The Morning Download: CEOs Say Top Performers Get the Most Out of AI

Good morning. AI stands to benefit everyone, but it may elevate top performers the most, CEOs say.

That was the view at the WSJ Leadership Institute’s CEO Council Summit in London, which kicked off yesterday and continues today.

The gap between strong and average performers is widening as AI pushes deeper into companies, according to Abhijit Dubey, president and CEO of NTT DATA.

“A top engineer only gets better,” Dubey. “A top software developer gets better. A top, you know, anything, only gets better. The divide between average and top performance is actually increasing, and that's going to have huge implications for the workforce.”

Dubey shared the stage with Greg Jackson, founder and CEO, Octopus Energy,  Francesca McDonagh, group CEO, Universal Investment and WSJLI President Alan Murray for a discussion on The New Rules of Global Business.

Watch: Institutional Resilience, Global Electrification, and the AI Wave

Pascual Restrepo, associate professor, Yale University and member of Anthropic’s Economic Advisory Council, addresses a similar point in The Wall Street Journal’s report today on The Future of Work and AI.

“One could argue that AI will 'simplify' jobs, reducing performance gaps between people and inequality in pay. One could also argue that AI could amplify talent at the top, by taking peripheral tasks away from superstar workers,” Restrepo says.

If that’s the case, the economic impact of AI could be less about technology replacing or automating jobs, and more about AI compounding differences in human characteristics. The most important characteristic of the high-performer may not be intelligence as it is widely understood and measured. It may be a mindset that places a big emphasis on curiosity, which is something that can be cultivated by the educational system and the culture itself.

“If you ask your top 100 most senior people in your organization to go and build an agent, I'm amazed that so few of them haven't.” McDonagh said at the WSJLI’s CEO Summit. “For others, the intellectual curiosity — which we've always learned in the Old World is a great indicator of human potential —  applying that with AI… I mean that is, for me it's a differentiator amongst even my senior management.”

Does your organization value and cultivate curiosity? If so, tell us about how that works.

With the introduction of a powerful new tools like Anthropic's Mythos and now its "Mythos-class" model Fable 5 (more on that below), questions on AI's impact on the economy, including the workforce, are becoming more interesting... and more urgent.

The WSJ turned to 16 economists about what they think AI will mean for the economy, workers and workplaces. One of the questions cuts right to the heart of it:

Is AI already impacting the labor market? How about in five years?

Ajay Agrawal
Professor, University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management

We are currently in the "Between Times." We see the potential of AI, but our organizational systems haven't fully adjusted. Over the next five to 10 years, at least one leading company in each market will likely figure out how to transition to a system solution that is much more productive.

Jason Furman
Professor, Harvard University and former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers 

We are currently seeing little or no impact of AI on the labor market. It is possible that it is reducing hiring in a few specific occupations and age groups but even that evidence is weak and the aggregate magnitude of any labor market impact is small to zero.

David Autor
Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

We do not yet see clear labor market impacts, but I expect them within five to 10 years. Some occupations will become more expertise-intensive and higher-paid: fewer people doing harder work with better tools. Others will become more accessible, as AI lowers the expertise threshold for entry. 

David Deming
Dean, Harvard College and professor, Harvard University

AI isn't replacing jobs, but AI is shaping economic incentives and the choices that firms make. The "hyperscalers" and other companies have made huge capital investments in AI infrastructure, and these investments have already had a visible and meaningful impact on jobs and on GDP growth.

Tomas Philipson
Professor emeritus, University of Chicago, former vice chairman and acting chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (2017-2020) and member of Anthropic’s Economic Advisory Council

The technology will have two well-understood offsetting effects on the demand for labor in a given industry. The first is displacing labor to more cheaply produce its product, but in doing so it will lower prices for consumers. This in turn will have the offsetting effect of increasing how much is sold and thereby raising the demand for labor.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri on re-architecting the workforce. If HPE President and Chief Executive Antonio Neri had a do-over on life, he’d be an architect. But in a sense he already is. (And it’s not just because he recently played a key role in designing the company’s Spring, Texas headquarters.)

During a Tuesday visit to The Wall Street Journal offices, Neri reflected on how he’s re-architected almost every job he’s had. From filling oil trucks in Argentina to his first job at HPE as a call center agent, he said he was always using the latest technology to reimagine menial tasks. He used an IBM Personal System/2 to automate data processing onto a Lotus spreadsheet in the 1980s.

Today it's not about spreadsheets, it's about AI which he is using to reachitect the company's workforce.

At HPE, AI agents are helping in areas like finance, marketing and software development, Neri said. Humans are still in the loop in most cases, but as the technology improves, they’ll be less “in the loop,” than “on the loop,” or simply overseeing it. At some point that oversight could even be done by AI itself.

“Instead of continuing to hire people for additional things I may need to do, I use the same population,” he said. “And they become more productive and more fungible in all the areas of the workforce.”

Neri's interest in architecture extends to the company's real-life headquarters campus in Texas. The lobby of HPE’s Spring headquarters draws inspiration from an airport lounge, Neri said, including markets where you can buy snacks and HPE merchandise. Outside there’s a large video screen known as “Big Tex,” that occasionally plays movies and live sports. Next week, it will broadcast Neri’s HPE Discover keynote.

— Isabelle Bousquette

• Anthropic has held off on sharing its full Mythos model with the world, but the general public will soon be given a taste with Claude Fable 5. The next-generation “Mythos-class” model includes guardrails that remove capabilities related to areas such as cybersecurity and biological research. When priced per-token, Fable 5 will cost twice as much as Opus 4.8, but it will also be better at completing large, complex tasks with fewer instructions, the company tells the WSJ.

• The Trump administration has ordered the government's main AI testing body, CAISI, to stop publishing its model assessments while a new executive order is implemented — a move driven by national-security concerns over increasingly powerful AI models. Some officials and companies like OpenAI are pushing back, citing the importance of the civilian agency.

• Broadcom said it will partner with Apollo Global Management and Blackstone’s credit and insurance business to launch AI XPV Platform, infrastructure that will enable more than 20 gigawatts in compute capacity through 2028. The platform will employ Broadcom’s chips and networking solutions to support companies including Anthropic and OpenAI.

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