Surveys Show C-Suites Confident, Doing ‘A Remarkable Job’ Managing Noise
Key Highlights
- Over half of CFOs are optimistic about the U.S. economy over the next six months, indicating growing confidence despite recent uncertainties.
- Business leaders feel well-equipped to navigate a disruptive environment, emphasizing adaptability and data-driven decision-making.
- Executives are quickly acknowledging that workforce changes, including layoffs, are becoming part of their strategic planning as AI begins to displace some roles.
Many C-suites are growing more confident about their firms’ outlooks for 2026 as well as the prospects for the U.S. economy, several recent surveys show.
However, one report also shows they’re becoming more used to the idea that some layoffs will be part of the plan for next year. A key factor there: The growing number of use cases for artificial intelligence that already are starting to or soon will pay dividends.
“People are saying it out loud now, and they weren’t saying it before,” Dana Lance, national tax solutions leader at Grant Thornton Advisors LLC, said in the firm’s recently released Q3 2025 CFO Survey about the idea that AI is displacing employees.
But first, some upbeat high-level data from Grant Thornton and others:
Of the roughly 230 executives who responded to Grant Thornton’s survey, 51% said they are optimistic about the U.S. economy over the next six months. That’s a solid 12-point jump from the second quarter, when tariff turmoil had nearly all of us wary at best, and reflected respondents’ growing confidence that their team can handle the supply-chain and cost-control priorities in front of them. But that 51% figure is also right in line with the average of Grant Thornton’s three previous quarterly reports as well as the average of each of the two full years before that.
That steady trend line suggests finance leaders are managing well the various changes coming at them, said Paul Melville, Grant Thornton’s national managing principal of CFO Advisory Services. He said executives are building on the skills they strengthened during the upheaval from the COVID era and more productively engaging with the real-time data they have.
“They’re doing a remarkable job managing,” Melville said. “There’s a lot of noise in the system but there’s also a lot of change. Sometimes, there’s a lot of noise without change. That’s not so in this case.”
Also speaking to a general sense of confidence are data points from the latest monthly Survey of Business Uncertainty conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta as well as the third-quarter CFO Survey pulled together by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in partnership with researchers from the Atlanta and Richmond Federal Reserve banks. In the former, the more than 1,100 senior leaders responding said they expect sales in the 12 months ahead to grow about 4.5% from their current level. That figure has been climbing steadily since spring’s tariff-driven uncertainty.
Similarly, finance chiefs told the Duke survey team that their collective outlook for GDP growth over the next four quarters has risen to 1.8% from 1.3% in late spring. In addition, the number of respondents who think GDP growth will turn negative was nearly cut in half to 13.6%—a move that likely shaped their similarly improved hiring intentions for what remains of 2025.
A global dip and a changing outlook on AI and jobs
That view of U.S. domestic GDP growth isn’t reflected in the newly released 2025 Global CEO Outlook from KPMG—but it also doesn’t appear to matter very much. The professionals at that firm noted business leaders reported a dip in their outlook for the world economy, while 79% of them said they are confident or very confident in their companies’ growth outlook.
“Despite the turbulence, business leaders feel well-equipped to navigate what has become a persistently disruptive business environment,” the KPMG team wrote. “Change and challenge have become the ‘new normal’ and leaders are rising to the occasion.”
Much of what constitutes “change” these days involves AI, and KPMG’s report shows that leadership teams have tackled deployment scenarios with gusto and are producing results. A year ago, KPMG’s pros said, 63% of respondents thought they would generate a return on their AI investments somewhere between three and five years out. This summer, two-thirds of them said they expect an ROI by 2028—and nearly 70% are spending between 10% and 20% of their budgets on AI projects.
Grant Thornton’s Melville said the technology is making for “a very big conversation” among finance leaders, who are rapidly homing in on how their peers are using it, how they can effectively deploy it and how they can train their people to quickly get the most out of it. That means, he and his colleagues wrote in their Q3 report, that “the idea that AI might replace workers is no longer unspoken among business leaders, who once were quiet about the topic in hopes of calming concerns of their employees.”
It's rapidly become clear that the workforce—at individual companies and collectively across the economy—is changing and will change further. It’s unlikely that leaders will suddenly slash 10% or more of their teams and Melville said most of the executives he works with can’t yet be precise with predictions about the "how" of that change. Still, the gains that AI is delivering will flow into other corporate dynamics very soon.
“Any executives thinking through how their workforce will look have to think about how to capture that productivity,” he said.
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
Senior Editor
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has been in business journalism since the mid-1990s and writes about public companies, markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications, focusing on IndustryWeek, FleetOwner, Oil & Gas Journal, T&D World and Healthcare Innovation. He also curates the twice-monthly Market Moves Strategy newsletter that showcases Endeavor stories on strategy, leadership and investment and contributes to other Market Moves newsletters.
With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati in 1997, initially covering retail and the courts before shifting to banking, insurance and investing. He later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal before being named editor of the Nashville Post in early 2008. He led a team that helped grow the Post's online traffic more than fivefold before joining Endeavor in September 2021.