Fortune

Long before he became CEO of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon got a tough lesson from his father after complaining he never had enough money: the problem wasn’t cash. It was time. Growing up in upstate New York, Solomon kept a packed schedule: three sports, student government, and shifts scooping 31 flavors at Baskin-Robbins.  But he still didn’t have enough cash to do what he wanted. When he complained to his father, a businessman, Solomon expected sympathy—or maybe a loan. Instead, his dad gave him a lesson in time management. “He told me to take out a calendar and write down everything I did each day,” Solomon recalled this past weekend to MBA graduates of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “And I noticed, when I had to account for every minute, that I actually wasted a reasonable amount of time.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eXi4Ttuu

Last week, Salesforce was making its way through Southeast Asia on an Agentforce world tour. With it came Arundhati Bhattacharya, Salesforce’s South Asia CEO. Bhattacharya ranked No. 83 on the Fortune Most Powerful Women Asia list last year. Salesforce hired her in 2020 to lead its India business. She was already well known as the first woman to serve as chair of the State Bank of India. After retiring from the SBI in 2017, Bhattacharya rotated through a series of part-time consulting roles, but found them largely unsatisfactory. The gap between busy days during board meeting season and light days at other times—she found it “not very comfortable,” she told Fortune. Marc Benioff convinced her to come on board full-time with Salesforce in South Asia. She had to take charge as a leader right away; during the pandemic the U.S. leadership team wasn’t “able to offer us much support in India,” she remembers. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eJ73DZsY

It’s no secret that Gen Z is facing the brunt of AI job disruption. Entry-level openings in fields with high AI exposure are becoming rarer as companies downsize.  “There’s no question that the entry-level hire is under pressure,” WeWork CEO John C. Santora said in an interview at the #FortuneWorkplaceSummit on Tuesday. “It’s incumbent upon all of us to bring that talent in and to educate the talent and teach them to be the future growth of all our organizations,” he continued. “AI is not going to provide empathy and leadership and mentoring and all those skills that you need to lead a company for a company to be successful.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/dpPj34fX

The class of 2026 is walking into one of the most unforgiving job markets in recent memory — and HR leaders are increasingly worried that the traditional on-ramps into corporate America are buckling under the weight of AI, shrinking entry-level roles, and a generation losing faith in the system. At the #FortuneWorkplaceSummit this week, a panel of executives and educators gathered to confront the question head-on. The conversation featured Cristina Mancini, CEO of Black Girls Code; Dr. Harry L. Williams, president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund; Debbie Dyson, CEO of SkillsRight; and Becky Schmitt, chief people officer at PepsiCo. The consensus is that the rules have changed, and nobody has fully figured out the new ones yet. Read more: https://lnkd.in/edCavcdh

America’s population is aging rapidly, and there aren’t enough young workers to backfill their critical roles; Svenja Gudell, chief economist at Indeed, says the generational imbalance is straining the workforce. “We’re entering a new phase of a great mismatch,” Gudell recently said onstage at #FortuneWorkplaceSummit. “We’re going to have workers in places we actually don’t want workers, and we’re going to have to reallocate a whole bunch of jobs to other people, and that’s going to cause a little bit of pain.” “It’s really important to also recognize that there’s lots of stuff happening right now—it’s not just AI,” Gudell continued. “Demographic change is a huge one that’s knocking on our door right now.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eaEjwGGd

Sales of Microsoft’s enterprise Copilot products have been slower than the company would like. Less than 4.5% of the 450 million customers of its Microsoft 365 office suite currently pay for Copilot features. Two years ago, Microsoft appeared to be one of the early winners of the AI era. Thanks to Nadella’s prescient bet on OpenAI, Microsoft had exclusive access to the high-flying AI startup’s models, and could use them to create AI features across its products. Nadella, a decade into his tenure, had steered Microsoft through one platform shift —desktop to cloud— and looked poised to repeat the feat. But AI is fast-moving, and two years is a lifetime. 🔗 Read more in the latest issue of Fortune Magazine: https://lnkd.in/e5mUXjwE

How are the top technology leaders actually measuring AI ROI and securing board buy-in? On 28 May, join leading Fortune 500 Europe CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs for a candid conversation on what’s really working in enterprise AI adoption today, from scaling implementation to proving business value. ➡️ Global Chief Digital and Information Officer at Mars Pet Nutrition, Rahul V Shah ➡️ Group Chief Digital and Information Officer at Saint-Gobain, Ursula Soritsch-Renier ➡️ EVP & Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Orange, Bruno Zerbib ➡️ Chief Information and Digitisation Officer at Reckitt, Nigel Richardson Moderated by Francesca Cassidy-Cadbury, in partnership with Glean and VivaTech. Register your interest: https://bit.ly/4u8Xut1

"We're in this low-hire, low-fire market," said Indeed Chief Economist Svenja Gudell at the #FortuneWorkplaceSummit. "The entire market is moving like molasses." Here's Gudell's advice for Gen Z job seekers trying to break in. https://bit.ly/4dGzkzn

The prospect of AI-related layoffs has been the talk of Silicon Valley and Wall Street since ChatGPT launched its first AI model in late 2022. This year, a handful of tech companies are delivering on that promise. Cloudflare is one of the latest to do so. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Wednesday, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince laid out his logic. The company is growing. Fast. It just posted record revenue growth and is expanding its global customer base. Still, Prince said the tech firm slashed 20% of its workforce earlier this month, with middle management facing the brunt of the cuts. “The vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers,” he wrote. He defined “measurers” as those in middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, and revenue recognition. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eftpM6rr

What do C-suite execs ask in interviews? We asked some at the #FortuneWorkplaceSummit. Here’s what they said, featuring: ➡️ Match Group Chief People Officer D.V. Williams ➡️ Upwork CEO Hayden Brown ➡️ WeWork CEO John C. Santora ➡️ The Rainbow Disruption Founder Jarvis Sam ➡️ SkillsRight (formerly OneTen) CEO Debbie Dyson ➡️ Patagonia Chief People and Culture Officer Theresita Richard ➡️ Indeed Chief Revenue Officer Maggie Hulce ➡️ TIAA Chief People Officer Claire Borelli 🔗 https://bit.ly/4dGzkzn