A few miles south of Salt Lake City, deep in Utah County, the town of Payson is on parade. Toddlers run between trucks that tug floats carrying cheerleaders and footballers. Seven beauty queens wave from a giant watermelon; the next float bears 36 bagpipers. Every performer in this annual celebration is a child. All told, it takes them two hours to pour onto the streets. More
It might seem like a wonderful time to be an American investment bank. Over the past year, the country’s lenders have handed shareholders gains of 27%, far outstripping the 10% for other stocks outside the technology sector. They have ridden a wave of strong interest income, heavy trading and a surge in dealmaking. Soon they will face less red tape, too. Viewed in this light, conditions could hardly be better. More
Making a lithium-ion battery, of the sort that can power an electric vehicle, is a bit like baking a cake. The ion-rich powder is first mixed into a lump-free batter, then spread evenly on foil. The solvents must be dried in an oven, just as baking removes water, then the results must be carefully stacked. The underlying chemistry is fairly well understood. But the best battery-makers, like the best bakers, improve their craft over years in the kitchen. More
Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said AI is boosting productivity but will likely reduce workforce size.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla warned China is closing the biotech and pharmaceutical patent gap rapidly and said the U.S. needs to focus on innovation.
Speaking at CNBC’s inaugural Invest in America Forum, both CEOs agreed that the time is now for new investments in technology and manufacturing to ensure competition in the global economy.
Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, Charlie Scharf, Wells Fargo & Company CEO and Kathy Warden, Northrop Grumman Chair & CEO speak during the Invest in America Forum on Oct. 15, 2025.
Aaron Clamage | CNBC
Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla sounded the alarm Wednesday over the potential for the the U.S. to lose its competitive edge to China, but said artificial intelligence could help America maintain its lead.
Speaking at CNBC’s inaugural Invest in America Forum in Washington, D.C., the two executives said that while the U.S. still leads in many sectors, inconsistent policy and underinvestment is ceding ground to China. AI, they said, poses both risks and benefits for the U.S. economy.
Scharf said AI will likely reduce the size of workforces — but will boost productivity.
“We will likely have less people, absolutely,” Scharf said. “When we look at the tools that we’ve implemented just for people that are coding, you see 20%, 30%, 40% improvement in coders. We haven’t reduced our head count by 20%, 30% or 40%. We’re actually doing more than we otherwise would have been able to do.”
Wells Fargo big bank peers like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are already hiring fewer people because of AI advancements.
Scharf also said the financial sector is poised for major regulatory changes despite an ongoing political stalemate in Washington.
“We ultimately do expect significant changes in capital requirements, liquidity requirements,” he said. “We do expect to see changes which will allow people in the industry, not just big banks and medium-sized banks, but smaller banks as well, to do more in these [local] communities.”
Bourla, meanwhile, expressed concern about China’s growing strength in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, pointing to a surge in research and development spending, regulatory reforms and a national strategy focused on life sciences.
“They [China] filed more patents this year than the U.S.,” Bourla said. “That’s never happened in history. Five years ago, the split was 90%-10%. … The gap is closing, but they probably will become [better than us] unless we get our act together.”
Bourla urged the U.S. to shift focus from trying to slow China’s progress toward improving its own productivity and innovation.
“We spend more time trying to think about how to slow down China rather than think how we can become better than them,” Bourla said. “We need to have regulatory changes here. We need to have stability. Tariffs and pricing was not helping.”
Pfizer recently agreed to a drug pricing deal with the Trump administration as part of a broader effort to remove long-standing uncertainties around pricing, Medicaid reimbursements and distribution. As part of the agreement, Pfizer secured a three-year exemption from pharmaceutical-specific tariffs, contingent on additional investments in U.S. manufacturing.
“Tariffs and the uncertainty of drastic correction of U.S. pricing — with this deal, we are removing both uncertainties,” Bourla said Wednesday.
He also called artificial intelligence the next frontier for medicine, predicting that AI will revolutionize drug discovery by dramatically accelerating timelines for finding treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer.
“We tried for years to find cures … AI will make it happen,” Bourla said. More
Perhaps the biggest headache for any investor is that no asset offers complete safety. Inflation gnaws away at cash; gold might offer protection but its price has soared so high that it feels less like insurance than chasing a hot trade. Rich-world government bonds are supposed to be havens, and have historically done better than cash at outpacing consumer prices. Just now, though, plenty of governments are borrowing so much that it is worryingly easy to imagine them letting the money-printers whir and inflating away their debt. More
Big banks including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are unveiling plans to reimagine their businesses around AI, technology that allows for the mass production of knowledge work.
Even during a blockbuster year for Wall Street as trading and investment banking spins off billions of dollars in excess revenue, the companies are hiring fewer people.
The comments around artificial intelligence from the largest U.S. banks mirror those from tech giants including Amazon and Microsoft.
Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., at the Institute of International Finance (IIF) during the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Oct. 24, 2024.
Kent Nishimura | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The era of artificial intelligence on Wall Street, and its impact on workers, has begun.
Big banks including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are unveiling plans to reimagine their businesses around AI, technology that allows for the mass production of knowledge work.
That means that even during a blockbuster year for Wall Street as trading and investment banking spins off billions of dollars in excess revenue — not typically a time the industry would be keeping a tight lid on head count — the companies are hiring fewer people.
JPMorgan said Tuesday in its third-quarter earnings report that while profit jumped 12% from a year earlier to $14.4 billion, head count rose by just 1%.
The bank’s managers have been told to avoid hiring people as JPMorgan deploys AI across its businesses, CFO Jeremy Barnum told analysts.
JPMorgan is the world’s biggest bank by market cap and a juggernaut across Main Street and Wall Street finance. Last month, CNBC was first to report about JPMorgan’s plans to inject AI into every client and employee experience and every behind-the-scenes process at the bank.
The bank has “a very strong bias against having the reflexive response to any given need to be to hire more people,” Barnum said Tuesday. JPMorgan had 318,153 employees as of September.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told Bloomberg this month that AI will eliminate some jobs, but that the company will retrain those impacted and that its overall head count could grow.
‘Constrain headcount’
At rival investment bank Goldman Sachs, CEO David Solomon on Tuesday issued his own vision statement around how the company would reorganize itself around AI. Goldman is coming off a quarter where profit surged 37% to $4.1 billion.
“To fully benefit from the promise of AI, we need greater speed and agility in all facets of our operations,” Solomon told employees in a memo this week.
“This doesn’t just mean re-tooling our platforms,” he said. “It means taking a front-to-back view of how we organize our people, make decisions, and think about productivity and efficiency.”
The upshot for his workers: Goldman would “constrain headcount growth” and lay off a limited number of employees this year, Solomon said.
Goldman’s AI project will take years to implement and will be measured against goals including improving client experiences, higher profitability and productivity, and enriching employee experiences, according to the memo.
Even with these plans, which is first looking at reengineering processes like client onboarding and sales, Goldman’s overall head count is rising this year, according to bank spokeswoman Jennifer Zuccarelli.
Tech inspired?
The comments around AI from the largest U.S. banks mirror those from tech giants including Amazon and Microsoft, whose leaders have told their workforces to brace for AI-related disruptions, including hiring freezes and layoffs.
Companies across sectors have become more blunt this year about the possible impacts of AI on employees as the technology’s underlying models become more capable and as investors reward businesses seen as ahead on AI.
In banking, the dominant thinking is that workers in operational roles, sometimes referred to as the back and middle office, are generally most exposed to job disruption from AI.
For instance, in May a JPMorgan executive told investors that operations and support staff would fall by at least 10% over the next five years, even while business volumes grew, thanks to AI.
At Goldman Sachs, Solomon seemed to warn the firm’s 48,300 employees that the next few years might be uncomfortable for some.
“We don’t take these decisions lightly, but this process is part of the long-term dynamism our shareholders, clients, and people expect of Goldman Sachs,” he said in the memo. “The firm has always been successful by not just adapting to change, but anticipating and embracing it.” More
Fed Governor Stephen Miran said the latest impasse in trade talks between the U.S. and China poses new dangers to the economic outlook and makes the case for rate cuts even more urgent.
Miran has advocated for another 1.25 percentage points in cuts on top of the quarter-point move the Federal Open Market Committee approved in September.
Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran said Wednesday that the latest impasse in trade talks between the U.S. and China poses new dangers to the economic outlook and makes the case for rate cuts even more urgent.
Speaking at the CNBC “Invest in America Forum” in Washington, D.C., the central bank policymaker noted the threat from China’s decision to restrict access to rare earths materials, which prompted a threat from President Donald Trump for 100% tariffs in Chinese imports.
Miran said that the dispute raises the level of uncertainty during a year when it already had been running high.
“I had been operating under the assumption that the uncertainty had dissipated, and therefore I felt more sanguine about some aspects of the growth outlook. Now, potentially, this is back because the Chinese are reneging on deals that were already made,” he told CNBC’s Sara Eisen. “So I think it’s incumbent on us as policymakers to think about the introduction of a new tail risk.”
From a policy perspective, Miran said the situation only convinces him more that the Fed needs to move aggressively on interest rate reductions.
During a tenure on the Fed that just began a month ago — and will end in January — Miran has advocated for another 1.25 percentage points in cuts on top of the quarter-point move the Federal Open Market Committee approved in September.
“To the extent that I think policy is quite restrictive right now, that sets us up to be vulnerable to shocks. If you hit the economy with a shock when policy is very restrictive, the economy will react differently than it would if policy was not as restrictive,” he said. “I think it’s even more important now than I did a week ago that we move quickly to a more neutral stance.”
The FOMC, of which Miran as a governor is a voter, next meets Oct. 28-29, when it is widely expected to approve another quarter-point reduction. More
With the AI upgrade, Honor expects to climb into the top three smartphone brands by market share in mainland China by the end of this year, Fei Fang, president of products at Honor Device, told CNBC in an exclusive interview.
Honor’s new AI tools come as Apple has yet to release its AI system in China.
It’s part of how Honor expects people will use AI assistants to access apps rather than going to the apps directly.
Chinese smartphone company Honor announced on Oct. 15 a slew of new AI features, including the ability to compare deals across different e-commerce sellers.
CNBC | Evelyn Cheng
BEIJING — Imagine if Amazon gave 20% discounts for every purchase made using an iPhone Air.
That’s essentially how Chinese smartphone company Honor wants to attract local buyers — by giving them an on-device AI tool that lets them quickly compare deals across Chinese e-commerce sites, including JD.com and different merchants on Alibaba’s Taobao. In one example seen by CNBC, the Honor AI-powered shopping search helped save 20% since the tool was able to find coupons that a user might otherwise overlook.
The features and a slew of other AI functions are set to roll out Wednesday on Honor’s newly launched Magic8 smartphone as well as the company’s other devices in China. The timing is notable. China is entering its busiest shopping season of the year akin to Black Friday: the Nov. 11 Singles Day promotional period.
With the AI upgrade, Honor expects to climb into the top three smartphone brands by market share in mainland China by the end of this year, Fei Fang, president of products at Honor Device, told CNBC in an exclusive interview. That’s according to a CNBC translation of the remarks made in Mandarin.
In the future, she expects that rather than opening smartphone apps directly, users will increasingly access the functions via an AI portal — which can then automatically provide customized services down the road.
“We believe this will happen and we are working along this direction,” she said, noting Honor will release more AI features in sports, health and companionship at its own ecosystem conference on Oct. 23.
Honor’s AI features are activated through the company’s “Yoyo” chatbot, which sits inside the company’s Android-based operating system called MagicOS.
While Honor said the overseas market has come to account for about half of its revenue, the Shenzhen-based company must first take on Apple to recover the first spot in China.
In the second quarter of this year, Huawei and Vivo shipped the most phones in China with 18% market share each, while Oppo and Xiaomi vied for second place at 16% share each, Counterpoint data showed. Apple had 15%, followed by Honor at 13%.
Apple has tried to make a comeback in China this year. CEO Tim Cook visited Shanghai this week, according to his social media account, coinciding with news that the slim iPhone Air would finally begin sales in China this month — weeks after the new iPhone 17 hit stores.
However, the U.S. smartphone giant has yet to release its AI features in China, despite Alibaba Group Chair Joe Tsai’s announcement this year that the company would work with Apple on the tech tools. Neither side has yet released additional details.
AI chatbots
Honor, which spun off from Huawei in 2020, signed a strategic partnership with Alibaba in September to co-develop AI smartphone features. Alibaba operates the Gaode maps app in China, a Fliggy travel booking platform, as well as the Taobao and Tmall e-commerce platforms.
Fang emphasized that shopping is just one of many AI functions that Honor is releasing this week. Other tools include guiding users on how to take the best photo angle, suggesting nearby restaurants from just a photo of a specific location and hailing a taxi using a simple voice command.
With a prompt as vague as “book me a ride back home,” the tech learns from on-device data and user preferences to automatically know what the home address is. Personal information stays on the smartphone and isn’t transferred to the cloud, Honor said. When it comes to payments, the user still needs to manually approve it, even if the AI helps with making the online order.
The new AI features for China users also come as ChatGPT is starting to let U.S. users shop on Etsy, and soon Walmart, through the AI chatbot interface. Other AI chatbots can also search the internet for specific products.
It remains to be seen whether AI will be consistently useful for consumers. But Honor said its edge comes from using AI to complete multiple steps, including accounting for individual e-commerce memberships and personalized coupons, to show consumers the cheapest option — with a prompt as simple as asking for the best deal on a product.
Honor said most of its new AI features are based on a self-developed graphical user interface (GUI) AI model that learns from how a human interacts with a smartphone screen and across apps.
The company claimed that the AI’s ability to learn has enabled rapid expansion from 200 tasks in July to more than 3,000 this fall.
In other cases, Honor said it has agreements with companies such as food delivery giant Meituan and video-streaming platform Bilibili to allow the phone’s AI to interact with the Chinese apps’ systems using the “Model Context Protocol (MCP)” tech pioneered by Anthropic.
Spending big first
Honor also incorporates some AI functions from other companies, such as Kuaishou’s Kling AI video generation model. Since Kling and other tools charge per use, that comes at a cost to the smartphone company, which is offering the features to consumers for free right now, according to Fang.
“This is one of our current challenges,” Fang said. “We have invested quite a lot of money in AI. But we believe we must first create value for consumers before commercialization.”
Honor announced in March it would spend $10 billion on AI over the next five years. The company indicated it would make a significant portion of the initial investment this year.
The spending is part of Honor’s ambitious plan announced in March to become an AI device company — and a platform to connect companies with consumers. Like Apple, Honor also sells smart watches, tablets and laptops.
Outside of China, Honor works with Google for AI and is ranked fourth by market share in Europe as of the second quarter, according to Counterpoint.
While Honor doesn’t have immediate plans to roll out AI-powered shopping overseas, the company at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March showed off an AI agent for making restaurant reservations on OpenTable. More
