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A war in the Middle East has suddenly made getting a mortgage even more expensive in a U.S. housing market already starved for affordability.

Like any global conflict, its repercussions ripple outward far from the immediate war zone. As KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk illustrated in a recent report, the war has set off a “butterfly effect” across the global economy. 

Now, the war’s disruption in the Strait of Hormuz is being felt by homeowners in towns across the U.S.

The 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose to 6.43% last week. That’s more than 30 basis points higher than at the end of last month—and its highest level since October 2025, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey. The 30-year mortgage rate sits at 6.4% as of Thursday.

Joel Kan, MBA’s vice president and deputy chief economist, said elevated oil prices, driven up by the Iran conflict, and the ensuing shipping crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, are contributing to the rate hike. 

“The threat of higher-for-longer oil prices continued to keep Treasury yields elevated, and mortgage rates finished last week higher,” Kan said in a statement. “Higher mortgage rates, coupled with affordability constraints and economic uncertainty, pushed some potential homebuyers to the sidelines.” 

Since the 30-year mortgage rate is benchmarked to the rate of the 10-year Treasury note, mortgage rates rise when the 10-year Treasury note rises. The 10-year Treasury is up to 4.39%, up from about 3.96% from before the start of the war.

The U.S. housing market was already under pressure

The housing market was already under pressure before the war’s start due to a dire housing shortage and concerns about the job market, especially among younger prospective buyers. Even Zillow’s CEO Jeremy Wacksman said homebuyers shouldn’t expect conditions to improve. 

“We aren’t expecting any relief in the short term,” he told Fortune in a recent interview. “I think it’s just going to take a while.”

The surge is also hitting refinance demand, not just purchases, as higher rates have reversed activity that had briefly improved earlier in the month. The MBA report—a weekly survey of respondents that include mortgage bankers, commercial banks, thrifts, and credit unions—also found refinance applications were down 15%. The Refinance Index, a measure of the volume of mortgage applications for refinancing existing loans, dropped 15% from the prior week.

It’s not just mortgage rates; the war’s impact on energy and other commodities are adding insult to injury to an already faltering U.S. economy. As Swonk noted in her report, higher-for-longer oil prices could hike inflation in the near term. Grocery prices are expected to take a hit. It’s no surprise to car owners across the U.S. that gas prices are off the charts, hitting a national average of just under $4 per gallon, according to AAA. And some economists have even invoked the dreaded S-word: stagflation. 

Uncertainty sidelining potential homebuyers

Potential homebuyers are being spooked by war-driven economic uncertainty, along with other factors, including the emerging threat of an AI-induced job apocalypse. Aside from higher mortgage rates, increased energy costs and stock market volatility associated with the war have caused 1 in 4 Americans to pause big purchases like homes and cars, according to a Redfin report released earlier this month. However, the report also notes that the majority of Americans still remain undeterred by the conflict.

That uncertainty looms in the air on Wall Street as investors try to navigate shifting signals from Washington. President Donald Trump announced Monday the U.S. and Iran had been in talks to end the war, sparking a $1.7 trillion stock market rally, and bringing oil prices briefly below $100 a barrel. But Iran’s foreign minister then said, while messages had been exchanged between the U.S. and Iran, no peace talks have taken place. Today, the price of oil is back up to $105 a barrel, measured using the Brent benchmark, up about $6 in just a day.

A Redfin report released Thursday said the back-and-forth is keeping some homebuyers sidelined.

“Markets are bouncing around this week as investors try to keep up with conflicting messages about the conflict in the Middle East,” the report read. “Stocks and bonds rallied on Monday after the White House said the U.S. and Iran had productive conversations, but it is unclear when the conflict will end.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The rich have been enjoying unprecedented wealth gains, while workers struggle against sluggish wages and a high cost of living. And the gap is especially stark in one of the country’s most billionaire-dense states.

New York is home to 154 billionaires boasting a collective fortune of $975.7 billion, according to a new report from Oxfam America. Thanks to the state’s position as a financial and investing hub, it’s home to many ultra-rich residents, including Mike Bloomberg ($109 billion) and Stephen Schwarzman ($41.9 billion). And their eye-watering net worths are only growing bigger; over the past year, the wealth of the state’s billionaires increased 11.6%, three times greater than the hourly wage of New York’s private-sector workers. The disparity is worsened by the fact that real average hourly earnings in the state’s private sector have largely stagnated and were even slightly lower in 2025 than before the pandemic, the Oxfam report pointed out. 

And at the top of New York’s elite billionaire club, it’s an even steeper drop down to everyone else. The 10 richest New Yorkers gained $42.4 billion over the past year, according to the report. Each of these ultra-rich billionaires gained about $4.2 billion, reeling in about $2 million per hour. Compared to the state’s average private-sector hourly wage of $39.62, it would take a typical worker 82,863 years to earn as much as one of the 10 wealthiest did last year on average. 

However, the growing economic divide in New York shouldn’t be seen as an anomaly; Oxfam notes this phenomenon is taking hold in all corners of the U.S. 

“What we see in New York is consistent with national trends,” Rebecca Riddell, senior policy lead for economic justice at Oxfam America, tells Fortune. “In many ways, we have an economy that’s rigged against working people and in favor of the wealthiest. Past policy choices on issues like tax, corporate power, and workers’ rights have resulted in an economy where the benefits flow upward.”

Why billionaire wealth is skyrocketing in America 

Riddell points to a few key factors in the billionaire wealth boom. 

The wealthiest 0.1% of U.S. households hold around a quarter of all U.S. equities, according to Federal Reserve data, enabling them to grow their fortunes by the billions. Last year, a report from Oxfam revealed that the 10 richest U.S. billionaires—mostly tech founders like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who reeled in big gains from their investments—added $698 billion to their net worths between November 2024 and the same month in 2025. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of the U.S. owned just 1.1% of the exchange. 

Plus, billionaires enjoyed a boost from the Trump administration’s “inequality-fueling” policies, Riddell says. 

Last July, President Trump passed his One Big Beautiful Bill, which entails reducing the tax bill of the top 0.1% of earners in the country. By 2027, it’s expected that the statute will shave $311,000 off the tax costs of the ultra-rich, while the poorest Americans—making less than $15,000 annually—will be forced to pay even more in taxes. Riddell explains that through the president’s bill, support for working-class New Yorkers will be cut, while million-dollar earners will be given around a $52,000 “handout” this year.

To make a meaningful difference for working-class New Yorkers, Riddell advises the state’s policymakers to address the inequality through tax increases on the wealthiest and raise revenue for critical public services. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed a 2% increase on the city income tax rate of households earning over $1 million annually.

Americans are barely scraping by—and are critical of the wealth gap

The U.S. is home to more billionaires than any other country in the world, but the average worker isn’t getting a slice of America’s monumental economic success. 

Moody’s chief economist, Mark Zandi, told Fortune last year that lower-income households are “hanging on by their fingertips financially.” Cost of living is rising, hiring has slowed to a worrying pace, and layoffs are on the rise. The issue has become so dire that it’s fueling a loneliness crisis, with Americans skipping out on social events and postponing their goals to make ends meet. 

“The grip feels more tenuous because no one’s getting hired. You can sustain that for a while, but you can’t sustain that forever. If the layoffs do pick up, that lower-middle-income group is gonna get nailed—and they have no options,” Zandi said in 2025. “They have debt: They have auto debt, they have student loan debt, they may, if they’re lucky, have a mortgage, but they’re gonna struggle, and their world is going to descend into recession pretty quickly.”

And U.S. citizens aren’t blind to the growing divide between the haves and have-nots—they’re critical of extreme wealth. A recent Pew Research survey found that nearly one-in-five Americans think that being a billionaire is “morally wrong,” with Gen Zers leading the outcry. Another 52% of Americans agreed the wealth gap is a very big problem, according to a 2026 report from YouGov, and 59% said the government should step in to reduce wealth inequality. Another 62% of citizens said that the tax rate on billionaires is either much too low (46%) or too low (16%).

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

As fears mount over AI replacing jobs—or workers being outpaced by more AI-savvy peers—standing still has become a liability. For Winston Weinberg, the CEO of AI legal startup Harvey—now valued at $11 billion—that reality isn’t theoretical, it’s how he runs his company. 

“You have to re-earn your position every six months; you need to re-earn your role at Harvey every six months,” Weinberg said on the latest episode of Fortune’s Term Sheet podcast. “It includes me, 100%.”

The mandate isn’t about churn for the sake of it—it’s about survival in an era where innovation is compounding quickly and falling behind can lead to dire consequences. That pressure is especially acute in Silicon Valley, where startups are racing not just against time, but against each other to build the defining AI companies of the next decade. For Harvey, that’s top of mind.

“If you don’t reinvent yourself as a company and as a leader, and whatever your role is at a company right now, fast enough, you will lose,” Weinberg added in the interview with Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle.

Weinberg, a lawyer by training, cofounded Harvey in 2022 alongside Gabriel Pereyra, a former Meta and Google DeepMind AI research scientist. In the company’s early days, the pair notably cold-emailed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—an outreach that eventually helped them secure early access to GPT-4 and backing from the OpenAI Startup Fund. Harvey, which builds AI tools for law firms and in-house legal teams, has also attracted investment from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.

From the beginning, Weinberg said, the company survived depending on more than the technology—it required a culture that could move fast and adapt constantly: “The thing that I care the most about with our culture is decisiveness,” he said. “I think you have to basically build a company that has a culture of making decisions very quickly and being OK to make mistakes.”

Adaptability has been critical to Harvey’s $11 billion scale

That willingness to take risks and learn from them, Weinberg added, has been central to distinguishing Harvey from the influx of AI startups—and to helping it scale into a multi-billion-dollar business.

“The reality is, the folks that I have found that haven’t scaled—and when I myself think that I’m not scaling—it’s because I haven’t learned enough in the past couple of months,” he added.

So, when evaluating hires or emerging leaders, Weinberg looks for people who can grow quickly with the company—those who can go from managing no one to leading teams of 20, 50, or even 100.

“The main thing I look at is, can they make decisions, own that decision, and then pivot when they make a mistake?” he said. “Instead of penalizing the mistake, penalize not making the decision or not learning from that mistake going forward.”

A need for constant reinvention and learning is something other top executives have long echoed.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet told Fortune last year that AI is creating a need to fundamentally change business processes.

“In order to capture the opportunity with AI, you really have to be willing to rewire your company,” Sweet said on the inaugural episode of the Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. “Many times, when clients are saying, ’ We’re not getting a lot out of AI, it’s because they’re trying to apply it to how they operate today.”

Sweet stressed that adapting to AI isn’t a one-time shift; it’s an ongoing process.

“This isn’t about using AI on top of what you do today,” Sweet added. “If you’re not significantly changing the way you operate, then you’re not reinventing, and you’re not going to capture the value.”

At Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy has similarly emphasized the importance of continuous learning—especially through experimentation.

“We ask why, and why not, constantly,” Jassy wrote last year in a letter to shareholders. “It helps us deconstruct problems, get to root causes, understand blockers, and unlock doors that might have previously seemed impenetrable.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

At Duolingo, job interviews start the moment a candidate steps into a car.

Luis von Ahn, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of the language-learning app, revealed on Phoebe Gates’ and Sophia Kianni’s The Burnouts podcast how a job candidate treats their driver from the airport to the office can make or break their chances of getting hired—regardless of how impressive their résumé looks or how much they like the candidate in the interview process.

Entrepreneur von Ahn, who cofounded Duolingo in 2011 with Severin Hacker, recalled a time when the company had been seeking a chief financial officer “for like a year.” The candidate had a strong résumé and the entire hiring committee “really liked,” he told The Burnouts in a February interview. 

But “it turned out that they were pretty mean to their driver from the airport to the office,” von Ahn said. “And that made us not hire them.” 

The CEO of Duolingo, which has a market cap of $4.65 billion, knew this because he pays taxi drivers to evaluate whether candidates are worth hiring. 

“Our belief is if they’re going to be mean to the driver, they’re probably going to be mean to other people, particularly people under them,” he said. 

It’s particularly important to Duolingo to hire the right person because of how much the company and von Ahn have leaned into AI. Last April, von Ahn said he was getting rid of contract employees and replacing them with AI. 

“We can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect,” von Ahn wrote in a memo posted to LinkedIn in April 2025. “We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”

While von Ahn’s taxi-driver test is an unconventional interview test, candidates in today’s brutal job market are being evaluated in ways they may not even realize.

A job market where every detail counts

His approach comes at a time when landing a job has never felt more grueling. Hiring in tech has slowed drastically, with job postings down an estimated 36% from pre-2020 levels, according to Indeed’s 2025 Tech Talent Report. Meanwhile, more than 40,000 people working in tech have been laid off so far this year, Layoffs.fyi data shows.

Plus, interview processes have become much longer and more involved. Candidates routinely face five to eight interview rounds, panel presentations, case studies, and personality assessments before receiving an offer. The average time-to-hire in the U.S. is approximately 36 days from job posting to offer, according to research by Alex Benjamin, vice president of talent acquisition at OnPoint Consulting Services.

And on top of that, culture and character evaluations have quietly become a standard part of the process—even when candidates don’t know they’re being assessed.

Other CEOs with unorthodox hiring tactics

Duolingo’s CEO isn’t alone in looking beyond a résumé and interview to look for character signals. 

Trent Innes, the former managing director of accounting platform Xeno, and now chief growth officer at SiteMinder, told The Ventures podcast in an episode published in September 2024 he uses a coffee-cup test to evaluate candidates.

When a job candidate arrives for an interview, the interviewer walks them to the kitchen for a beverage. 

“Then we take that back, have our interview, and one of the things I’m always looking for at the end of the interview is, does the person doing the interview want to take that empty cup back to the kitchen?” Innes said. 

For anyone who leaves their dirty cup behind after the interview and doesn’t offer to take it back to the kitchen, it’s a no-go.

“You can develop skills, you can gain knowledge and experience, but it really does come down to attitude, and the attitude that we talk a lot about is the concept of ‘wash your coffee cup,’” he said.

Even without odd tests, several big-name CEOs are vocal about how important street smarts and attitude are to securing a job. Amazon built its hiring process around its core Leadership Principles, with interviewers trained to probe for red flags, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been outspoken about valuing street smarts and intellectual curiosity over pedigree alone.

“I care how you deal with our tellers, our guards, and our receptionists as much as I care how you deal with CEOs,” Dimon said in a July 2024 interview with LinkedIn. “It’s those 300,000 people that matter, and we have to set up right for everybody.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

If you are watching the chaos unfurling in the Middle East and thinking, “this doesn’t affect me,” that might be because you live on the West Coast or in a large Northeastern metropolitan area.

Where you live determines the impact the war in Iran has on your personal finances, according to an analysis by Oxford Economics.

Since the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran, the economic fallout has included rising oil prices and volatility in equity markets. Oil prices are of particular note because consumers feel the pinch at the gas pump in an environment where they are already sensitive to further pressures on affordability.

Oil prices have increased because Iran borders the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway in the Persian Gulf through which exports from the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq all flow. Some 20 million barrels of oil typically flow through the strait every day, about 20% of the global oil supply. Iran has said it controls the strait, littering it with mines, and ship captains are too nervous to enter the waterway, choking off global supply and sending prices spiralling.

However, other pockets of the economy are also impacted by disruption in the strait: fertilisers are a by-product of gas production, driving inflation in agriculture costs. There’s only a certain margin of costs that producers can absorb before they need to pass it on, with consumers ultimately footing the bill in another very visible way. Additionally, higher gas prices aren’t just borne by consumers but businesses as well: Transportation costs for farm equipment, commercial shipping, trucking, and delivery services have also increased as a result of the disruption.

The conflict in Iran, and the increase in oil prices as a result, have a “disproportionate” impact on low-income households because they spend a larger portion of their budgets on fuel, food, and utilities—the prices of which have increased because of the war, according to Barbara Denham of Oxford Economics.

“Metros where households spend the highest share on these commodities are largely in the South, in West Virginia, or scattered across the Midwest,” Denham noted. “Most are relatively small.”

Families living in Jackson, Hattiesburg, and Gulfport (MS), St. Joseph (MO), and Des Moines (IA) are among those feeling the sharpest end of the increases, the report added, as households in these metros spend an average of 16% of their total budget on groceries, fuel, and utilities. Unsurprisingly, these areas also have high levels of low-income households earning less than $35,000, and tend to be smaller and more remote locations.

The extent of the damage to household finances resulting from increases in oil prices depends not only on how long the conflict continues and how it is resolved, but also on how quickly trade routes reopen. A matter of weeks ago Wolfe Research chief economist Stephanie Roth said “food-at-home” inflation might rise by roughly 2 percentage points, adding about 0.15 percentage points to headline inflation.

An update this week from Britain’s IGD (Institute of Grocery Distribution) suggested food inflation could increase from the country’s current rate of 3.6% to over 8% by June.

At the other end of the spectrum, West Coast, and Northeastern metros spend less of their overall budget on groceries, utilities, and fuel—families in Seattle, Ithaca (NY), Lakeland (FL), Vineland (NJ), and Phoenix spend approximately 11% or less of their total budget on these three costs.

“While we believe that higher energy prices should have more of an impact on headline inflation than on growth, at least over the short term, the psychological impact of both the war and soaring gas prices is already registering on consumer sentiment surveys,” noted Denham. “We still forecast positive consumer spending growth of 1.9% this year … but we have lowered our GDP growth forecast from 2.8% to 2.4% due to the impact of higher oil prices and uncertainty weighing on consumer spending.”

A bump for some

While a bump in oil prices isn’t the most welcome news for consumers, it’s a silver lining for the oil drilling and gas mining sector. In 2020, the U.S. became a net exporter of petroleum for the first time since at least the 1940s, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Therefore, certain areas—and a handful of states—will see an upward tick in growth courtesy of the new supply and demand equilibrium. More than half of drilling GDP is generated, unsurprisingly, in non-metro counties: The Permian Basin in West Texas (which also includes counties in New Mexico) accounts for 35% of total mining and drilling GDP and 12% of those jobs.

“While we forecast that mining GDP will increase marginally in these counties, the impact on job growth will be more muted as firms can ramp up production in the short run,” Denham added.

Areas heavily involved in the refinery process also stand to gain, observed Denham: “The refined oil sector will also see a short-term uplift in GDP due to the jolt to oil prices. Refineries differ somewhat from drilling in that they are partly concentrated in Texas (Houston, Beaumont, Corpus Christi, and Dallas) but also have a large presence in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Bellingham (WA). Indeed, the top 10 metros account for 50% of refining GDP and a third of the jobs.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The Rounds of 64 and 32 delivered their share of drama, but now that the March Madness Sweet 16 has arrived, the stakes couldn’t be higher for anyone still hoping to win their office pool.

This year, one bracket made it further than most, surviving all the way to the 44th game of the tournament before No. 6 Tennessee’s 79-72 upset of No. 3 Virginia finally ended the run. Out of the roughly 36 million brackets tracked across major online platforms like ESPN, CBS, Yahoo, and others, zero perfect brackets remain. (Office pools are a different story, of course. If you’re still alive in yours, hold tight.)

What’s perhaps more striking than the upsets themselves is what didn’t happen: For the second straight year, there are no mid-major Cinderellas left standing. The Sweet 16 is an all-power-conference affair, a reflection of how NIL and the transfer portal have reshaped the landscape of college basketball.

The third and fourth rounds start Thursday, and while traditional Cinderella stories may be off the table, the Sweet 16 matchups are loaded with intrigue.

When and where do the Sweet 16 games of March Madness 2026 air?

Sweet 16 — Thursday, March 26

• No. 11 Texas vs. No. 2 Purdue, 7:10 p.m. ET on CBS (SAP Center, San Jose, CA)
• No. 9 Iowa vs. No. 4 Nebraska, 7:30 p.m. ET on TBS (Toyota Center, Houston, TX)
• No. 4 Arkansas vs. No. 1 Arizona, 9:45 p.m. ET on CBS (SAP Center, San Jose, CA)
• No. 3 Illinois vs. No. 2 Houston, 10:05 p.m. ET on TBS (Toyota Center, Houston, TX)

Sweet 16 — Friday, March 27

• No. 5 St. John’s vs. No. 1 Duke, 7:10 p.m. ET on CBS (Capital One Arena, Washington, D.C.)
• No. 4 Alabama vs. No. 1 Michigan, 7:35 p.m. ET on TBS (United Center, Chicago, IL)
• No. 3 Michigan State vs. No. 2 UConn, 9:45 p.m. ET on CBS (Capital One Arena, Washington, D.C.)
• No. 6 Tennessee vs. No. 2 Iowa State, 10:10 p.m. ET on TBS (United Center, Chicago, IL)

Elite 8

Sweet 16 winners won’t get much of a break. Regional championships are set for Saturday, March 28, and Sunday, March 29, airing across CBS and TBS.

Final Four

Saturday, April 4: The penultimate games will air on TBS at 6:00 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. ET from Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

National Championship

Monday, April 6: The champion will be decided at 8:30 p.m. ET on TBS from Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

How to watch for free

CBS Sports and Turner Sports show all tournaments across TBS, CBS, TNT, truTV, and their digital platforms, including March Madness Live.

Can I watch March Madness online?

If you have a cable subscription but aren’t near a TV, you can log into TBS.com or the TBS app for games on that network. You’ll need your cable or satellite provider credentials. CBS and Warner Bros. Discovery are also streaming games on their respective platforms.

• Paramount+: CBS’s streaming service; subscriptions start at $8.99 or $13.99/month. They have a deal right now for $2.99 for your first month.
• Max: No free trial; subscriptions start at $10.99/month
• Disney+ bundle: (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+): Starts at $35.99/month; no free trial currently available
• Hulu with Live TV: Three-day free trial; $89.99/month afterward
• YouTube TV: Five-day free trial available; $82.99/month after
• Sling TV: Currently offers an “Orange” plan starting at $4.99 for a one-day, three-day, seven-day, or monthly subscription to watch sports streaming
• Fubo TV: Seven-day free trial; plans start around $73.99/month

NCAA’s own streaming option

March Madness Live will stream every game on the NCAA website and on Apple, Android, Amazon, and Roku devices. You’ll need to log in with your TV provider credentials to access most content, though some free streaming windows are typically offered early in the tournament.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times, a factory worker struggles to keep pace with an ever-accelerating assembly line — until the machine swallows him whole Nearly 90 years later, Wharton professor Eric Bradlow has the image on his mind. The machines are smarter now. The stakes are higher. And according to a sweeping new joint report from Accenture and the Wharton School, the humans running them are falling behind in a way that should alarm every boardroom in America.

There is a lot of breathless talk of autonomous agents reshaping every corner of corporate America, from handling sales calls to writing code to managing supply chains. But the report from the partnership between Accenture’s Global Products practice and Wharton’s AI and Analytics Initiative adds evidence to an emerging, inconvenient pattern: the smarter AI gets, the more it demands of the humans behind it.

“Intelligence may be scalable, but accountability is not,” says the report, titled The Age of Co-Intelligence: How Humans, AI Agents and Robots Are Redefining Value. It’s a sentence that sounds almost simple until you sit with what it means for every boardroom deploying agents by the hundreds. “This asymmetry is critical,” it continues, arguing that as AI removes limits on how much thinking and analysis can be done, humans still have to decide what matters, set strategy, and, importantly, own the outcomes.

The central finding is not that AI is coming for human jobs — it’s that it poses a direct challenge to all the leaders who will have to manage a world of autonomous bots crawling through the white-collar economy. “In a co-intelligent enterprise, leadership does not diminish as AI improves,” the report reads. “It becomes more consequential.”

While the report illustrates hypothetical upsides and doesn’t discuss the downsides of agents run amok, consider single errors rippling through entire systems: one agent’s hallucinated inventory figure causing downstream agents to massively overorder stock, or a customer service agent telling a customer that the problem is fine, and solved, when it isn’t and a human isn’t taking the lead. James Crowley, Accenture’s Global Products Industry Practices Chair and a co-author of the report, told Fortune that “we like to say humans in the lead, not in the loop.” If humans aren’t consciously taking the lead, errors can multiply at scale.

The numbers underneath that claim are staggering. Analyzing task-level data across 18 industries using ONET and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Accenture researchers found that more than 50% of working hours across the American economy are now in play — subject to reshaping by about 60 digital and physical AI agents considered in the study. This is a truly massive data set, corresponding to more than 120 million workers across the 18 industries studied. In banking and capital markets, Wharton and Accenture estimated that the share of hours impacted by digital agents alone exceeds 45%.

A mass redeployment of labor

For a $60 billion company — a real client modeled in the report — the researchers estimated approximately $6 billion in potential annual revenue growth from deploying agentic AI at full maturity, alongside $1.7 billion in annual productivity gains. The catch: by 2028, roughly one-third of those productivity gains showed up not as direct cost savings, but as “capacity freed” — hours that need to be deliberately redirected toward higher-value work, or they simply evaporate.

“Productivity becomes growth only through redeployment,” the report warns. “Unless leaders deliberately redeploy that capacity toward higher-value work, productivity gains stall at efficiency and fail to translate into growth.”

Crowley told Fortune that the failure mode isn’t deploying too many agents — it’s failing to think about them as a coherent workforce rather than a collection of one-off experiments. “Everyone’s building an agent here, an agent there, sometimes thousands,” Crowley said. “What we tried to do is step back and look at what the agentic landscape will look like at an enterprise level.”

That enterprise view is where the accountability problem bites hardest. AI agents are already spreading “rapidly across the enterprise value chain, often ahead of formal strategy and governance,” the report notes, with nearly three-quarters of knowledge workers now using AI — frequently through unsanctioned, bring-your-own tools, a phenomenon sometimes called “shadow AI.” By 2028, roughly a third of enterprise applications are expected to embed agentic capabilities. And yet the report makes clear that governance architecture has not kept pace.

From a tech CEO’s perspective, this report rings true. Andrey Khusid, CEO of Miro, the $17.5 billion productivity startup that made headlines for deciding to leave Russia amid the outbreak of the Ukraine War, recently sat down with Fortune for a chat about the state of things. Miro’s main app a productivity software that dates back over a decade and it’s now embedding AI. “For almost 15 years, it was human-to-human collaboration [on Miro],” he agreed. “But then agent-to-AI happened. And now a lot of collaboration happens between humans and agents together.”

By bringing agents onto the platform, Khusid said his company is allowing users to “deliver work in an agentic way.” This is more complex than human-to-human work, he said. “It’s way more powerful and way faster time-to-value. Because before you would need to have a human with this expertise or that expertise … With agents, you can have the whole team working by your side with different expertise.”

Still, it’s extremely important to recognize that agents can be error-prone, just as humans can, and “a lot of this now-agentic delivery is a black box.” Miro is working to unpack that default opacity so that it can correct agents when they err in the wrong direction. Acknowledging that it looks like “an agentic revolution,” he added, “We’re at the very beginning.”

Bradlow and Crowley conceded that agents can be error-prone, even hallucinatory, and, on a mass scale, that could lead to widespread errors. “Here’s the thing,” Bradlow said, citing his years of expertise as a mathematician and data scientist at heart, and urging us to understand agents as fundamentally non-human in their decision-making. “Agents are built on the premise of what’s called reinforcement learning, which means good outcomes as programmed by the human who determines the objective function. When agents get bad outcomes, they change their assignment. They change what they do. It’s not as obvious humans learn that same way.” When an agent makes a mistake, he explained, you can tell it what to reinforce, and it shouldn’t make that mistake again. Which makes Khusid’s point about opening the black box all the more important.

Modern Times and the Weakest Link

Bradlow, who chairs the Wharton marketing department, told Fortune that it reminded him of several images from television and film. “This will expose the weakest link in an organization,” he said, recalling the British game show that was one of the most successful in BBC history, where the host eliminated players by saying, coldly: “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.”

He said it also reminded him of famous images of Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball, where the comedy legends struggled to keep up with ever-accelerating assembly lines. In the classic episode “Job Switching,” Ball ended up stuffing her mouth with chocolates as they sped by her at relentless speed

Chaplin’s famous scene in Modern Times was a bit grislier, ending with him getting sucked into the conveyor belt itself. It was also an iconic image that captured the early days of 20th-century capitalism. If one worker in a 20-step process adopts AI and triples their throughput while the next worker is still running on Excel, the bottleneck doesn’t disappear, he said — it just moves. “Efficiency gains happening here but not here,” he said, “will be exacerbated, and you will see it quickly.”

The governance stakes are highest, the report found in one case study, precisely where the revenue opportunity is largest: Sales. A function combining massive decision volume, high digital agent suitability, and elevated commercial risk — customer interactions, pricing, commercial judgment — sales is simultaneously the top candidate for early agent deployment and, as the report calls it, “a governance-critical domain where trust, accountability, and human oversight must be deliberately designed.”

That word — deliberately — recurs throughout the 40-page report like a drumbeat. Leaders cannot simply enable agents and wait for value to emerge. They must set explicit P&L targets, build human-led operating models, and assign clear decision rights before agents go live. The report goes so far as to suggest organizations may need a new executive role: a Chief Agentic Resources Officer.

“We spend so much time on the productivity aspect of the story,” Crowley said. “The gains on the revenue side are going to eventually dwarf the gains on the efficiency and productivity side.” Most companies have been very focused on the efficiency and productivity opportunities with advanced AI, he said, adding that he thinks now is the right time to make this an “and” story as the revenue potential is there and could be far larger.  

Bradlow agreed that was a major takeaway for him as well, citing remarks he heard at an executive breakfast roundtable that Wharton and Accenture co-hosted at Nvidia’s GTC conference earlier in March. “The gains on the revenue side are going to eventually dwarf the gains on the efficiency and productivity side … it’s corporations, entities, people doing things they just could not do before. And companies launching new types of products they just could not imagine doing before.”

But that growth prize comes with a human price tag. The more intelligence you scale, the more accountable — and irreplaceable — your human leaders become. The agents can reason, execute, and coordinate. What they cannot do is own the outcome. In a badly designed agentic enterprise, one human could suddenly find themselves responsible for an exponential cascade of outcomes they never saw coming. It suggests that the phrase “modern times” means exactly what it did in Chaplin’s time: you have to master the machine, or you could be ground up in its gears.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com