The consumer surplus from AI

Our research, with Felix Eggers, widens the lens and finds that Americans already enjoyed roughly $97 billion in “consumer surplus” from generative AI tools in 2024 alone. Consumer surplus—the difference between the maximum a consumer is willing to pay for a good or service and its actual price—is a more direct measure of economic well-being than GDP. Generative AI’s $97 billion in consumer surplus dwarfs the roughly $7 billion in U.S. revenue recorded by OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic and Google from their generative AI offerings last year. It doesn’t appear in GDP because most of the benefit accrues to users rather than the companies.

That is from Avinash Collis and Erik Brynjolfsson in the WSJ.