🌁 Good morning, from the 27th floor of the InterContinental San Francisco, where I watched City Hall light up in blue last night in recognition of World Parkinson’s Day.
I spent the past week sitting down with several tech leaders at HumanX, an AI conference started by the team behind Money20/20. My conversations with Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier, Read AI CEO David Shim, Dataiku CEO Florian Douetteau, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, Glean CEO Arvind Jain, Luma AI COO Caroline Ingeborn, Weka Chief AI Officer Val Bercovici, Nebius GM of Americas Dan Lawrence, and Generation Investment Management Growth Equity’s Jonah Surkes will be published here and on YouTube over the next few weeks.
This week, I’m sticking around the Bay Area and hosting an AI panel during a CEO conference.
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Inside the AI Bubble
The hall outside of the HumanX 2026 main stage. (Photo: Hope King/Macro Talk)
You know that holiday M&M ad where the red M&M and Santa Claus run into each other and exclaim “He does exist!” and “They do exist!” before fainting?
That was me this week at HumanX when I discovered that no one really wanted to talk about negative public sentiment or job loss fears: “The AI bubble does exist!” my brain cried.
What was I thinking? Trying to merge two worlds — one filled with profound optimism around massive global transformation and the other of everyday worries — at a conference with human in its name?
Dataiku CEO Florian Douetteau explained the disconnect: Negative consumer perceptions of AI aren’t directly impacting enterprise sales.
“It’s not an issue in terms of doing business,” he told me this week on the sidelines of the conference.
Maybe I’ve been away from daily tech reporting too long. I think I’ve also forgotten that when I was covering Apple, Facebook, Waymo, Tesla and the like, I was reporting on consumer tech — and consumer tech companies need to react differently to public perception than enterprise companies due to the nature of their business.
But consumers have become savvier. Even if they’re not the end enterprise audience, they see how CEOs are talking about AI in the news. They see how markets react. They live with AI data centers in their backyards. What they don’t yet see is how they’re benefitting.
That race between an “AI that destructs” narrative and an “AI that creates actual economic efficiency, less waste, actual new research” determines public perception, Douetteau said.
“Today, you can’t really say that the positive perception or the AI that creates [story] wins, at least in the public perception,” he said. “It’s — we’ll lose our job before getting new fancy products or cheaper products.”
Wall Street Journal reports that a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that while AI use is growing, 55% of Americans believe more harm than good will come from the technology in their daily lives — up from 44% in a poll last year.
Signal to watch: A unified narrative is emerging.
“Artificial-intelligence companies appear to be organizing around a simple message in the face of rising public anxiety about the negative potential effects of their world-changing technology: We come in peace,” WSJ’s Bradley Olson and Sam Schechner reported this week.
The potential gap: But that may not go far enough. What's lacking is evidence of immediate benefits to daily life.
“AI is not helping a low-income person who's deciding whether to feed their family or do their laundry,” Alex Jekowsky, the co-founder and CEO of Cents, told me in a recent interview.
On alert: Local pushback on data centers has slowed the pace of development in certain locations, putting broader industry growth at risk, as Macro Talk cited last week. Individuals from Sam Altman to local officials are being personally targeted for their roles in the AI boom.
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The most revealing business and economic stories this week
Airlines cut flights and hike prices amid fuel strain. (BBC)
Iran’s “Tehran Toll Booth” in open waters — passage rules and fees for the Strait of Hormuz — sets a precedent for China. (WSJ)
Many Americans say they’re cutting back on personal care services, dining out and groceries, and clothing and home goods purchases as inflation eats into spending power. (CNBC)
The Fed is worried about businesses scaling back on hiring to offset rising costs as overall inflation jumped to 3.3% in March, driven by gasoline prices. (NYT)
PepsiCo’s cash cow brand Frito-Lay resisted cutting snack prices, leading to its first revenue decline in over a decade. (Bloomberg)
KPMG plans to shift routine testing tasks (payroll, accounts receivable, etc.) from human auditors to “orchestration agents” starting with a pilot this summer. (WSJ)
Pfizer and other big drugmakers and investors are turning to Chinese biotechs for innovation. (WSJ)
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon flags geopolitics — notably the war in Ukraine and Iran — as his top macro risk for 2026. (JPMorgan)
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s shareholder letter “reads something like a Kendrick Lamar diss track” about rivals. (Techcrunch)
Some employers are experimenting with in-office work trials to vet candidates. (BI)
Note to Self
People in San Francisco, especially people in the tech industry, if you say you're a journalist, they get really scared…If you mention journalism — I call it the J-word — they will physically walk away from you in conversation.
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Macro Talk’s mission is to help business leaders and early- to mid-career professionals understand the big picture and make decisions about the future. Through this newsletter, the podcast, and live events, Macro Talk uncovers the forces shaping the economy and world of work — and how to play them.
