• President Trump smashed the pause button on some of his tariffs before big banks careened into a head-to-head with analysts about their earnings guidance on Friday. The president’s announcement on social media had an immediate impact on markets, with the Nasdaq ending the day up 12%, while the S&P 500 rose more than 9%. Individual stocks climbed: Delta Air Lines lifted 23%, Nvidia rose more than 18%, and Apple, which saw more than $770 billion in value evaporate after concerns about the retail price of iPhones, closed the day up 15%.

Stock markets erupted with a torrential surge of optimism following President Donald Trump’s post on Truth Social pausing some of his tariffs, and comments from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reassuring the world that the U.S. is not embroiled in a trade war. 

Despite the brief respite from the carnage of the week, though, a chilling uncertainty looms over the next 90 days. 

“Every portfolio manager is trying to figure out whether you can draw a straight line to future negotiations,’” said Jake Schurmeier, portfolio manager at Harbor Capital and a former member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Markets Group. “We get another 90 days before we have to do this song and dance again.”

To level set: President Trump announced a bevy of tariffs during a Rose Garden address last week that had been telegraphed since his campaign. Investors had priced in tariffs and the subsequent impact on trade policy, but the extent of the tariffs was greater than expected. Markets plummeted in the trading days after Trump’s announcement. The word “recession”—typically avoided at all costs—became a talking point, and the chances of the U.S. stumbling headlong into one rose, according to JPMorgan Chase, whose CEO Jamie Dimon announced publicly that a recession was a “likely outcome” after the tariff tumult. Trump said Dimon’s comments factored into his decision to issue the partial pause on Wednesday.  

Following Trump’s announcement, markets staged a gravity-defying rally, with the Nasdaq ending the day up 12%, while the S&P 500 rose more than 9%. 

Michael Orlando, executive director in the J.P. Morgan Center for Commodities and Energy Management at the University of Colorado Denver, told Fortune the tariff pause is a relief, mostly from uncertainty, which had continued to weigh on equity prices. But the bigger development, which emerged over the weekend, was that U.S. Treasuries “stopped looking like a safe harbor in a time of uncertainty and started looking like a risky bet, themselves,” Orlando said. 

“I think this tariff ‘cooling off’ period did a lot to dispel concerns that maybe the President doesn’t understand the idea of gains from trade,” Orlando added.

But the question remains: What happens next?

‘Ample Air Cover’

First, there’s the consideration as to whether the damage from tariffs will be lasting, along with the cost of pervasive economic uncertainty, said Schurmeier. All the planning around capital expenditures and major strategic moves just got tossed out the window because there is no certainty, he said. 

The portfolio manager noted there will be critical signs to look out for during earnings calls between major companies and analysts this week, particularly regarding how CEOs and CFOs plan to grapple with questions about tariffs—and anything else that might cause disruptions.

“This provides ample air cover to drop any bad news,” said Schurmeier. “Any bad news you have, get it out this quarter.”

Money managers will also be watching to see how big bank leaders, such as Dimon, talk about how their clients are responding, perspective on M&A activity, and guidance about their willingness to provide credit, Schurmeier added. Right now, it’s too early to talk about potential loan losses, but other topics will be indicative about whether there’s stronger business sentiment. 

“Whatever they say will be pretty instructive,” said Schurmeier. 

China: From 104% to 125%

The other major looming issue is China. 

The next few weeks are likely to zero in on the impact of possible further retaliation after China pledged to “fight to end” even before Trump raised tariffs on the country to 125%. Trump countered with no pause on China tariffs, and instead hiked them because of China’s “lack of respect,” the president wrote on social media. 

Idanna Appio, a portfolio manager at First Eagle Investments and former deputy head of the global economic analysis department at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said the situation with China is extremely serious, from tariff levels to the potential for a broken trading relationship between the world’s two largest economies. 

It’s unclear if Trump’s latest move will push China toward negotiation on tariffs or if economic tensions will reach such a level that China becomes more confrontational in the geopolitical sphere, Appio said. 

“Given the sharp escalation and the economic friction between the U.S. and China, which is obviously not good for the global economy, does that spillover to the geopolitical side?” she said. “If they feel they have nothing left to lose…does China start to push into other domains? I hope the answer to that is, ‘No.’”

Economic Outlook: ‘Very Tenuous’ 

Beyond what might happen with China, the U.S. economy remains in a “very tenuous place,” Appio said. 

She put a recession into her forecast but Appio said she isn’t sure if she’s removing it at this stage because of looming uncertainty even if tariffs aren’t as large as those initially announced last week. Plus, there’s still room for further tariff action and few uncertainties have been truly eliminated at this stage. 

“One fear I have is that we wind up repeating this whole exercise in 90 days,” said Appio. “It’s been a roller coaster ride, to say the least.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

I’ve been around long enough to see every major shift in workplace technology spark the same reaction: panic.

I saw it when we moved work to the cloud. When we started using AI in search and knowledge discovery. When we replaced spreadsheets with shared docs. And now, with the rise of AI agents, I’m seeing it again.

The question always comes fast: Will this technology take my job?

Here’s my answer for today’s version of this existential question: AI agents won’t replace you. But someone using them might.

That’s not a threat—it’s a wake-up call. Because this generation of AI isn’t about automation. It’s about amplification and impact.

Meet the new MVP of work: The AI glue guy

To explain what I mean, let me borrow an analogy from sports. I’ve long admired athletes like former NBA swingman Andre Iguodala—those who don’t lead the league in stats but are absolutely essential to their teams. They rebound. They defend. They communicate. They make the players around them better. That’s why Iggy was named the NBA Finals MVP in 2015—he did the gritty, overlooked work that held the Warriors together.

In basketball, they call that kind of player the “glue guy.”

That’s what AI agents are at work. They’re the glue guys of the modern team—not the stars, but the silent difference-makers. They fill in the gaps. They keep everything connected. They help people accomplish their work faster, more accurately, and better.

Take one of the companies my team at GrowthLoop recently partnered with—Allegro, widely considered the “Amazon of Eastern Europe.” It’s using a tool of ours that’s powered by agentic AI and sits on top of its data cloud. Instead of jumping between disconnected tools, its marketers now work alongside a team of specialized AI agents: one understands data, another builds optimized journeys, others surface insights, suggest audiences, and brainstorm campaign ideas.

All of it happens from a single interface, like a command center for modern marketing. The agents don’t replace the humans—they empower them. The result? A 2X lift in return on ad spend. A 60% jump in gross merchandise value. A nearly 70% drop in cost per click.

That’s not job replacement. That’s job transformation.

And the best part? It’s just getting started.

We’ve seen this dynamic play out before. At my previous company, we introduced Glean—a tool I helped launch that transformed how teams discover knowledge inside their companies—and it was the same story. People feared overload. But what they found was a faster path to the right information, and more time for real problem-solving. That’s the story of every major breakthrough in tech: first, fear. Then, productivity. Then, progress.

What makes AI agents feel different is how fast they’re evolving. These models don’t just automate left-brain tasks like math and scheduling anymore. They now handle right-brain tasks—creativity, language, strategy. But the real breakthrough is their ability to reason in real time and personalize results. These agents aren’t just tools—they’re strategic partners. They process data faster than any human, spot patterns we’d miss, and suggest options we might never consider.

We’ve already seen this shift across industries. Developers are using AI to generate code and spot bugs faster. Customer support teams are delivering personalized answers in seconds because agents are stitching together past interactions in the background. Creative teams are testing and iterating on campaigns without waiting weeks for results.

None of this makes AI scary or removes the need for humans. It eliminates the drudgery.

Look inside any large company and you’ll find a mountain of work that’s pure busywork. Layers of reporting, status updates, and manual coordination consume massive amounts of time—what Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index calls “work about work,” which eats up to 60% of a person’s day. All of those hours add up to huge amounts of lost time. It’s modern-day “TPS reports” (from Office Space) on repeat. But AI agents change that. Imagine if, for every project, a crisp three-bullet summary was auto-generated and shared weekly—no chasing, no compiling. Now your product manager can spend time with customers, not decks. Your marketing lead can focus on creative, not cobbling data from five tools. These agents aren’t stealing jobs; they’re freeing people to do the work that actually matters.

Are some jobs going to change? Absolutely. But show me an era when they didn’t. The top jobs today didn’t even exist 20 years ago. Prompt engineer. Data strategist. AI agent supervisor. There’s a whole new category of work emerging around how we guide, govern, and collaborate with these systems.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, especially with how fast things are moving. But speed doesn’t have to mean chaos. In fact, AI agents can help tame the chaos, especially for companies buried under decades of siloed data, legacy tools, and fragmented workflows. They’re the connective tissue, the missing link. The glue.

And here’s the thing about glue guys: They don’t ask for the spotlight. They just make the team better.

The future of work is a team sport

If you’re a leader reading this, I encourage you to start getting familiar with new technology where humans and agents collaborate, much the same way as human teams do today. Ask yourself what are the low-value, repetitive tasks that no one likes doing.

The workforce is more adaptable than we give it credit for. History shows that when people are given new tools, they find new ways to work. The same will happen here. We’ll invent jobs we haven’t thought of yet. We’ll solve problems we once considered unsolvable. We’ll build teams where everyone, human or agent, plays to their strengths.

If I had 10 seconds in front of every employee at a Fortune 500 company, here’s what I’d say: You’re not going to lose your job to AI agents. You’re going to lose it to someone who knows how to collaborate with them really well. So embrace it. Learn it. Use it to make your work better—and more human. There’s no bounds to human ingenuity.  Agents will help reduce the distance from idea to impact.

Because in this new era of work, the most powerful move you can make is to play like a team. And your team will only benefit from having glue guys.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Read more:

• AI’s job boom? Not before the bust
• When AI builds AI: The next great inventors might not be human
• I’ve spent years helping female founders access capital. Now that they have AI, they might not need to
• Tariffs, AI, and a broken pipeline: The workforce crisis no one’s ready for

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The Internal Revenue Service is projected to lose more than $313 billion in revenue in the coming decade as undocumented workers are poised to pay fewer taxes after the agency struck a deal to share data with U.S. immigration authorities.

The IRS is expected to lose $12 billion in revenue for the remainder of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, according to a report out Tuesday by the Yale Budget Lab. The group estimates unauthorized workers paid about $66 billion in federal taxes in fiscal year 2023, with about two-thirds of that coming from payroll levies.

The Treasury Department—which oversees the IRS—earlier this week reached a deal with the Department of Homeland Security to share taxpayer information in response to law enforcement requests related to migration. While federal officials say the agreement includes safeguards and applies only to criminal matters, it reverses longstanding IRS privacy policies.

The report underscores the role undocumented workers play in paying into Social Security and Medicare benefit programs that they can’t draw from in retirement because of their immigration status. 

“The IRS has historically made clear to the undocumented immigrant population that their tax information is confidential and would not be used in such ways,” the report said. Tax compliance could fall among that group “if they become concerned that filing taxes could expose their personal contact information to law enforcement and be used to facilitate their deportation.”

President Donald Trump has enlisted the IRS and other government agencies in his efforts to crack down on undocumented immigration. He’s vowed to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history, and so far is ramping up raids and encouraging undocumented immigrants to “self-deport.”

The report notes that there’s “considerable uncertainty” around the estimates, as they will depend strongly on the behaviors of undocumented immigrants and their employers. The 10-year loss in revenue could be as low as $147 billion and as high as $479 billion, according to the Budget Lab.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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