Another group of CFOs responded to the quarterly survey from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the Richmond and Atlanta branches of the Federal Reserve in a similar way. Early this year, their top concerns were trade/tariffs, labor and the general demand picture. Three months later, labor is the only repeat topic and sitting a distant third to inflation and non-labor costs.

As with the broad economic outlook CFOs gave Grant Thornton, those concerns have eaten into the growth outlook of executives who spoke to the Duke/Fed teams. CFOs told the researchers they expect U.S. real GDP growth to be 1.8% over the next year, down from 2.1% three months earlier. That’s still nowhere near a recession but slow enough to have some of those frowns start to show.

“This continues to feel like the economy that could have been,” Greg Daco, the chief economist at EY-Parthenon, wrote Aug. 26. “Absent the strains from the global trade conflict, tensions in the Middle East and persistent policy uncertainty, the AI-investment surge could well have supported steady growth above 3%.”

AI Refinements and Cost Controls Top Executives’ Wish List

Respondents to PwC’s mid-year update to its CEO Survey weren’t as broadly downbeat as the Grant Thornton audience. In fact, a third of leaders told the firm they’ve grown more confident about growth since late last year while 26% said their confidence has diminished.

But of the more than 350 CEOs who responded to PwC researchers, 26% said that managing their supply chains has become more challenging “to a large or very large extent.” And as that work is bleeding into costs more broadly, a very similar number told the firm that making pricing decisions also have grown quite a bit trickier.

Where to now? Right back, it seems, to the difficult operating environment where many C-suites have been for several years: Countering one disruption after another while tightly managing spending but still investing in targeted growth priorities. Listen these days to a publicly traded company’s leaders address investors and analysts, and the odds are pretty good that you’ll hear the code word “dynamic” at least once.

As Grant Thornton’s pros put it: “While CFOs are brimming with ambition at a time of transformational change, they’re concerned about their ability to execute that transformation.” Building resilience into your organization is key, but truly succeeding requires going beyond becoming adaptable.

One lever leadership teams know they can pull is the one labeled “More With Less,” a habit we wrote about earlier this year. In this summer’s Grant Thornton survey, no fewer than 87% of CFOs said they are planning for more cost cuts of some sort. That was a 15-point jump from the first quarter.

AI will play a role in those plans but, based on PwC’s latest survey, executive teams shouldn’t put all that many expense-cutting eggs in that basket. Only 28% of CEOs said their AI investments have already produced cost savings while one in eight said costs have actually risen. And a mere 9% told PwC they’ve achieved AI nirvana by both trimming spending and increasing revenues thanks to AI.

The advisors at PwC say there’s a lot of value to be found in pushing AI “upstream” and having tools more quickly flag changes in inventories, input costs or suppliers’ health. The key, they say, is to embed AI systems broadly and strategically so that teams can more efficiently get to grips with these inflation and supply-chain bugaboos that just won’t go away.

“Companies that can combine AI capability with resilience, and human judgment, will be better placed to see changes earlier, test options faster, and coordinate responses across the business,” the PwC team wrote. “Companies that treat AI as a series of isolated tools may find it harder to turn insight into action.”