The AI story is turning

Welcome to a special edition of Macro Talk, brought to you by FIS. In today’s newsletter, I share three observations from my recent reporting trip to Orlando, where FIS held its annual conference, Emerald.

These insights reveal how jobs and corporate strategies are already changing as AI reshapes businesses.

Macro Talk uncovers the forces shaping the economy and world of work — and how to play them. Help us grow by sharing Macro Talk with friends and colleagues, upgrading to a paid membership, and subscribing to our show on YouTube.

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Commit the acronym FDE to memory, if you haven’t already. It stands for forward-deployed engineer.

One of the hottest jobs in tech right now, FDEs blend software engineering, sales, and consulting. Crucially, they embed inside customers’ organizations to integrate AI into specific business operations or products.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are growing this role aggressively, with the latter partnering with many financial industry giants, including FIS.

Specifically, FIS announced earlier this month that it’s building agentic AI services with Anthropic, beginning with financial crimes monitoring. The relationship — to co-develop tools for FIS’s product suite “from the ground up” — is a “first of its kind,” Himal Makwana, FIS's global head of corporate strategy, told me.

“When FDEs land, they almost work from a blank piece of paper,” he said. “They almost take away all biases [and] misconceptions around how a product or a system actually works, and they design it from first principles.”

After evaluating and documenting every workflow, the engineers use Claude to optimize systems. FIS then helps design the harness — or the control layer — which ensures proper governance, he added.

“We build this agent so it has auditability, traceability that meets bank-grade and regulators’ requirements,” Makwana said.

🏁 The Signal: The FIS-Anthropic partnership presents a model for other companies in highly regulated industries to follow. FIS owns the final IP and maintains the AI agent, according to Makwana. And in sectors like banking and healthcare, that ownership structure is critical for compliance.

▶️ The Play: As co-building arrangements like this multiply, business leaders and workers who understand the co-design process and governance structure will be better positioned for successful integration.

The pace of economic change has been unrelenting since the pandemic. AI has been jet fuel on an already-burning fire.

But no magic détente is on the horizon. And at this point, as former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry said during his keynote at Emerald: "The real risk is that unregulated actors use AI irresponsibly and do it faster than you."

🏁 The Signal: Most industries are scrambling to find revenue-generating AI products or cost-cutting AI efficiencies. Less attention is being paid to unregulated AI across society — including AI-enhanced scams Interpol now says are 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods, McHenry noted.

▶️ The Play: The flip side of that urgency — a theme that ran through Emerald and applies well beyond banking — is what existing institutions have working for them: history and legacy.

"Regulated institutions that know their customers, understand communities, and can be examined, audited, and held accountable — that is not a burden. It's a moat. You can move faster than those that are more loosely regulated, because you're already working through these issues,” McHenry said.

The 1996 film "Jerry Maguire” comes to mind when I picture where we are on the AI timeline. Specifically, it’s the iconic scene where Cuba Gooding Jr. bops around his kitchen half-clothed, egging Tom Cruise on to scream "Show me the money!”

Thirty years on, I see Jerry, the bold, lone sports agent, as the AI giants like Anthropic. He’s realizing he needs Cuba — partners like FIS, or athletes who have been playing the game a long time — to prove his value.

🏁 The Signal: For nearly four years since ChatGPT’s arrival, the AI story has been about AI labs disrupting incumbent businesses — or about the fear of that happening. FIS’s relationship with Anthropic appears to be part of a quieter reversal underway: legacy institutions setting the terms, owning the products, and writing their own narratives.

▶️ The Play:This year's SaaSpocalypse forced companies to get clear on where they excel. For legacy institutions, those areas — navigating compliance, regulation, and existing services infrastructure — are turning out to be exactly what AI deployment requires. Watch for more deals where the incumbents, not the labs, lead.