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Millions of Americans don’t have enough saved for retirement — and millions more don’t know where to start. With President Trump recently pointing to Australia’s retirement system as a potential U.S. blueprint, this is a rare moment when reform momentum is actually building. Policymakers should seize it.

Consider a young worker starting their first job today. Recent legislation means they’re likely automatically enrolled in a 401(k) from day one — real progress. But fast-forward a few decades: that same worker may have cycled through six employers, accumulated a tangle of small accounts, and still face the question that haunts millions of Americans: Will this be enough?

That story is increasingly the norm. Longer lifespans, less linear careers, a rising cost of living, and tighter government budgets are redefining what retirement security even means. The 2019 SECURE Act and its 2022 successor made meaningful progress — but gaps in longevity protection, savings adequacy, and coverage persist. With 401(k) and 403(b) plans now the backbone of retirement for most Americans, the case for deeper reform is urgent.

The Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index — which benchmarks retirement systems across 50+ markets on adequacy, sustainability, and integrity — makes the problem concrete. The U.S. scores well on integrity but consistently lags on adequacy and sustainability, exactly where reform could have the most immediate impact.

The result: the U.S. sits in the middle of the global rankings while countries like Australia lead the pack. Without reform, more Americans risk reaching retirement without enough income — or the tools to access what they’ve saved.

Where reform is needed most

1. Turn savings into income that lasts

Saving is only half the challenge. The harder problem is converting a 401(k) balance into reliable income that doesn’t run out. Too often, workers change jobs and cash out small accounts rather than rolling them over — permanently shrinking their retirement nest egg.

With the U.S. population over 60 projected to double by 2050, longevity risk isn’t abstract. Simpler rollover processes and clearer disclosures would go a long way toward helping workers preserve their savings — and plan for a retirement that could last 30 years.

2. Close the coverage gaps

Retirement savings in the U.S. remain deeply uneven. Younger workers, part-timers, and caregivers are the most underserved — and many have little visibility into whether they’re on track.

Three targeted fixes could close much of that gap: automatic reenrollment for workers who previously opted out; extending coverage to workers under 21, building on the SECURE Act’s expansion for part-timers; and special catch-up contributions for caregivers who temporarily leave the workforce. Together, these changes would broaden access and reward the workers most likely to fall behind.

3. Modernize investments — and reduce legal risk

In 2025, the President signed an executive order directing regulators to ease restrictions on private market investments in 401(k) plans — following Australia’s long-standing approach. Giving savers access to private equity, venture capital, and digital assets could improve diversification and returns. But many employers are still waiting on clear guidance around fiduciary safe harbors, liquidity, and fees before they act.

Allowing 403(b) plans — which cover millions of government and nonprofit workers — to invest in collective investment trusts, as 401(k) plans already can, would lower costs and broaden access for an underserved segment of the workforce.

Legal risk is also a growing deterrent. Employer-sponsored plans have faced a surge of litigation in recent years, and policymakers should explore targeted ways to deter frivolous lawsuits while keeping legitimate claims viable.

Pensions still matter

Most new retirement savings now flow into 401(k)s and 403(b)s, but a significant share of existing retirement wealth still sits in traditional defined benefit pensions. Modernizing the system can’t mean abandoning what still works.

Lowering Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) premiums would encourage employers to keep sponsoring DB plans. Greater flexibility in deploying surplus DB assets could also benefit both workers and plan sponsors.

Policymakers should also support DB designs that reduce financial volatility for sponsors — such as pooled employer plans, which would make it easier for smaller organizations to offer a pension at all.

The bottom line

Better retirement policy isn’t about winning a global ranking. It’s about ensuring future generations can retire with dignity — even as careers grow less linear and lifespans grow longer.

The reforms outlined here — expanding lifetime income options, closing coverage gaps, modernizing investment rules, reducing legal risk, and strengthening pension protections — would make the U.S. system more resilient and more fair. The window for action is open. Policymakers shouldn’t let it close.

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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Goldman Sachs is sounding a cautious note on the U.S. economy, raising its inflation forecast and trimming its growth outlook in response to surging oil prices caused by disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz. But even as recession risks climb, most of Wall Street’s base case remains slower growth — not an outright downturn.

In its weekly U.S. economics update published on Tuesday, Goldman said it now expects Brent crude to average $105 per barrel in March and $115 in April before retreating to $80 by year-end, assuming roughly six weeks of Hormuz supply disruptions. On the back of that revised oil outlook, the bank raised its headline PCE inflation forecast by 0.2 percentage points to 3.1% by December 2026 and nudged its full-year GDP growth estimate down to 2.1%. Goldman also raised its recession probability by 5 percentage points — to 30% — while stressing that a recession is still not its base case.​

One relative reassurance: Goldman does not expect the oil shock to durably unhinge inflation expectations. Even major energy shocks in recent history did not produce lasting shifts in where consumers and businesses expect prices to settle, the bank noted, though it flagged post-pandemic inflation psychology as a risk worth watching.​

Some analysts see even higher recession odds

Opinions across Wall Street diverge meaningfully, with some offering more dramatic warnings than Goldman about a potential recession. JPMorgan’s Bob Michele has warned the Iran war is not merely an inflation “speed bump,” pushing back on the Fed’s own projections and arguing that price pressures could stay sticky well into the second half of the year. EY-Parthenon puts recession odds at 40%, citing cascading effects on LNG infrastructure and refining systems beyond the oil market itself. Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi has argued that recession odds were near even—before war broke out.

But others see the economy’s glass as considerably more than half full. BNP Paribas argues the U.S. is “well-positioned to absorb the shock,” pointing to America’s status as the world’s largest crude producer and net energy exporter — a structural advantage that simply didn’t exist during the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s. Higher oil prices redistribute income within the U.S. economy rather than draining it abroad, limiting the macro damage. The U.S. also uses significantly less energy per unit of GDP than in prior decades, blunting the inflationary punch that past supply shocks delivered.

The Fed Walks a fine line

The Federal Reserve held its policy rate steady at 3.5%–3.75% at last week’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting — a decision Goldman characterized as “a bit more hawkish than expected”. Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged the inflation risk from oil while placing employment and price concerns on equal footing, signaling that rate cuts remain possible but are not imminent. Goldman still expects two 25-basis-point cuts in September and December, bringing rates to 3–3.25% by year-end, and pushed back on market pricing that has begun to bake in rate hikes.​

The outcome hinges heavily on one variable: how long the Hormuz disruptions last. A swift de-escalation would allow oil risk premiums to fade and limit economic damage to a few tenths of a percentage point of growth. A prolonged conflict, by contrast, would entrench energy costs, crimp consumer spending, and force the Fed into an increasingly uncomfortable corner. Goldman currently puts that worst-case scenario—severe and sustained—as just that: a tail risk, not a forecast.​​

For now, the base case across most of Wall Street is an economy that slows but holds — with inflation running hotter than the Fed would like, growth below its long-run potential, and the next few months of geopolitical news determining which scenario ultimately wins out.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Europe is living through its third energy price shock in four years. In 2022, Russia weaponized its gas pipelines. In 2023–24, conflict in the Red Sea disrupted shipping lanes. Now, war in the Middle East has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Oil has breached $100 a barrel for the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Stock markets are in freefall. European gas prices have surged roughly 70%. Each time the trigger is different. The vulnerability is always the same: Europe runs on fuel it does not own, shipped through waters it does not control.

Wind and solar cannot be embargoed, blockaded, or shut off by a foreign power. Every terawatt-hour of domestic renewable generation is a terawatt-hour that no adversary can weaponize. Unlike the U.S., Europe has no shale gas. Unlike China, it cannot fall back on cheap domestic coal. The only energy Europe can produce at scale, on its own soil, is renewable electricity. Europe must now become the world’s first Electro-Continent.

This is not only about shielding against the next geopolitical shock. It is about building the foundation for the next industrial era.

The AI Race Is an Energy Race

The IEA projects that global data-center electricity consumption will more than double by 2030, reaching roughly 945 terawatt-hours — more than Japan consumes today. The winner of the next industrial revolution will not be the region with the best engineers. It will be the region that can deliver the cheapest, most abundant, fastest-to-deploy power.

Europe is being squeezed from both sides. Industrial electricity prices in the EU are roughly twice those in the U.S. and about 50% higher than in China — a gap that is widening. European founders are already world-class at innovation. But no amount of innovation can overcome a 100% overhead on your primary industrial input.

Both superpowers have understood that energy abundance is a strategic necessity. China invested over $1 trillion in clean energy in 2025. The U.S. enjoys the double advantage of cheap domestic shale gas and the massive capital commitments of Big Tech. As former ECB President Mario Draghi’s landmark competitiveness report made clear, Europe’s industrial base is bleeding out because of energy costs. If Europe wants to host the next generation of €100 billion companies, it must fix the foundation.

Renewables Won the Market. Now Let Them Build.

The good news: renewable energy prices have dropped more than 90% over the past decade. In 2025, over 90% of new renewable capacity was cheaper than the fossil fuel alternative. Clean energy is the cheapest and fastest form of new generation available.

Wind and solar generated more EU electricity than fossil fuels for the first time in 2025. Yet the gas tail still wags the dog. A single dip in wind and hydro output last year forced higher gas burn, pushing the EU’s fossil gas import bill up 16%. Every remaining molecule of gas dependency is a transmission mechanism for the next foreign crisis.

China is becoming the world’s first electro-state — making cheap, domestically produced electricity its primary competitive advantage. But Europe has something China does not: the density, grid interconnection, and integrated single market to do this at continental scale. The EU’s Clean Industrial Deal, launched in February 2025, places renewables at the heart of industrial strategy. The vision is correct. The execution is failing.

The Permits Problem Is a Security Problem

While Brussels sets the right direction, member states are undermining it. Last November, Sweden rejected 13 offshore wind projects in the Baltic Sea — projects with a combined capacity of nearly 32 gigawatts. That single decision wiped out €47 billion of private investment.

Across Europe, legislators are still listening to incumbent energy companies that need policy life-support to survive, rather than backing technologies that already stand on their own in open markets. Renewables may have needed an early push. They do not need one now.

Energy permits must be treated as national security priorities — with the same urgency as defense procurement. If a wind farm permit takes eight years, but a war can close a strait in eight hours, the permitting system is a strategic liability.

You cannot fight a trade war with China by starving your own industries of power. You cannot win the AI race with the world’s most expensive electricity. You cannot build €100 billion companies on a foundation that cracks every time a foreign government closes a shipping lane.

Europe does not need more government handouts to win this race. It needs government permissions. The capital is there. Corporate giants are desperate for green electrons. Pension funds and infrastructure investors are ready to deploy. What is missing is not money or technology. It is the political willingness to let them build.

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.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is warning the U.S. is moving more like Europe when it comes to defense.

Speaking Tuesday at the Hill and Valley Forum, which aims to bring together leaders from Washington and Silicon Valley, the longtime JPMorgan leader who led his bank through the 2008 housing crisis, said he was “deeply frustrated” with certain policies in the U.S. that he said set the country back. 

One example is the web of rules, compliance procedures, and the involvement of Congress that he said slows the procurement process for the Department of War (DoW) and prevents it from being adaptable in times of conflict that require quick pivots.

“We’ve become like Europe, we’re unable to move and change—change budgeting, change procurement. You know, let people do what they need to do.” 

One suggestion Dimon thinks would help improve the country’s red tape? Bringing on more private companies to get involved with making military equipment. To be sure, private companies are already participating actively in the U.S. defense industrial base. Although companies such as Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and RTX (previously Raytheon) have dominated military contracts for years, the U.S. government is increasingly looking to newcomers such as SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril for their tech capabilities. Earlier this month, the DoW awarded Anduril a five-to-ten year enterprise contract worth up to $20 billion, which is similar to one it would sign with a major defense contractor. 

Dimon added that building up the nation’s military is especially important as it faces geopolitical issues including the threat of a conflict with China.

Relations between the U.S. and China have been icy in recent years, as the two countries seek to dominate AI. The world’s second largest economy has in some years grown its GDP at nearly double the rate of the U.S. At the same time, a trade war between the two economies has seen Washington impose sweeping export controls on advanced chips in an effort to limit China’s technological advancement, while China weaponizes its rare Earth resources with its own export controls on the materials that are essential to building semiconductors, but also advanced weapons systems and electric vehicles. 

Dimon noted that U.S. companies made a mistake over the past decades in moving their supply chain to China just to produce a good for “$10 less.” This poses a major threat as China’s economy continues growing at a faster rate than that of the U.S. and threatens to overtake the country. Dimon also noted the risk that China may invade Taiwan is likely—something that is particularly concerning as Taiwan supplies 90% of the world’s most advanced microchips.

Still, the U.S. should also emulate China to an extent in the sectors where it has made significant progress, including shipbuilding, car manufacturing, and battery production.

“We should look at our own shortcomings then and then be prepared if they ever become an adversary to, you know, to face off against them,” he said.

Dimon’s comments come as the price tag of the Iran war has skyrocketed with the Pentagon last week reportedly requesting $200 billion from Congress on top of its existing budget, which exceeds $800 billion. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said “that number could move” as the Department of War seeks to replenish munition stockpiles and prepare “for what we may have to do in the future.”

Later in the interview Tuesday, Dimon painted a picture of “permanent peace” in the Middle East partly thanks to the threat of capital flight. In the process he became one of the first CEOs of a major company to foresee a potential positive impact stemming from the Iran war.

“There’s a lot of foreign direct investment going there, but it won’t go there if  things like this are taking place,” Dimon said of the Gulf countries who are particularly affected by the conflict. “They’ve realized no, they need permanent peace. They can’t have neighbors like lob ballistic missiles into their data centers.”

The JPMorgan CEO said he was optimistic about the war, saying it may lead to a lasting peace in the region in the long term because of the change in “attitude” among Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. The Iran conflict, now in its fourth week, has made these countries realize they need peace to protect the influx of capital that has helped their economies grow and diversify over the past decade.

The Gulf states have tried for years to diversify their economies to prevent them from being entirely oil dependent, and have brought in billions in foreign investment in the process. Still, the Iran war has once again highlighted the instability of their region. Strikes by Iran on military targets as well as Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain have spooked investors who have over years flooded the region with investment, especially in low-tax emirates in the UAE like Dubai and Abu Dhabi that have marketed themselves as safe, globally connected business hubs.

While some skeptics of the Iran war have said the country didn’t pose any imminent threat to the U.S., Dimon disagreed, labeling the country “a terrorist threat.” Iran-backed militias and the proxy conflicts Iran has waged in the region have been responsible for the death of hundreds of Americans, according to the Pentagon. During the Iraq war, the White House says Iran-backed militants killed 603 American troops, along with dozens of others in the years since the 1979 Iran hostage crisis and into the present day.

“They’ve been murderers of Americans and other people for 40 or 50 years. That’s not a threat. That’s actual killing,” Dimon said.

Dimon’s comments come as President Donald Trump on Sunday said the U.S. would not strike Iranian energy infrastructure and power plants for five days as U.S. envoys negotiate with their counterparts in Iran. 

While it’s unclear whether these talks, which Iran has denied, will yield any peace accord, Dimon said he is hopeful the conflict will bring about better prospects for the whole of the Middle East.

“I think the Iran war makes it a better chance in the long run,” Dimon said. “It’s probably riskier in the short run, because we don’t know the outcome of it, but Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, America, Israel, all want permanent peace in the Middle East.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Today, job seekers often send hundreds of applications into the void of applicant tracking systems, where their materials may never be seen by human eyes. For many, the job search has become a full-time job in itself. Some, though, are outsourcing it. That’s where the reverse recruiter comes in.

Reverse Recruiting Agency helps find, apply to, and secure jobs on behalf of the worker, not the company. It charges $1,500 a month for their services (though clients get their first-month fee refunded), plus 10% of the job seeker’s first-year salary upon job acceptance. That $1,500 gets you personalized résumé editing services, 50 to 100 applications per week, career coaching, interview prep, and several other job readiness services, according to the company’s website.

Today, more than half of U.S. job seekers are spending six months or more shooting out résumés before landing a job, according to LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Confidence survey. Some people have even reported applying to hundreds of jobs before landing a single interview. Long-term unemployment rate, or those lacking work for 27 weeks or longer, is also on the rise, at about 25.6% as of last month, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That’s putting pressure on folks to get a job.

Alex Shinkarovsky, founder of Reverse Recruiting Agency, said in an interview with Fortune that this company has helped 45 clients so far, with 25 more active clients. Most clients, he describes, are high-performers coming from a range of backgrounds, from data science, program management, and engineering. Even a top exec from Apple has consulted for his help, he said. 

“Most of the people who are hiring us now are awesome candidates, as in, they’re not struggling now,” Shinkarovsky told Fortune.

Although the company helps to submit 50 to 100 applications per week, Shinkarovsky said still may not be enough to beat the odds. On average, he said his company submits 863 applications per client before they land a job offer. For difficult career searches—those facing visa complications, ageism, or location constraints—it takes up to 924 applications.

Still, Shinkarovsky said his company is slashing the time it takes to find a role in half. The average time it takes to score a job offer is about 12.7 weeks for the standard role switch with the company’s help, compared to 24.3 weeks across the market, according to a Reverse Recruiting Agency analysis.

The perils of a job market rife with AI

The rules of the game are changing, shifting the knowledge required to score an interview. The logical conclusion of a job market that prizes volume over quality is a flood of AI-generated résumés and cover letters. And recruiting experts say that’s become the norm. In fact, the whole job search ecosystem is rife with AI, as applicants submit AI-generated materials and recruiters use AI to sort through applications, many of whom are ghosting applicants because of the technology.

“It’s fundamentally broken,” Shinkarovsky said. The founder clarified the company’s workers don’t use AI to submit applications on behalf of their clients, save for some résumé optimization functions as well as outreach on LinkedIn.

He suggests that Congress could address the issue by implementing a verification system for job seekers, similar to a voter ID, to add friction to the application funnel. “That would cut out almost all the slop right away,” he said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Origin, a London-based startup building an AI-powered platform to help multinational companies manage their employee benefits, has raised $30 million in new venture capital funding.

The funding, which the company is calling an extended Series A+ round, brings the total amount of money Origin has raised in the past 12 months to more than $50 million.

The latest investment is being led by Notion Capital, which also participated in Origin’s initial Series A. Felix Capital, which led the earlier round, Acadian Ventures, and all other existing investors are also participating, the company said. It also said that it had secured “additional growth funding” from HSBC Innovation Banking U.K. alongside the new venture round.

Origin’s angel investors include Paul Daugherty, the former chief technology and innovation officer of Accenture; Jacqui Canney, the chief people and AI enablement officer at ServiceNow; and Tudor Havriliuc, the former vice president of human resources at Meta, who held the role from 2010 to 2022.

The company declined to provide its valuation following the latest funding, but said it was higher valuation than its valuation following the initial Series A.

Origin was founded by Chris Bruce and Pete Craghill, the leadership team behind Darwin, a benefits technology software company, originally called Thomsons Online Benefits, that was acquired by Mercer in 2016. At the time of its acquisition, Darwin held an 80% market share of the non-U.S. global benefits administration market, according to Bruce.

Bruce told Fortune that the idea for Origin came out of a discussion he had with Craghill in the summer of 2023 in which they both observed how advances in AI and large language models could now address a problem they had tried and failed to fully solve 15 years earlier: giving big companies a clear picture of what they spend on employee benefits globally.

“It simply was not possible without AI,” Bruce said.

For most organizations, benefits are their second-largest cost, but they lack visibility into what they are spending. Bruce said one client’s chief financial officer told him the company believed it was spending roughly $750 million on benefits but had no way to verify that figure. “I’ve got visibility on every budget line in the organization, with the exception of benefits,” Bruce recalled the CFO saying. 

The root of the problem, Craghill said, is that benefits data in multinational organizations is scattered across PDFs, insurance policies, vendor platforms, and local documents in dozens of languages. “You had all this unstructured data around the world, and there was no solution to it,” Craghill said. “It was always a human problem.” He said Origin spent its first 18 months focused on cracking the data ingestion challenge, learning how to assess the quality and completeness of wildly inconsistent source materials.

Origin’s platform, powered by an AI engine the company calls Cuido, ingests and structures that fragmented data—from policies, contracts, renewals, broker reports, and vendor platforms—into a single, queryable system of record. Using the platform, HR executives can track benefit spending and usage, as well as handling renewals, policy reviews, and governance workflows.

Employees can also query Origin’s platform to ask questions about what benefits they have available to them. In multinational companies with complex benefits offerings in different geographies, getting an answer to this seemingly simple question can often take days. Now, it takes just minutes.

While that is good for employees, the real payoff for using Origin’s platform is that it helps companies rationalize their benefits spending, reducing duplication, or helping them consolidate providers, according to Bruce. The company whose CFO estimated he was spending $750 million annually on benefits, now expects to save around $75 million by using Origin’s platform, Bruce said. Another of Origin’s clients consolidated 13 local insurance policies into a single regional plan, achieving a 20% cost saving, according to the company.

Origin’s Cuido platform was co-created in partnership with several large multinational employers who serve as Origin’s anchor customers, including Pfizer, Comcast, and BP. Bruce said the company went out to 11 major multinationals two years ago, shared its vision, and asked them to sign on as paying co-creators. Seven of those 11 agreed. A large technology company that initially declined in order to build a similar system internally ended up joining Origin 10 months later after abandoning its own effort, Bruce said.

Origin currently has about 75 employees and go-to-market teams in both the United States and the United Kingdom and Europe. The company uses what Bruce calls “a value-based pricing model” that is tied to the complexity of a client’s organization, including the number of countries in which it operates.

Origin’s new funding will be used to deepen integrations into existing human capital management platforms, such as those from Workday and Oracle’s Peoplesoft, so benefits information is accessible where employees already work, and to expand Origin’s partner capabilities for brokers, consultants, and insurers.

Andy Leaver, operating partner at Notion Capital, said in a statement that his firm was doubling down on Origin because of the team’s speed and execution. “Benefits are one of the last major enterprise functions still left behind by the digitisation wave of the last 25 years,” Leaver said. “AI now makes it possible to build a true system of record and intelligence for benefits.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Almost a year ago, when QVC Group partnered with TikTok to launch the first-ever nonstop live shopping streams in the U.S., the company’s CEO called the move “our bet.” The subtext was clear: It was a bid to revive the shopping TV channel’s languishing business and rejuvenate its audience.

The rationale for QVC, best known for its namesake channel QVC and HSN (once known as the Home Shopping Network), was simple: to adapt its multi-billion dollar business to shoppers’ new habits. That has become urgent as TV generally has lost its hold on viewers, particularly in cable and broadcast television. Between 2018 and 2024, QVC’s and HSN’s main channels each lost almost half (44% and 47%, respectively) of the U.S. homes they reached. The company is heavily indebted and several media outlets reported last month that it was looking into ways to restructure its debt. Its CEO, David Rawlinson said in November that “returning our company to growth continues to be difficult.”

“What we realized is that our form of getting close to the customer was going to have to shift because where the consumer was spending their time was shifting pretty dramatically,” QVC Group chief business development officer Brian Beitler told Fortune at a panel at the eTail conference last month in Palm Springs, Calif.

Social commerce is behind about $150 billion in U.S. consumer spending right now and QVC wants in. Beitler sees scrolling on TikTok as analogous to surfing TV channels. When QVC started in the 1980’s, it succeeded by grabbing people’s attention as they channel-surfed past QVC or HSN and then clicked right back when they saw a product or moment that grabbed them.

“We could interrupt you with really entertaining and interesting live content about products with really unique and interesting personalities,” Beitler said. It’s a proposition that sounds strikingly similar to that of social media today—and to his mind, TikTok, with its 170 million U.S. users, allows for that in an up-to-date, tantalizing way. It was a more interesting partner than YouTube and Instagram, which are largely advertising-driven and don’t offer the direct “shoppability” consumers find on TikTok.

Last year, a few months after launching the TikTok partnership, QVC, a publicly traded company controlled by longtime media mogul John Malone, said some 74,000 TikTok creators had featured QVC products on their shoppable videos and livestreams, but Beitler declined to provide an updated number, saying it was better to focus on partners looking to build a sustainable sales channel.

QVC has clear parameters for the ideal partners to showcase its products on TikTok. “They should come across as having a level of expertise and a level of knowledge,” Beitler said, adding that authenticity in the storytelling is key.

But to be successful, he said, brands might need an attitude shift on how they work with collaborators. “The most difficult thing for brands and retailers, for those of us in this room, is you have to relinquish a bit of control,” said Beitler. “You’ll give them information on the product and trust them then to use that in an authentic and high-trust way with their audiences.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When Jensen Huang praised OpenClaw last week, the ripples reached Hong Kong within hours. Shares in MiniMax and Zhipu AI jumped more than 20% after the Nvidia CEO declared in a CNBC interview that the rapidly spreading open‑source agent framework was “definitely the next ChatGPT.” 

Foreign investors once dismissed China’s AI push as a constrained, second-tier effort. Yet now, strategists argue that the country may be better positioned for AI, thanks to cheaper power, growing capital spending, and a swarm of open-source developers. Those same analysts are also wondering whether the U.S. AI boom, after years of sky-high valuations and data center spending, is running out of steam.

“We’ve actually reduced our exposure to U.S. tech,” Mohit Kumar, Jefferies’ global macro strategist, told Fortune at the investment bank’s Asia Forum in Hong Kong last week. “We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for a number of reasons: valuation, wider adoption of AI, an advantage in power generation.”

“China basically has unlimited access to cheap energy, whereas the U.S. has this massive energy bottleneck,” Jefferies’s global head of equity research Chris Wood said to Fortune. 

The country will have roughly 400 gigawatts of spare power capacity by 2030, equal to three times what the world will need to meet data center demands, according to Goldman Sachs. In contrast, the U.S. is struggling with aging infrastructure and a lack of generating capacity, leading to spiking power prices in data center states like Virginia. 

In China’s western provinces like Ningxia and Gansu, electricity can cost as little as five cents per kilowatt-hour, versus 25 cents in Beijing or Shanghai, or 40 cents in some parts of the U.S, according to Baidu’s chief finance officer Henry He, who noted for attendees that power can make up about 35% of inference costs.

China’s manufacturing sector also helps its AI sector, particularly in applications that interact with the physical world. For example, He noted that Baidu’s Apollo robotaxis can charge one yuan ($0.15) per mile and still be operating at break-even in the city of Wuhan.

In the U.S., robotaxis manufacturers have had to choose between LiDAR sensors or visual cameras due to cost. But He argued that, in China, “we don’t need to make that difficult choice,” as both are affordable thanks to Chinese manufacturing. 

The same logic extends to autonomous aviation. EHang, for example, relies on a domestic supply chain that can provide affordable batteries and electronic components to build its aerial vehicles. “We have an extremely competitive component cost, and we can turn it into a very competitive selling price,” CFO Conor Yang explained to Fortune. 

A peaking U.S. AI cycle?

Wood’s optimism in China is contrasted by his questions about the U.S. The Jefferies strategist thinks that investors are starting to ask questions about the amount of money being spent in the U.S. on AI infrastructure, and expects U.S. capital spending to peak this year.

In an interview with Fortune, Wood described the U.S. private equity market as suffering from “a giant case of financial constipation,” with tens of thousands of portfolio companies waiting to IPO. In addition, private equity has recently poured money into the software sector, right as AI now threatens to erode their business models.

Private credit has been tested since the bankruptcy of auto parts supplier First Brands Group last year, which spooked retail investors and pushed some asset managers, like Blue Owl, to restrict withdrawals. This year’s “AI scare trade” has only made matters worse as retail investors try to pull their capital from fund managers, leading other fund managers, like BlackRock and Morgan Stanley, to also cap withdrawals. 

Monetization is still difficult

Still, China’s AI companies may struggle to charge much for their products in the country’s hyper-competitive environment, where labs compete on both price and performance.

“It is very difficult for a single company to always [have] a top model globally,” He, from Baidu, said. (Baidu, an early mover in the space with its ERNIE model, has since lost ground to Chinese rivals like Alibaba and DeepSeek)

Startup MiniMax, for example, generated $79 million in revenue last year, yet reported a $1.8 billion net loss. (Investors don’t seem to care, driving shares up by over six times since the startup’s IPO in early January.)

The problem for AI labs, whether in the U.S. or in China, is that any lead in performance could disappear in a matter of months, as other labs catch up by offering models with near-frontier-level performance, often on an open-source basis.

Wood, from Jefferies, thinks that large language model providers will end up like utilities: capital-intensive, commoditized, and unlikely to earn sustainable returns. Instead, he argued that China’s AI boom “is going to be in applications—cheap applications—made possible by open‑source models and very cheap power.”

Agentic AI could be the next battleground. Chinese companies large and small are quickly rolling out their own OpenClaw frameworks, and local governments are offering subsidies to “one-person companies” building their own AI agent startups. 

Chinese tech companies already have strong consumer platforms to put AI agents in front of users. Tencent’s WeChat, for example, has over 1.3 billion monthly active users and hosts millions of mini programs spanning commerce, transport, lifestyle, and finance. 

“We’re going to see some interesting innovations in China. This is the only area where the U.S. and the West are going to be behind,” Michael Bruck, founding partner at 71 Capital, told Fortune. 

“Is it a huge stretch of imagination to think the next version of a mini program is going to be an agent built into WeChat?” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com