pre-distribution points to where intervention can actually happen: at the level of market design.
This is where the Council’s Framework for Inclusive Capitalism is focused. Its three pillars — creating opportunity, expanding the workforce, and enabling fair gainsharing — map to the core questions, and tradeoffs, of economic life: how productivity and value are created, who participates in that creation, and how the ensuing gains are shared. Pre-distribution, embedded in how markets function, is more durable within the control of business than ex-post redistribution.
For business leaders, the implication is clear: Inclusive Capitalism is not just about outcomes. It is about how those outcomes are produced. The levers that determine them — wages, training, ownership, workforce design — are already in corporate hands.
| Why AI makes pre-distribution urgent |
| Task completion speed gain 56% Developers using AI assistance (GitHub Copilot study) | Productivity vs. pay growth since 1979 2.7× Faster than typical worker compensation (EPI) | Jobs disrupted by 2030 22% World Economic Forum estimate |
Artificial intelligence is compressing the window between value creation and concentration even more. In software development alone, developers using AI assistance completed tasks up to 56% faster in a controlled study of GitHub Copilot — a signal of the productivity gains now moving through the broader economy. Absent deliberate action, those gains risk disproportionately accruing to capital owners and high-skilled workers, reinforcing existing imbalances.
Companies deploying AI today are making choices about training, compensation, ownership, and worker voice that will define the next labor market. Where regulation has not yet caught up, those choices risk becoming standard practice, established by the companies willing to move first, reinforced by investor expectations, and adopted by peers who follow.
Pre-distribution calls on companies to make those choices deliberately, in alignment with the principles of Inclusive Capitalism. Companies must design systems where productivity gains translate into broader opportunity and shared prosperity, before the pattern is set.
| What does pre-distribution look like in an AI economy? |
Pre-distribution encompasses many approaches: from universal basic income and employee ownership to models which give workers seats on corporate boards. Here we focus on the business decisions and corporate practices that align directly with the Council’s Framework for Inclusive Capitalism:
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Pillar 1
Job Opportunity
Worker opportunity means not creating new jobs, but also advancing job pathways amid the displacement which technological change can bring. In an AI economy, that means ensuring AI creates pathways forward rather than dead ends. The Council’s framework is clear: technological change does not have to lead to worker displacement. That outcome requires deliberate choices and the window to make them is narrowing.
Pre-distribution shows up here through workforce investment: training workers before displacement, not after. JPMorgan Chase’s $350 million workforce investment — framed by CEO Jamie Dimon as preparation for an AI-driven economy — signals that leading companies are beginning to treat workforce development as a continuity strategy, not a compliance exercise. The open question is whether this becomes a structural norm or remains a differentiator for a small number of large employers. |
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Pillar 2
Expanding the Workforce
Complementary to creating opportunity, this pillar focuses on broadening participation and reducing barriers to mobility, particularly for low-wage workers and those most at risk of being left behind by the AI transition. Pre-distribution takes shape here through investing in access for those currently outside the system and ensuring that the skills workers gain are ones they own.
Bank of America’s $40 million workforce development investment in 2025 is an example of what this looks like in practice. The bank partnered with more than 100 universities, community colleges, and 600 nonprofit organizations to connect approximately 86,400 individuals to livable-wage jobs and upskill 265,000 people. The bank’s skills-first hiring approach and community partnerships are designed to close skills gaps in regions where workforce demand is highest, from healthcare to advanced manufacturing to technology. Alongside access, portability also matters. The World Economic Forum estimates that 22% of jobs will be disrupted by 2030, with 170 million new jobs created and 92 million displaced. Transferable certifications and skill records that workers can carry across jobs and employers are a direct expression of the framework’s call for training investments that belong to the worker, not the employer. Unlike employer-specific training, portable credentials have value across broader labor markets, allowing workers to transfer their skills and giving employers greater access to qualified talent. |
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Pillar 3
Enabling Fair Gainsharing
This third pillar is where pre-distribution becomes most visible and most measurable. If AI drives productivity, the question is whether workers share in the gains. Pre-distribution in this pillar includes wage standards that reflect productivity rather than just market clearing rates, profit-sharing, and employee ownership where workers receive a fair share of the value they help create.
According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Productivity–Pay Gap tracker, since 1979 productivity has grown 2.7 times faster than typical worker compensation — a gap that AI has the potential to widen or close depending on the choices companies make now. Research from FCLTGlobal and others suggests that companies with broad equity participation are associated with lower turnover, higher employee wealth accumulation, and stronger long-term performance — including a 20 percent higher likelihood of surviving a recession than comparable firms without employee ownership. |
| What is the business case for Pre-Distribution — and the open questions? |
The Council for Inclusive Capitalism was founded on a straightforward proposition: that business holds both the power and the responsibility to shape a more equitable economy. Pre-distribution is where that proposition becomes operational.
Companies already control the key levers — wages, training budgets, ownership structures, and workforce policies. The Council’s framework provides a clear structure for using those levers to produce more inclusive outcomes. And the case is not just moral. It is economic. Investments in workers — in skills, equity, and opportunity — drive productivity, strengthen resilience, and support long-term growth.
But the harder questions remain live: which levers move fastest, and at what scale? What is the investor’s role? How can employers participate in and benefit from new sectoral models? And what does genuinely good practice look like — versus what merely gets counted?
| Coming up in part two In part two, those are the questions the Council put to ally member Delilah Rothenberg, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Predistribution Initiative, whose organization has spent years building the practitioner tools to answer them. |
