TALENT MANAGEMENT

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Yes, this is another story about AI. But this one’s fun, because it’s not about robots replacing humans…at least not entirely.

A new global technology report from Bain & Co. said that “funding AI’s insatiable compute demand would require $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 and much of the value lies in innovation—beyond employee productivity.”

“AI infrastructure investment is racing ahead, but generating enough economic value to justify it will require trillions of dollars in new AI-driven revenue,” according to Bain’s 7th Annual Global Technology Report.

Deepali Vyas, global head of data and AI executive search at ZRG Partners, told CFO Brew the mass investment in AI over the next few years will include hiring talent, because there are still ultimately some things that can’t be automated.

“Companies want to hire in AI,” she said. “What [enterprises] are saying is, ‘Let’s get the best and brightest minds that understand AI more holistically, because we want them to evangelize the firm, the enterprise, as well.’”

Hire AI technologists who have “commercial DNA.”—DL

      

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MONETARY POLICY

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Oh, please. We can’t be the only ones looking for High Drama™ from every Federal Open Market Committee meeting! Live a little, people! Or, at the very least, forgive us for wanting some hot gossip!

But even if the gossip-loving among us didn’t exactly get any spicy tidbits from the Federal Reserve’s freshly released minutes from its September 15–16 meeting, we did get some valuable information: Fed officials anticipate raising interest rates again before the end of 2026, the record showed.

In case you somehow forgot: At the last FOMC meeting in September, the Fed raised interest rates for the first time since 2023, which also marked the first rate hike of Kevin Warsh’s brief tenure as chair. In the post-meeting press conference, Warsh said, “the plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long.”

The rate hike was largely expected, but it was unclear at that time how the FOMC would proceed for the rest of the year: September’s dot plot of FOMC officials’ borrowing cost expectations showed 16 out of 18 anticipated another interest rate hike in 2026.

“There are clearly policymakers who favor an unconditional higher policy path,” one economist said.—NP

      

CYBERSECURITY

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It’s football season, and opposing NFL teams have more in common with cyberattackers than you might think—for one, they both want to rush the other team into a bad decision.

The San Francisco 49ers, pairing with cybersecurity company Doppel, is one football team trying to avoid fumbling its cyber defenses. The team’s new platform attempts to identify digital risks such as impersonation threats and brand attacks, train staff via AI-driven security simulations, and stop threats to email security.

Costa Kladianos, EVP of technology for the 49ers at Levi’s Stadium, told IT Brew that, instead of outsourcing its cybersecurity to multiple vendors, the organization opted for a holistic platform with one vendor so that they could ensure that “the platforms were talking to each other.”

“You have to come at it with the education, incredibly important, with the technical controls,” Kladianos said. “You want to have many layers, and you want all of them to work together.”

Keeping the NFL franchise’s reputation secure is a high priority, IT Brew reports.—CN

      

Together With Paystand

What Q4 has in store. We’re wrapping our quarterly finance trend series with Paystand by discussing agentic AI in finance, programmable money, and cross-border payments. The leaders at Paystand, whose mission is to decentralize commercial finance, will help translate these three key finance trends for us. Read on.

market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 2.9 percentage points. That’s how much tariffs contributed to inflation of consumer goods last year and early this year, according to New York Fed researchers. Without the tariffs, prices for those products would have actually gone down nearly 1%. (CNBC)

Quote: “You can discover new math easily…You can make a trillion theorems easily. The problem is most of those theorems are not ones that anybody will care about.”—Computer scientist and physicist Stephen Wolfram, on OpenAI’s release of hundreds of AI-generated mathematical proofs (Axios)

Read: An IRS investigator is suing the agency for allegedly leaking his tax records in retaliation for whistleblowing. (New York Times)

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