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“What torments of grief you’ve endured from evils that never arrived,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 19^th-century American philosopher and writer. Millions of workers are feeling similar. How many jobs will artificial intelligence destroy? And are we all worrying unnecessarily? 

“The demand for human labor will not go away,” Mohit Joshi, the chief executive of the Indian information technology giant, Tech Mahindra, tells me. The world is entering an era of technology complexity and new business opportunities. The changes are likely to increase demand for ‘humans in the lead’, even though the job specifications will be radically different.  

Joshi has data and historical precedent to back up his assertion. In the 1990s, many companies, spooked by the threat of the Millennium Bug, invested heavily in technology updates as a protective measure. The bug—linked to the New Year date change from the 20^th century to the 21st—never materialized, leading to predictions that tech spending would fall back to 20^th century levels. It went in the opposite direction and the ‘trend to spend’ continued. 

Similar momentum is apparent in 2026 when it comes to the effects of artificial intelligence on workforces. “We think the productivity gains will not result in immediate headcount impacts,” Joshi says. “There is a lot of investment that will need to happen over the next couple of years to drive simplification, modernization and optimization. And, especially on the data side, investment will be required beyond the three to five years that it will take to modernize and simplify systems.” 

“In the best case beyond that, I feel the complexity of organizations will increase dramatically. And, if the AI premise gets realized fully, the economic growth is going to be so much more significant. It should create more opportunity, because you will have a much larger landscape.” 

Read more: AI is capable of remarkable feats. And has the power to kill. Meet one woman warning about the dangers ahead

Elon Musk talks of an era of abundance, ushered in by an applied AI revolution where a robot can do your shopping and energy comes from space. The journalist Ezra Klein has written a book of the same name, Abundance, arguing that governments have a key role to play in ending the age of scarcity. Products and services will change so radically that demand for employees will increase. 

“My own advice to my teams is that there will always be somebody who’s a winner,” Joshi says. “And my sense is that the people who are winning will have a few attributes. The first is that they will be fast, because there’s a gigantic premium for speed. You need to be able to pivot very quickly.” 

“The second is curiosity. And the final thing is, at a time of great change, leaders will need a degree of empathy and kindness to be able to carry teams along with them.” 

The ‘waterfall method’ of change is well known to business leaders—a sequential plan where projects are strictly defined and work is often driven through divisional silos with little opportunity for re-assessment. Most now lean towards the ‘agile method’, a more flexible approach to project management which encourages working between teams across the business. 

How to build AI into the agile process is the key question. “What can you do to drive productivity and efficiency in your business?” Joshi says. “What is it that you should be doing to drive revenue in your business? Because productivity is nice, but revenue is really the most important piece.” 

Return on AI investment is the key metric boards will want to see. “It’s very clear that organizations are going to get a lot flatter,” Joshi says. “You will have people at the top who will have a lot more in terms of span of control. You will have maybe a bulging middle instead of the traditional pyramid that we’ve had.” Employees with five to ten years’ experience will become ever more valuable. 

Not everything is digital. Joshi laughs as we notice that we both write with pens on paper (it helps me think more clearly). He encourages his children to read physical books, with a small pocket-money boost for each one completed. 

“What I tell my kids, almost obsessively, is that the ability to read and write well will never go away. So read as widely as you can early in life, because you will never again get this opportunity of unbroken periods of time where you can read, nor will your memory ever be as good to absorb as much as you can today. Learn to speak and write beautifully, and I think everything else will fall into place.” 

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Good morning. In today’s Fortune:

• Global stock market selloff as Iran war expands to attacks on major gas fields.
• Trump admits he ‘knew nothing’ about Israel attack on Iran site.
• The Marines are coming. Get ready for boots on the ground.
• Inside Iran’s war strategy: Survive and resist.
• China is sitting back to watch the chaos.
• AI: Sales tripled at chipmaker Micron.
• Chart: There is a record number of objects orbiting Earth.
• Women are underrepresented in AI as workers and users.
• Perk watch: Some companies pay private school fees for CEOs’ kids.

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Event platform Posh raised a fresh $37 million to solve one of the quintessential “tarpit” startup ideas: turning the “what are we doing tonight?” group chat into an actual plan.

Founded in 2019 by then‑New York University students Avante Price and Eli Taylor‑Lemire, Posh began as software they built to run their own events after getting cheated by promoters and hitting the limits of Eventbrite. “I was using Eventbrite and other products to manage events, and then realized that the technology components were missing a ton of the capabilities that I needed,” Price told Fortune. That pain point became Posh’s product: a business‑first platform where organizers, not the marketplace, sit at the center.​ The company is already capturing corners of the events industry which is on track to be worth more than $2 trillion by 2028.

Now, the company has raised its $37 million Series B led by FirstMark Capital with Causeway Ventures, Goodwater Capital, Companyon Ventures, and Epic Ventures, Fortune has exclusively learned.

Posh’s model is straightforward: Posh takes about a 10% cut on paid tickets plus a 99‑cent fee per ticket, its primary revenue stream. In 2024, the company generated roughly $10 million in revenue on more than $83 million in ticket sales (the same year it raised $22 million in Series A funding). Today, the business has grown to an estimated $40 million in cumulative revenue, according to Price, processing $350 million in GMV and 25 million tickets since inception, with top organizers generating over $10 million on the platform. “What you have to do is you have to own the transaction first,” Price told Fortune. 

Posh already powers everything from Palm Tree Festival and We Belong Here to brand activations with Lamborghini, Adidas, the NBA, Celsius, HBO, and Complex. The company has also poached talent from Meta, Reddit, Amazon, Hinge, Spotify, Block, and Canva to accomplish its goals. For the first four years, Posh was essentially “Shopify for events,” focused on tooling for nightlife: white‑label pages, SMS CRM, referral kickbacks, linked ticket tiers, and instant payouts. Now, with roughly 50,000 organizers and nearly 8 million users, the center of gravity has shifted toward demand—what Price calls a “Netflix‑style feed” that surfaces parties, activities, food and drink, and other categories based on where your broader social graph is actually going. 

“The solved problem is your core group chat,” he says. “The harder problem is those 10 or 20 people you’d love to catch up with but never text. We’re trying to reintroduce that serendipity.”​

See you tomorrow,

Lily Mae Lazarus
X: @LilyMaeLazarus
Email: lily.lazarus@fortune.com
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Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

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Sunway Healthcare shares rose 28% in their first day of trading, following the company’s 2.9 billion ringgit ($732 million) IPO, the country’s largest in nearly a decade. Shares of the Kuala Lumpur-based hospital operator, previously the healthcare arm of Malaysian conglomerate Sunway Group, closed at 1.85 ringgit on Wednesday, up from the offer price of 1.45 ringgit. The listing is Malaysia’s biggest since 2017’s IPO of Lotte ​Chemical Titan Holdings.

Sunway Group previously said the spin-off will help unlock shareholder value and improve the business’s access to capital markets. In Sunway Healthcare’s IPO prospectus, Sunway described the health business as a “distinct and viable business of its own.”

Sunway Healthcare generated 1.6 billion ringgit ($403 million) in revenue during the first nine months of 2025, a 17.8% year-on-year jump, according to its prospectus. Yet the company’s profits over the same period declined by 22% year-on-year to hit 140 million ringgit ($35.4 million).

Following its IPO, Sunway Healthcare will continue to operate its network of private hospitals, ambulatory care services and ancillary services, with plans to expand to eight hospitals totalling over 3,400 beds by 2032. Sunway Group will also retain majority control of its healthcare offshoot, owning 69.4% of the shares. 

Sunway Group, No. 190 on Fortune’s Southeast Asia 500 list, posted record revenue of 9.8 billion ringgit ($2.5 billion) in 2025, up 24.5% from the year before. The revenue jump was fueled by strong performance across most of its business segments, including property investment and construction.

Malaysia’s greying population

Sunway hopes to tap growing healthcare demand in an aging and wealthier Malaysia. “The outlook for Malaysia’s private healthcare services industry remains positive,” Sunway Group wrote in its Q4 2025 earnings report. “Malaysia has one of the largest middle-income populations in ASEAN, coupled with rising life expectancy and a growing incidence of non-communicable diseases.”

Malaysia has a rapidly aging population, with 14.5% of its population set to be 65 and older by 2040, according to the Malaysian Department of Statistics. Over 2 million Malaysians are living with non-communicable diseases including diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and obesity.

Investors are eager to invest in Malaysia’s healthcare boom. KPJ Healthcare, No. 303 on Fortune’s Southeast Asia 500, hit a record share price of 3.53 ringgit during intraday trading on March 18.

Malaysia’s stock exchange, the Bursa Malaysia, has also been having a blockbuster year. The KLCI Composite Index is up by 14.1% over the past 12 months, and breached a six-year high in mid-January. According to Deloitte, Malaysia had more IPOs than other Southeast Asian markets, with 59 IPOs raising 5.5 billion ringgit ($1.4 billion) in 2025.

The Malaysian ringgit has also risen to its strongest value in five years, propelled by AI optimism and rising energy prices. “The Ringgit should be one of the best performing currencies in Asia this year,” wrote Goldman Sachs strategists in a March 14 research note.

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My oldest daughter starts an internship at Deloitte this year. She’s capable and motivated. She’s also walking into a professional environment that is wildly different from what it was even a few short years ago.

I started my career more than a few short years ago. Back then, success had a simple formula: be the first one in, be the last one out, and always ask for more work. Effort was measured in hours. Visibility was measured in face time. That commitment still matters — I’m not going to tell my daughters that hard work doesn’t matter. But I am going to tell them that hard work alone won’t cut it anymore.

They need to work differently — and so does everyone else.

What working differently actually looks like

From my experience as both a CEO and a father, I’m genuinely impressed by Gen Z’s fluency in digital communication. They text. They message. They send voice notes. That’s very useful when communicating with each other. But it has its limits, even in this hyper-digital moment. Building trusted relationships is more important than ever.

A workplace includes people who came up through email culture, phone call culture, and even memo culture. Every generation connects differently, and each method has its place. My daughters will need to adjust their approach to fit the preferences of the people they work with, rather than expecting everyone else to adapt to them.

I’ve told them this directly: figure out how your manager prefers to communicate — even ask them — then use that method. Figure out how the finance team operates, how the field team talks, how the executives want information delivered. This isn’t about abandoning your style. It’s about building range. Be a communicative chameleon.

Building that range also means building capacity for adaptation. Gen Z’s digital fluency will seem outdated to the generations behind them — and they don’t even have to wait for Gen Alpha to enter the workforce. Things are changing much faster than that. Adaptation isn’t a strategy. It’s the baseline.

Where AI fits in

AI has become one of the most practical tools available for exactly this kind of adaptation — and most people entering the workforce aren’t using it this way yet.

I do this in my own work. Before major presentations, I feed my deck into an LLM and ask how my message might land with different audiences — the board, my direct reports, a customer. It doesn’t do the work for me, but it surfaces perspectives I might not have considered, helping me tailor my communication for maximum impact. If a Fortune 500 CEO is using AI to pressure-test how his message will land before a board meeting, a 22-year-old starting her first job should be doing the same thing.

For someone entering the workforce, this is a practical starting point. You’re walking into rooms — virtual or otherwise — full of people who think differently than you do, communicate differently than you do, and have expectations you haven’t learned yet. AI can help you anticipate how a message will be received before you send it. It can help you build emotional intelligence across departments and age groups — skills that used to take years to develop through experience, trial and error.

The tool is new. The goal isn’t. You’re still trying to connect with people — AI just gives you a way to rehearse before the stakes are real.

There’s no substitute for showing up

AI can help bridge communication gaps, but it’s still just a tool. There are people on both ends of every interaction, and there’s no substitute for human connection at work.

“Showing up” looks different in many companies now, with in-office, remote, and hybrid work physically separating colleagues. But digital elements are facilitators — not replacements. Showing up means more than logging into meetings; it’s about turning your camera on, engaging actively, and looking for ways to add value. True presence, whether virtual or in-person, requires intentional effort to connect, build trust, and participate fully.

My daughters will enter a workforce where building relationships across teams takes deliberate effort. Nobody’s going to bump into them in a hallway and offer career advice. They’ll need to seek it out and cultivate a circle of trusted advisors to help them through every stage of their careers.

The advice I keep coming back to

Early in my career, someone told me: look for ways to take on more than your job description. Don’t wait to be asked. Find the gap and fill it.

That advice hasn’t changed. Work ethic is still the foundation. But outworking your peers today means something different than it did in 1995. It means adapting. It means communicating in ways that land with people who think differently from you. It means using the tools available to sharpen your judgment, not replace it.

My daughters are smart enough to figure most of this out on their own. But the rules of the game have changed fast enough that even people 30 years into their careers are still catching up. The advantage goes to whoever adapts first.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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• In today’s CEO Daily: UL Solutions CEO Jennifer Scanlon talks to Fortune’s Diane Brady on the company’s new UL 3115 standard
• The big leadership story: How to earn $18.4 million without working a single day
• The markets: It’s bad out there
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. For more than 120 years, UL has put its mark on products from tree lights to toaster cords to convey a promise: This won’t kill you. Last week, for the first time, the $3 billion-a-year safety science company issued a new certification for AI-embedded products. As UL Solutions CEO Jennifer Scanlon told me: “Innovation without safety is failure.”

Rarely has there been a technology that’s evolved so fast with so little oversight. (The patchwork of emerging state laws adds to the confusion.) This week, the spotlight is on OpenClaw, the autonomous virtual agent that’s spawned a new craze in China. It got a shout-out from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his developers conference this week, where he announced NemoClaw and declared OpenClaw framework to be “the next ChatGPT.”

Can private-sector safety standards do what Washington has not: provide guardrails to fast-moving technologies with potentially profound consequences? The UL mark already goes on about 22 billion products worldwide every year. This latest standard, UL 3115, evaluates whether an AI-enabled product is safe, robust and well-governed with a “human in control” throughout a product’s lifecycle. “Whether or not there’s government regulation around this, our customers are coming to us because they need broader protections and assurances,” Scanlon told me. “They’re clamoring to have at least a standard that they can adhere to that gives them the confidence in how they’re getting out in front of their customers.”

UL’s expertise is in functional safety. As Scanlon puts it: “When you turn the radio on in your car, you do not want your brakes to slam. So how is that embedded software being tested and proven? They’re embedding AIs in toys. How do we know those toys are safe for kids?”

That’s why UL’s AI Center of Excellence set out to apply its safety protocols to the new world of AI-embedded physical products. “We start with an outline of investigation, which is a precursor to safety. That’s our engineers and scientists working with customers to understand what they’re worried about, what they believe the challenges are—and then we come at it from the scientific perspective, which is: what else should you worry about?”

“In the case of AI‑embedded products, they started thinking about: How transparent is the algorithm? How much bias is built into those algorithms? What’s the veracity of the training data? And if some of that training data is not true, how do you eliminate it from the learning model? And type of human oversight and verification—that essential final check—is in place? What are those processes?”

Thus far, two products have been AI‑certified: Qcells’ Energy Management System, an AI-enabled control engine for data centers, and the Omniconn Platform 4.0, a smart building solution. It’s one part of the puzzle in a world where leaders are trying to match speed with safety.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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If you’re an investor who has notched magnificent returns from the Magnificent 7, it might be time to ask: Is it time to get out? The answer is yes according to Rob Arnott. Arnott is the founder and chairman of Research Affiliates, a firm that oversees strategies for nearly $200 billion index funds and ETFs for the likes of Charles Schwab and Invesco. Overall, his predictions for the markets are grim: He warns that shareholders in U.S. big caps will make one-fifth the returns over the next 10 years they pocketed since 2016, and those meager gains will barely edge the CPI.

But U.S. big tech investors are a in for a special world of hurt, he predicts. When he digs into the difference in prospects between the S&P value and growth contingents, a big gulf emerges. The RA model predicts 4% annual gains in the former and a shockingly puny 1.4% in the latter, meaning the recent champs’s returns will lag inflation by one-percent. Much of the drag, he says, arises from the big valuations, on top of earnings so gigantic they’ll be hard to grow big from here. A major reason we saw that double-digit EPS boom rampage, he avows, “is the stupendous growth in the Mag 7.” Now, he adds, “Valuations for growth stocks are very stretched, driven by the Mag 7. The market’s saying it’s a foregone conclusion they’ll grow earnings like crazy. But to beat the market, they’d need to grow earnings even faster than those lofty expectations.”

Arnott’s especially skeptical of the premium prices awarded by investors expecting fantastic profits from AI. “The companies making money from AI are the ones selling the tools,” he says. “They’re now lending to their own customers so that those customers can keep buying their stuff. And their customers are having a hard time monetizing that equipment.” Arnott related that he’d just used Perplexity to perform an in-depth study of how various tax increases being proposed would affect marginal rates at different income levels, and paid nothing for the service. “These AI providers will figure out how to make money,” he says. “But not as fast as the expectations that are built into their stock prices. It will be a slow build over a long period, meaning returns on these stocks will be much lower than the market’s baked in.”

Here’s his advice: “If you’ve owned the Mag 7, say ‘thank you very much, Mag 7,’ and get out and don’t ride them back down.” Arnott believes that returns will be much bigger outside the U.S. than stateside. For example, RA posits that developed nation, non-U.S. value stocks will provide 7.4% returns going forward, more than twice the expectation from the S&P 500, and that emerging markets value shares will do even better at 7.6%. Arnott concludes that the best strategy is to “first, own no U.S. shares or at least lighten up, and second, own no growth stocks anywhere.”

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As the national debt careens above $39 trillion, the Trump Administration is weighing policy changes that could heap hundreds of billions of dollars onto the growing tally, economists warn.

Earlier this month, a host of Republican lawmakers, led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, sent letters to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urging an executive action to index the agency’s calculation of capital gains taxes to inflation. The change would lower taxable capital gains through an adjustment of the cost basis of an asset to account for inflation. 

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Washington-based fiscal watchdog, warned in a report published on Tuesday that the executive action would slash tax revenue, heaping an additional $170 to $950 billion onto the national debt by 2035, citing data from the Yale Budget Lab.

“The last thing we need is more deficit-financed tax cuts—especially ones enacted by executive fiat,” CRFB president Maya MacGuineas said in a statement. “With debt approaching record levels and interest expenses exceeding $1 trillion a year, we need more revenue, not less.”

Republican lawmakers have advocated for tax breaks on the basis that individuals having more money in their pockets can be used to increasing spending, productivity, and economic growth. Efforts to cut taxes through capital gains indexation have been going on for years, including during President Donald Trump’s first administration, when Cruz introduced a bill in 2018 calling for then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to change regulations around indexing capital gains. Proponents argue adjusting capital gains for inflation prevents investors’ “phantom” gains from being taxed, and that taxing investments should be curtailed to incentivize injecting more money into the economy. 

The winners of capital gains indexation

Investors also have a lot more to gain from indexation today. The Yale Budget Lab noted that in 2018 when legislation around capital gains tax cuts was introduced, the Congressional Budget Office projected $9.5 trillion in taxable capital gains realizations over a ten-year period. Today’s projection has nearly doubled to about $16.5 trillion, driven by the S&P 500 being nearly twice its 2018 value and after years of low pre-pandemic inflation that suppressed cost-basis adjustments. 

These investors also skew wealthy, with more than 90% of stocks owned by the richest 10% of Americans, according to Federal Reserve data. As a result, tax cuts through capital gains indexation are regressive, benefiting the top tier in the K-shaped economy of the rich getting richer as lower-income Americans continue to struggle. The Yale Budget Lab found the top 0.1% by income would see about $350,000 in tax savings from 2026 to 2027, but the bottom two quintiles of income would see no benefit at all.

The drawbacks of the proposed executive action

According to CRFB, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze for the broader economy. The national debt is growing by about $2 trillion per year, with an additional $1 trillion spent on paying interest on that debt. The watchdog said in a report earlier this month that in the next five years, interest on the national debt will exceed GDP growth, hurtling the U.S. into a “debt spiral.” That risk grows as interest rates remain high, making it harder to make a dent in repaying the balance.

Tax revenue is even more crucial following the Supreme Court decision to strike down tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which would have generated $1.7 trillion in revenue through 2036, CRFB argued. 

Elena Patel, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said another argument against indexing capital gains is that while assets would be adjusted for inflation, liabilities and debt would not be. This means an investor could borrow money, deduct nominal interest payments, and invest in an asset with gains indexed to inflation: something that benefits borrowers at the expense of the tax base. 

The one-sided adjustment would be a particular burden on homeowners, most of whom do not pay capital gains tax anyways as a result of existing tax exemptions. A policy indexing capital gains would therefore not be beneficial to the 12 million homeowners taking advantage of this benefit, Patel told Fortune.  

“As a homeowner, I don’t want that, because that means my deduction is eroding over time and worth less and less,” she said.

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The year is 2036. You’re sitting at your office desk—alongside 100 AI agents.

At least, that’s how Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang imagines work could be one day at Nvidia. Speaking at a Q&A session for media at the Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose, the CEO and cofounder said that in a decade, the company could expect to have about 75,000 workers—nearly double the 42,000 currently at the company—all working alongside millions of AI agents.

“In 10 years, we will hopefully have 75,000 employees, as small as possible, as big as necessary. They’re going to be super busy” Huang said to laughter. “Those 75,000 employees will be working with 7.5 million agents.”

That’s a 100-to-1 ratio of agents to humans. Huang’s comments reflect the rapidly growing AI adoption across industries. And companies are increasingly bullish on AI, encouraging employees to dive headfirst into the technology. Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said failure to adopt AI could actually cost workers a promotion. Other executives from companies like OpenTable and Salesforce see AI agents as the future of work.

Huang said those AI agents won’t exactly replace workers. Instead, they’ll be picking up the grunt work human employees don’t need to complete. “They’ll be working around the clock,” he said. “So hopefully our people don’t have to keep up with them.”

Expanding AI agent fleets

AI agents differ from what most people think of as AI, like the chatbot or LLM you turn to to search for a recipe, or to plan your next vacation. AI agents, instead, are software programs that autonomously achieve certain goals set for them by reasoning, planning, and taking actions, rather than simply responding to prompts.

Huang doesn’t foresee this technology solely being used by Nvidia. At the GTC conference, Huang also unveiled an open agent development platform, the Nvidia Agent Toolkit, to help enterprises build and run their own AI agents.

“Claude Code and OpenClaw have sparked the agent inflection point, extending AI beyond generation and reasoning into action,” Huang said in a press release. “Employees will be supercharged by teams of frontier, specialized, and custom-built agents they deploy and manage.” Nvidia notes companies like Adobe, Palantir, and Cisco are already working with Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit to enhance agentic capabilities across their platforms.

A November 2025 McKinsey survey found 62% of organizations were at least experimenting with AI agents (McKinsey itself has about 25,000 AI agents working alongside its 40,000 employees, according to CEO Bob Sternfels). But nearly two-thirds of surveyed companies hadn’t yet begun scaling AI. 

AI agents have recently caught the attention of those both in and outside of Silicon Valley. Entrepreneur Matt Schlicht founded Moltbook, a platform where AI agents could speak with each other without human input, and the results were both captivating and terrifying as agents chatted about everything from productivity to the nature of their existence. Meta recently purchased the platform for an undisclosed sum. And Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI, recently conducted a test with an AI agent, charging it with finding a more efficient way to train a small language model. The agent ran 700 experiments in two days, resulting in 20 optimizations.

Huang is optimistic about the power of AI, and believes agents are a critical building block on the road to solving some of humanity’s most complex questions. “We’re gonna solve some really incredible problems,” he said. “The things that we are thinking about today to solve, 10 years ago nobody would even imagine that [they’re] solvable”

 “We’re thinking about drug discovery like it’s an engineering problem, people are talking about extending lives,” he continued. “We will all feel superhuman.”

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Lamborghini’s wealthiest customers are still buying supercars—but tariffs are taking a quiet toll on the bottom line.

“Being the U.S., by far our biggest market, we could not, let’s say, increase the price [at] the same level as the tariffs were increased, and, at the same time, the market was going down,”  CEO Stephan Winkelmann told Fortune. “So we had less cars sold, and with less margin on those cars to be delivered in the second half of the year.”

The luxury automaker, owned by the Volkswagen Group through Audi, reported its full-year earnings for 2025 on Thursday. Lamborghini saw a new delivery record of 10,747 cars in 2025 and reached $3.7 billion (€3.2 billion) in revenue, a 3.3% year-over-year increase. However, operating income fell to $885 million (€768 million) from a record of $962 million (€835 million) in 2024, and the carmaker had a profitability of 24%, also slightly down from last year.

Winkelmann noted the dip in operating margins was in part a result of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration at the beginning of 2025, which precipitated a price increase for the luxury cars. Lamborghini said last year it would raise prices for its Temerario and Urus models by 7% and for the Revuelto by 10%. Winkelmann indicated Lamborghini would be unable to raise costs more, with the import taxes cutting into profitability as a result.

Tariffs cost the auto industry nearly $35 billion last year, according to an Automotive News analysis, with vehicles from the European Union, such as Lamborghini, hit with a 15% import tax. For luxury automakers, the import taxes have had a range of effects. For Ferrari, customized deliveries helped offset the impact of the levies and lower shipments for some models. In January, Mercedes reported a 19% slump in sales growth in the U.S. and a quarterly sales decrease of 12% year-over-year in part as a result of the tariffs.

Lamborghini also saw a dip in operating income as a result of negative exchange rates and the decision to pivot away from a fully electric Lanzador in favor of a plug-in hybrid model instead, Winkelmann said.

How Lamborghini is navigating tariffs

Lamborghini appears poised to continue navigating tariffs. Last summer, Winkelmann noted that even Lamborghini’s wealthiest customers were reconsidering the timing of their purchases as a result of the tariffs, waiting for import tax levels to become stable.

“Some are waiting because they want to be sure that this is the final number that is going to be in place,” Winkelmann said in an interview with CNBC in August 2025. “Others are fine with it, or we will have negotiations.”

Winkelmann told Fortune tariff uncertainty interrupted between six to eight weeks of shipments for the automaker, but was able to offset some disruptions and order cancellations from customers waiting on the company’s shortlist.

He expected more consistent deliveries in the coming year as tariffs level off. The company was not impacted by tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which were struck down by the Supreme Court last month, so the import taxes have and will remain at about 15%. Winkelmann said he predicts “a new normality” of customers knowing what to expect with tariffs and adjusting to the cars’ new prices.

Lamborghini’s next challenges will be navigating the war in Iran, with conflict in the Middle East threatening the key luxury car market in the area. According to GlobalData, the United Arab Emirates typically sees more than 300,000 vehicle sales annually, with about 20% of those being premium imports.

With a drop in both the U.S. and Chinese markets, and turmoil in the Middle East, Winkelmann said Lamborghini will rely on sustained demand in markets in Europe, as well as Japan and Korea.

“The global economy, all this so far, could not offset the clarity of Lamborghini,” he said.

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In 2023, artificial intelligence was capable of just a fraction of what it has achieved today. ChatGPT had just launched. Distorted AI photos and videos had just started to hit your timeline. The technology was improving, but adoption was slow and productivity gains were a dream away. Today, it’s being rapidly deployed across industries, and that pace has sounded the alarms for workforce researchers.

Professional services company Cognizant (number 217 on the 2026 edition of the Fortune 500) has reassessed its estimate of AI’s impact on the workplace, and the results are starker than before. They’ve updated their original forecast made in 2023—formulated by examining 18,000 tasks and nearly 1,000 jobs from the U.S. Department of Labor occupational data—to find that 93% of jobs could undergo at least some disruption from the technology. And the threat has become existential for a wider range of jobs. The research found that 30% of jobs could face an existential threat from AI, 15 percentage points higher than the initial assessment. In total, the report estimates AI-driven disruption could shift roughly $4.5 trillion in labor from humans to machines.

“We underestimated the impact of the technology,” the report reads. “What we projected might take until 2032 to unfold is happening now before our eyes.”

A growing chorus of business leaders and insiders is sounding the alarm on the looming threat AI poses to the workforce, particularly in white-collar roles. And those predictions are slowly becoming reality as companies—especially tech firms—have started to cut sizable chunks of their workforces, attributing the layoffs to AI. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut nearly half of the company’s workforce thanks to AI automation. Australian-American tech firm Atlassian cut 10% of its workforce to fund AI investments. And now Meta reportedly plans to cut 20% of its roughly 79,000-person workforce, which tech analyst Mark Shmulik warned could lead to “a cascade of hurried pivots, half-formed strategies, and reactive restructuring across the ecosystem” as firms race to remain competitive in the AI era.

“Today—six years ahead of schedule—93% of jobs could be impacted in some way by AI,” the report reads. “The technology, in short, is affecting more jobs, faster, and to a greater extent than we anticipated.”

Beyond white-collar work: manual labor and health care see first signs of disruption

The report found that the current potential for AI disruption extends beyond the professional world. The technology has started to encroach on the once-assumed safe realm of manual-labor tasks. In construction, for example, the technology can now help with interpreting blueprints. And in transportation, it can examine shipments or perform safety inspections.

“Tasks once considered purely manual actually contain embedded cognitive elements that AI can augment,” the report reads. “When those improvements occur across every shift and every site, the gains become transformative.”

In health care, too, AI is already showing signs of disruption, moving from assisting with small tasks to automating complex ones. The study found that the technology has improved diagnostic accuracy and patient care.

AI still has a long way to go before establishing a workforce that’s majority machine and minority human, according to Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank that analyzes the workforce. “Some of these disruptions will take much longer to play out than we assume,” Sigelman told Fortune. “The timeline of disruption will be longer, the nature of the impacts may be more subtle.” 

The study found that while the majority of tasks today are in some way able to be assisted by AI, just 10% are fully automatable. And while the researchers calculated an average exposure score of 39% by industry, several sectors with big workforces, including transportation and construction, are still far off from facing substantial exposure to AI.

But Sigelman adds that while the timeline may differ from Cognizant’s projections, the overall impact on the workforce could be just as significant. He said AI will usher in requirements for a completely different skill set, which can disrupt even some of the most established professionals, potentially requiring significant retraining and upskilling. 

“People who have been in a job for decades may no longer be qualified for the job that has defined their careers.”

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Pikachus at every street corner. Leveling up before getting into the gym. “Pokémon Go to the polls.” You remember this era well: Pokémon Go became a frenzy, with hundreds of millions taking to the streets for their chance to snap up the rare Azelf or special edition Charizard. Now, not only does it seem that Pokémon Go took the world by storm, but it also was using crowdsourced data to map it.

Over the past decade, Pokémon Go players voluntarily submitted photos and short videos of public landmarks, street corners, storefronts, and urban intersections—all coming together to create a dataset that now stands at 30 billion images captured at ground level, across nearly every major city on the planet. Niantic Spatial, the enterprise AI and mapping division spun from Niantic Inc., has spent years converting that trove into something the robotics industry has never seen before: a photorealistic, street-level, continuously updated model of the physical world, built specifically for robots.

That model is now being deployed to navigate Coco Robotics’ roughly 1,000 delivery bot fleet operating in cities across the country and around the world, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Jersey City, and Helsinki, logging millions of miles of deliveries to date. Brian McClendon, Niantic Spatial’s chief technology officer and one of the original creators of Google Earth, explains the data strategy plainly.

“We look at the player data as very high-quality ground training data for other lower-quality datasets,” McClendon told Fortune in a statement. “The long-term philosophy of Niantic Spatial is that we can solve these hard problems of localization, reconstruction, and semantics by using very concentrated places to train models and then use much more broadly available data at lower resolution to be able to localize, visualize, and understand from ‘bad’ data.”

The 30 billion Pokémon Go images aren’t just a map: They are a master key that unlocks the potential of how to create a real-world, real-time map. The player scans teach the model what precision looks like—it’s so precise, in fact, that it can even signal when the input is imperfect. It’s a strategy that positions Niantic Spatial less as a gaming company that pivoted and more as the most ambitious mapping operation ever assembled—one that was funded entirely by its own users’ enthusiasm for catching digital creatures.

Niantic Spatial’s Visual Positioning System, or VPS, solves a problem that has quietly stunted the autonomous delivery industry. GPS, the backbone of most navigation systems, doesn’t fare that well in dense urban environments, where tall buildings interfere with satellite signals. For a delivery robot that needs to drop food at a precise doorstep, being several feet off means unhappy customers complaining their burger is cold—or in their neighbor’s tummy. Instead, the VPS bypasses satellites entirely, comparing live camera feeds from the robot against its vast image database to determine position in real time.

“The model will work in real time, taking in images from the robot and comparing them to both publicly available as well as proprietary datasets we’ve collected to determine the robot’s global position and heading,” a Niantic Spatial spokesperson told Fortune in a statement. The company knew where this tech performs best: “Niantic Spatial’s VPS is particularly resilient in urban canyons where GPS performs badly.”

“Our initial VPS was built using scans that users choose to take in games—but no single source defines the model,” the Niantic Spatial spokesperson said. Player participation was always opt-in: users had to actively choose to submit a short video scan of a specific public landmark. Today, the model increasingly learns from the data Niantic Spatial’s enterprise customers generate themselves. The underlying engine—a large geospatial model, or LGM, trained on billions of posed images and hundreds of millions of real-world scans—powers three capabilities: reconstructing spaces as navigable 3D models, localizing machines within those spaces, and understanding environments semantically. As CEO John Hanke wrote in a recent blog post: “For the past several years, we’ve been building a large geospatial model that acts as a living, breathing map of the world, one that is native to robots and AI.”

For Coco CEO Zach Rash, the problem is with robots’ critical thinking skills (or lack thereof).

“Robots don’t have the same intuition yet as a human, where a human can understand, ‘My GPS isn’t really working, but I understand that’s probably the right place to go,’” Rash told Fortune. “We need the robot to have that sort of intuition.”

“When we go into really dense areas with high rises, that’s where the VPS solution can be really helpful,” Rash said. “Our GPS and our existing solutions might fail in that sort of environment.”

The stakes, he noted, are felt by customers at the very last moment of a delivery: “It is a terrible customer experience if the robot parks in the wrong place waiting to receive that order.”

“It’s very early with [Niantic Spatial], and I think we’re excited to collaborate with such an incredible team on figuring out how we add this toward existing technology to make the service better. VPS is an obvious one,” Rash continued. “They’re very good at doing this. If I can more precisely figure out where to drop off food, my customers will be happy.”

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For decades, the standard formula for financial success was the same: go to college, get a degree, and land a prestigious white-collar job—probably a lawyer, consultant, or investment banker.

But entrepreneur and author Daniel Priestley is sounding the alarm on a major job-market shift. He suggests the traditional hierarchy of labor (white-collar over blue-collar) is actually flipping.

Priestley, founder and CEO of Dent Global, an entrepreneur accelerator, said he’s observed that the nature of the economy is changing so rapidly that he envisions a future in which “plumbers regularly earn more than lawyers,” as blue-collar roles are elevated while professional services face unprecedented disruption from AI. 

“For the last 25 years I’ve been building companies from scratch and I’ve been through the Global Financial Crisis,” Priestley said during a recent appearance on the Diary of a CEO podcast. “But I have never experienced what we’re experiencing right now.”

“I’ve never seen more fear for the disruption that is coming,” he continued. 

He argues we’re witnessing a “swinging pendulum” in which the high value once placed on “white-collar work behind a screen” is moving toward “blue-collar work with your hands.” Other CEOs like Ford’s Jim Farley have sounded a similar alarm, arguing there’s far more demand for blue-collar work than there are people who want to do it.

He’s concerned about staffing AI data centers and factories, which he calls a crisis affecting the “essential economy” of blue-collar workers who make up $12 trillion in U.S. GDP, according to the Aspen Institute. Farley has also said AI could wipe out half of white-collar jobs, instead ushering in mass demand for skilled trades and blue-collar work. 

“There’s more than one way to the American Dream, but our whole education system is focused on four-year [college] education,” Farley said during the Aspen Ideas Festival last summer. “Hiring an entry worker at a tech company has fallen 50% since 2019. Is that really where we want all of our kids to go? Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.” 

Gen Z is already testing the plumber over the lawyer thesis

Over the past couple of years, at least some of Gen Z have started drifting away from the classic desk job path and more toward skilled trades. Enrollment in vocational-focused community colleges climbed 16% in 2023 to its highest level since the National Student Clearinghouse started tracking in 2018. This includes a surge in students studying construction trades, HVAC, and vehicle repairs.

“There’s still a stereotype that getting a university degree guarantees and results in a well-paid job, but I soon realized that isn’t the case,” Emily Shaw, a Gen Z apprentice at British construction company Redrow, told Fortune’s Orianna Rosa Royle. Some have even started their own blue-collar businesses, bringing in six-figure incomes. Another Gen Z electrician interviewed by Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg skipped college because he said he wasn’t a good student, and now makes six figures working a trade instead. 

A Jobber analysis of Labor Department data also projects demand for electricians, plumbers, and HVAC technicians will grow well above the 4% average for all occupations through 2033. 

To be sure, some of Gen Z’s blue-collar pivot is driven by the same AI anxiety Priestley described—and a realization college may not really be worth it anymore. Nearly 80% of Americans have noticed an increased interest in trade careers from young adults, according to a Harris Poll survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults for Intuit Credit Karma.

How fast is change coming?

Priestley—and countless other executives—have warned that change is coming fast. And he said the shift is being accelerated by the “instantaneous” AI rollout. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, which unfolded over decades and required massive infrastructure buildout, change will come much faster in the AI era. 

“The minute an AI learns how to be a lawyer in one place, it can be a lawyer in every place,” he said, because the digital network already exists. A Brookings Institute study published in February 2025 also suggests more than 30% of U.S. workers could see at least 50% of their tasks disrupted by generative AI. A 2023 commentary published by Brookings also said AI will “revolutionize” the practice of law by dramatically increasing efficiency in drafting, research, discovery, and document production, although it doesn’t argue the tech will completely eliminate the need for lawyers.

Meanwhile, blue-collar workers, such as electricians and bricklayers, are experiencing a “blue ocean” of opportunity due to a severe labor shortage. Priestley said the imbalance is due to “market distortion” from government-backed student loans. 

“Lots of young people who should have been plumbers, electricians, and concreers, and brick layers went off and got a master’s degree in mating habits of butterflies or some random degree that doesn’t have a job attached and they end up in [$60,000; $70,000; $80,000] worth of debt to get this degree that no one was asking for,” he said. “That market distortion means that we now don’t have many plumbers and electricians.”

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