Good morning. As AI continues to revolutionize business, companies are fundamentally rethinking their workforce strategies for the decade ahead—and exploring new options.

This topic came up during a panel session at the Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore conference last week. Jess O’Reilly, Workday’s general manager for the ASEAN business, reflected on how a major Southeast Asian bank is considering a skills-based approach to employment.

“I was in Thailand a couple of weeks ago with a huge bank, and they’re really looking at their 10-year strategy and saying, ‘We don’t even know if our people are going to have a traditional full-time job anymore,’” O’Reilly said. Instead of planning around fixed job roles, the bank is considering pivoting to what it calls a “skills economy.” Here, every project or initiative is treated like a gig assignment—team members are chosen for their specific skill sets relevant to the project at hand.

What’s particularly notable is the bank’s approach to continuous learning and reskilling. O’Reilly explained that there’s always room for someone new to build their skills within these project teams. For example, the bank might set aside 1% of a project team for employees looking to reskill—people who say, “I don’t have these skills yet, but I have experience in adjacent areas and I want to learn.” By doing so, the company ensures that fresh talent is constantly cycling into critical roles.

O’Reilly posed the question: How do we use AI not just for automation, but as the backbone for identifying and matching skills with project needs? She argued that AI can help organizations inventory existing skills, identify opportunities, and make it easier to create space for upskilling and onboarding new talent through gig-style projects.

Perhaps a gig-based workplace would also inject variety into the day-to-day. And many companies are considering moving away from job-centric structures and toward a skills-focused approach, according to Deloitte’s report, “Becoming an AI-enabled, skills-based organization.” The firm finds that companies integrating both AI and skills-based approaches will be better positioned to predict talent gaps, improve talent placement, retain high performers, and reduce mis-hires.

AI and skills-based approaches could also mean that entry-level positions aren’t eliminated by automation—instead, new hires would be selected for specific skill sets that can be expanded and developed.

Skill requirements for jobs are constantly changing, noted Peiying Chua, head economist for APAC at LinkedIn, during the panel session. “For entry-level workers, this presents the opportunity to upskill and work on different sets of abilities—to build human-centric skills, agility, and creativity,” she said.

Sheryl Estrada
[email protected]

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Good morning. Traditionally, many CFOs viewed marketing as a cost center, but more are now seeing it as a growth accelerator.

AT&T (No. 37 on the Fortune 500) illustrates how finance and marketing can work together to support business expansion. I sat down with Pascal Desroches, AT&T’s senior EVP and CFO, and Kellyn Smith Kenny, chief marketing and growth officer, to learn more.

CFOs often have a reputation for saying “no” to new marketing ideas, but Desroches has taken a different approach in his career.

“You can’t be in an organization where everybody’s terrified of the CFO—it just doesn’t work,” he told me. Desroches recalled advice from his mentor, the late media executive Dick Parsons: “As executives, we have to leave our door open, even for bad news, because it gives us an opportunity to problem-solve.”

Kenny agreed. “I’m working with Pascal to massively overhaul and transform the digital experience for customers,” she said. “None of that would be possible if Pascal was just saying, ‘No,’” she quipped. Desroches approaches every conversation, decision, and investment with an enterprise mindset—how do we help the company succeed? “But he also holds people accountable, which is exactly what you need your CFO to do,” Kenny added.

A focus on the customer

Desroches credits his customer-focused perspective to his 20 years in the media industry prior to becoming CFO of AT&T in 2021. Understanding and marketing to consumers was essential, he said.

AT&T’s marketing team provides insights that shape new products and services. Increasingly, customers prefer a single provider for wireless and broadband, Desroches said. “Kellyn and her team championed this, and our investments reflect their feedback,” he said.

Kenny works closely with both Desroches and is a direct report to AT&T CEO John Stankey, solving problems for each business unit within budget, he explained. “Her ability to deliver results within financial constraints has been incredibly impressive to watch,” Desroches noted.

Before joining AT&T in 2020, Kenny served as global CMO at Hilton and held senior roles at Uber, Capital One, and Microsoft. “In my bones and in my DNA, I’m always thinking about how any marketing investment will drive the company’s financial performance,” she said.

Shared metrics for growth

Research backs the CFO–CMO collaboration. A recent McKinsey analysis of Fortune 500 executive teams, based on publicly available data, found that companies with a single growth-focused executive, like a CMO, grow up to 2.3 times faster. Successful marketing teams use shared KPIs to demonstrate financial impact, making it easier for CFOs to support new initiatives.

One of Desroches and Kenny’s joint projects—the AT&T Guarantee, introduced in January—promises reliable connectivity, fair deals, and prompt service. If AT&T falls short, it takes corrective action, such as bill credits.

“We anticipated a certain amount of credits, but the actual need has been lower,” Kenny said. She and Desroches credit AT&T employees for reducing outages and keeping customer wait times under five minutes.

Since launching the AT&T Guarantee, the company has seen higher net promoter scores (NPS) following network disruptions. Finance and marketing teams jointly track NPS, “brand love,” and the share of customers who bundle multiple services. Other shared metrics include customer lifetime value, average revenue per account, and churn—which is decreasing among customers who’ve experienced issues, Kenny said.

AT&T also reported on Wednesday that it added 401,000 net postpaid phone connections in Q2, reflecting strong customer growth.

A finance person sitting at your leadership team table, “who is fluent in the practice of marketing and growth, goes a long way,” Kenny said.

Have a good weekend.

Sheryl Estrada
[email protected]

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of AT&T

Good morning. Agentic AI could fundamentally reshape businesses in less than three years.

At the Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore conference this week, Sapna Chadha, VP for Southeast Asia and South Asia Frontier at Google, explained that AI agents are evolving beyond single-task assistants. AI agents take powerful language models and equip them with tools, enabling them to carry out multi-step or complex actions—not just single isolated tasks, she explained. It’s about stitching capabilities together so that agents can act on behalf of users in increasingly sophisticated ways, she said.

By 2028, it is expected that almost 33% of all enterprise software will have agentic AI built in, automating nearly 15% of day-to-day work and workflows, Chadha said.

Vivek Luthra, Accenture’s Asia Pacific data and AI lead, told Fortune‘s Jeremy Kahn that clients are experiencing three stages of agentic AI adoption:

• AI Assist: Agents help employees with individual tasks.
• AI Adviser: Agents provide insights to empower better decisions.
• Autonomation: Agents autonomously manage entire workflows.

Luthra noted that, while most companies are still in the “assist” or “adviser” stages, Accenture is already observing fully autonomous processes in select strategic functions.

Within Accenture, AI agents are deployed internally across HR, finance, marketing, and IT. Externally, industries such as life sciences use agents to speed up regulatory approvals, while sectors such as insurance and banking leverage them for fraud management.

Accenture’s recent “front-runners” report surveyed 2,000 industry executives, finding that about 8% of companies have truly scaled up their AI adoption. “AI is very high on the agenda, but companies are still figuring out how to scale it,” Luthra noted.

Chadha shared that agentic AI features appear in both Google’s consumer products and enterprise solutions. She highlighted Project Astra as Google’s vision for a universal AI agent capable of handling diverse tasks, from diagnosing bike repairs via camera to initiating support calls.

As agentic systems become more powerful and autonomous, the need for responsible AI and improved safety standards increases.

Google is working with trusted testers and moving carefully, Chadha said. Key risks could include agents going rogue or sharing sensitive data without authorization, she explained. That’s why Google is setting clear guidelines and developing toolkits for safe deployment, including standards, she said. The company recently release a white paper, titled “Google’s Approach for Secure AI Agents.”

Both panelists highlighted the importance of transparency and user control. Chadha advised that agentic platforms must clearly communicate actions and request user approval at key decision points.  “You wouldn’t want to have a system that can do this fully without a human in the loop,” Chadha said.

Regulation is also critical: “It’s too important not to regulate,” Chadha insisted, calling for robust protocols and industry standards.

Sheryl Estrada
[email protected]

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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