Good morning. Who’s your agent? That’s not a question that most of us who work outside the realm of entertainment are used to hearing. But it’s a question that author and MIT fellow Michael Schrage posed to a group of chief financial officers last week during a dinner that Fortune cohosted with Deloitte and Salesforce in Boston. Schrage was talking, of course, about AI agents, those software programs created to autonomously take action on your behalf and interact with other humans or programs.
The answer from our attendees was mixed: some CFOs had personal AI agents that they deploy to help manage workflow or prepare for, say, quarterly calls. Others are more focused on overseeing how agents are created and deployed through their organizations. And some were holding back to figure out the right guard rails and directives to put in place before unleashing too many of autonomous ‘workers’ throughout their corporations.
It was a timely and thought-provoking conversation for me because it touched on issues that I think every leader has to figure out right now:
The role of the CFO: They’re sometimes cast as the Debbie Downer of the C-suite: the keeper of the coin, Dr. No, the balancer of budgets, controller of costs, and reality check on corporate ambitions. But Deloitte research reinforces that the CFO is actually the enabler and core driver of innovation and the one “anchoring AI initiatives to measurable business outcomes,” as noted in its Tech Trends 2026 report. They have to measure the risk-to-return ratio on AI investments and figure out new ways of valuing the agentic workforce.
The role of the agent: Schrage talked about functional agents that are deployed across a team and personal agents that act on behalf of the individual. The latter may be designed to keep an eye on the former, and the bespoke nature of such agents raises fascinating ethical and legal questions about what happens to them when the human that spawned them moves on to another organization. It’s not a theoretical exercise. I have a digital twin. While it’s, ahem, somewhat simplistic and sycophantic in its current form, it could theoretically be deployed to one day write and speak on my behalf long after I’m gone. So who owns the IP on your digital self?
Corporate norms: If, as Schrage suggests, tomorrow’s leaders could include cyborgs with the intelligence, skills, judgement and authority of their human keepers, how should the work flow, assessment of employees, and corporate design be reimagined to accommodate this? Should super users be allowed to create as many agents as they like? How are costs and compensation calculated? Schrage predicts that “CEOs will be judged as much for their agents as for their hires,” as will other C-suite leaders. Their augmented ability to manage the augmented ability of others will make for very different relationships with coworkers, customers, and the communities they serve.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
Top leadership news
Echoes of a bad deal
GameStop’s proposed eBay takeover echoes the doomed AOL–Time Warner deal: a smaller, shakier buyer using richly-valued stock and heavy debt to overpay for a larger, established earner, writes Fortune’s Shawn Tully. GameStop’s $65 billion, half-cash/half-stock bid would heavily dilute shareholders, add risky leverage, and require an unrealistically high valuation multiple, making value destruction more likely than creating an Amazon rival.
AI shock looks like China shock
Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok argues today’s “AI shock” resembles the China shock: disruptive to workers yet ultimately boosting productivity and creating new industries and jobs. China’s WTO entry devastated U.S. manufacturing employment but raised output; Slok expects AI to similarly shift jobs, not erase them.
S&P 500 could soar to 8,250 this year
Yardeni Research President Ed Yardeni, a Wall Street veteran, hiked his year-end forecast for the S&P 500 to 8,250 from 7,700, making him the most bullish among top Wall Street forecasters: “Our key assumption is that the economy will remain resilient, and so will earnings. That’s been our mantra since we first started writing about the Roaring 2020s during the summer of 2020.”
The markets
S&P 500 futures are flat this morning. The last session closed up 0.84%. The STOXX Europe 600 was down 0.09% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.28% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 0.47%. South Korea’s KOSPI was up 4.32%. China’s CSI 300 was up 1.64%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 0.05%. India’s NIFTY 50 is down 1.49%. Bitcoin was at $81K.
Around the watercooler
How Jeffrey Epstein leveraged a prestigious U.N.-affiliated nonprofit—and the Gates Foundation—to control women and keep them in his orbit by Jessica Mathews
Ted Cruz says the quiet part out loud: Trump accounts are Social Security personal accounts as GOP senator reveals ‘dirty little secret’ by Jason Ma
AI generated identical résumés for a man and a woman: Hers was more likely to be labeled ‘weak,’ while his got a 97% approval rating by Eleanor Pringle
Companies are abandoning ‘peanut butter’ raises as pay-for-performance takes over the workplace in the AI era by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.
