| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, the complex bureaucracy to sharpen minds and speed decisions of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. On Sundays, we look at the major themes of the week past and how they will define the week ahead. Sign up for the daily newsletter here. What jobs will artificial intelligence make disappear in a poof of silicon dust? We don’t really have a clue. There are the usual suspects: data entry clerks, customer-service reps, cashiers, payroll processors, bank tellers. But let’s be real: All those career paths were fading into irrelevance long before AI entered the scene. Shop assistants, surprisingly, seem to be safe. “A revealing study from two German academics suggests Large Language Models, and ChatGPT specifically, have a lot of catching up to do on the key performance metrics that retailers care about the most,” writes Dave Lee. “They found that shoppers who arrive at an e-commerce site through ChatGPT were less likely to buy something than those who arrive by almost any other online journey, such as clicking a search result or visiting an online store directly.” Are junior bankers at risk? “OpenAI has more than 100 ex-investment bankers helping train its artificial intelligence on how to build financial models as it looks to replace the hours of grunt work performed by junior bankers across the industry,” Bloomberg News’s Omar El Chmouri reports. Which leads our Matt Levine to question what is going to happen further up the ladder: “It is hard to know exactly what will happen to an industry built on an apprenticeship model when it no longer needs apprentices: Banks will still need senior bankers to show up and shake hands with the clients, and where will those senior bankers come from if not from the ranks of junior bankers?” Who else is endangered? I’d be worried if I were a ghost writer, communications staffer, PR artist or any other disaster-avoidance expert in the realms of politics, big biz and, well, talking heads in general. A fascinating study by a group of academics from the University of Maryland, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Microsoft and Pangram Labs looked at the terrifying rise of AI use in American newspapers, which they called “widespread, uneven and rarely disclosed.” I was most intrigued by what the study found about op-ed pieces at the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal: AI use is 6.4 times as likely occur in opinion articles than in straight news articles. I was astounded that … the percentage was that low! Think about it: When you read a piece by a president or a prime minister or a four-star general or a tech CEO, it’s likely that there was a whole ladder of youthful communications and PR functionaries helping the boss, poring over edits, and watching out for anything that may rebound painfully. So am I shocked that, these days, a long list of opinionators relied in part or entirely on AI to suss their takes for them? Nope, it just seems like the march of progress. Sprinkled in the mix of bylines in the study, you’ll find a VC honcho, a former CEO of a chipmaking company, and a cofounder of an online health-care marketplace. It’s only fitting that tech folks are allegedly using tech itself to cut a few corners and get their influence out there. Which can be a big mistake, because in era of President Donald Trump, CEOs face a PR minefield. Look no further than Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff. “Benioff, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Salesforce Inc., has spent north of $1 billion and decades trying to convince the public that he is the good kind of tech titan and that his enterprise software firm is the good kind of tech company. So Benioff’s media blowup last week wasn’t just a little PR oopsie. It was a full-on torching of the carefully constructed narrative he’s spent so many years creating,” writes Beth Kowitt. “In an interview with The New York Times that should have been a benign, even boring, preview to the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last week, Benioff said that he was all for President Donald Trump sending the National Guard to the city.” Whoops. Any good communications staffer would have reminded him, before walking into the Gray Lady’s lion’s den: “Do not say anything you are really thinking!” But apparently his virtual PR assistant, Agentforce, was too busy hallucinating. And the man needs help on avoiding embarrassment: Here is Benioff, left, along with co-CEO Bret Taylor at Dreamforce 2022. No, you are not hallucinating.  Photographer: Marlena Sloss/Bloomberg It took a few days, but Benioff (along with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang) went behind the scenes and helped convince Trump to call off the troops. “Benioff has gone from San Francisco’s most beloved philanthropist to its most famous turncoat to its most unlikely hero,” writes Erika D. Smith. “Woke didn’t ruin San Francisco and MAGA won’t save it. But overly aggressive immigration raids would’ve risked the city’s fragile recovery from the bad years of the pandemic. It also would’ve risked pushing the city’s politics back in the progressive direction that many newly empowered moderate Democrats don’t want it to go.” Big Tech chiefs who get entangled with the president on a personal level are playing a very old game. “Since Donald Trump’s re-election America’s CEOs have, to all intents and purposes, put a crown on Trump’s head and turned themselves into courtiers. He’s Henry VIII in a golf buggy, and they are so many slavish bag carriers,” warns Adrian Wooldridge. “Political power is fickle. Trump can only stay in power until 2028; the Democrats, though feeble now, will eventually regain the White House and may make significant advances in the midterm elections; and many consumers will punish over-zealous courtiers by taking their business elsewhere.” [1] Nobody has more experience with Trump’s fickleness than Tesla founder Elon Musk, who has been reduced to begging for a trillion dollars to build a robot army (which Matt points out is every 10-year-old boy’s dream). Yet other barons of business are still thriving as “champions of the new game,” Adrian informs us, particularly JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Just watch out for the creepy crawlies! “Words matter, particularly when data-dependent markets are starved of new information by the US government shutdown,” writes John Authers. “That’s been rammed home twice in the last week, as the US sold off sharply first in response to trade threats by President Donald Trump on social media, and then to a comment from JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, likening problems with auto-loan credit to ‘cockroaches.’ As he put it, ‘When you see one cockroach, there are probably more.’” Or not, despite the $147 million loss Barclays took from the failure of subprime auto-lender Tricolor. “The Tricolor hit prompted the bank to review other exposures and what it could have done to spot the possible fraud,” writes Paul J. Davies. “Still, Chief Executive Officer CS Venkatakrishnan said that — unlike his old boss at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Jamie Dimon — he didn’t foresee a cockroach infestation of other failures. His one caveat: ‘I’m no entomologist.’” Venkatakrishnan may have thought that was a zinger, but any competent PR aide would have told him to block that metaphor. A different banking CEO, Jane Fraser, is taking on her own Henry VIII role, although uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. “Fraser’s elevation to chair as well as chief executive officer of Citigroup Inc. is a reward for progress and a bulwark against potential pretenders to her throne. Her restructuring of the lumbering and longtime dysfunctional beast that is the US’s third-largest bank by assets is taking time and is far from done. But it was always going to be a tough, disruptive task,” writes Paul. “In 2023 she announced a radical overhaul of Citigroup’s complex bureaucracy to sharpen minds and speed decisions. That meant thousands of job cuts and a cultural shift she admitted would make plenty of Citi folk ‘very uncomfortable.’ ” One thing we known about the AI era: There is going to be a lot of such discomfort ahead in the world of banking. And apparently in corporate communications as well. Bonus Talk that Talk Reading and Quizzing: What’s the World Got in Store? “In the past three years, many of us have wrestled with the ebbs and flows of the consumer ‘vibecession.’ Even as survey data hinted at widespread economic unease, the hard economic numbers — consumer spending and gross domestic product, in particular — generally portrayed resilience,” writes Jonathan Levin. “Less discussed is the lackluster sentiment coming from the c-suite, which has grown more and more puzzling as earnings growth has broadened. But here too, there are signs that the vibes might not be quite as ominous as they seem on the surface.” To get a handle on this corner-office contradiction, first consider this chart: Then consider this one: Which is how you end up at this one: How very American: faith in oneself and not much in others. “All told, the c-suite vibesession feels a lot like what we saw with consumer vibes,” says Jonathan. “Clearly, the confluence of events in recent years is leaving consumers and business leaders unsettled, and you absolutely can’t blame them. But for those of us trying to make sense of what it means for the real economy and market, the key takeaway is that we have to focus on what consumers and businesses know best — their businesses, households and local communities. And above all, we have to keep a close eye on what they’re actually doing with their money, not just what they say.” And if those business leaders get good advice, they won’t say much. Note: Please send bunny ears and feedback to Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net | 
