A survey of economists from the National Association of Business Economics found 46% think reducing the national deficit and debt should be the top policy priority.

That was an uptick from the 43% of respondents who said the same in NABE’s August survey. February’s survey summarized responses from 152 NABE members, 61% of whom also said current fiscal policy is “too stimulative,” marking “the largest share of respondents holding that opinion since the summer of 2018,” the survey’s authors noted.

The business economists surveyed ranked deficit reduction as the Trump administration’s top priority above immigration and healthcare reform, Gregory Daco, EY-Parthenon chief economist and NABE president, said in a statement tied to the survey. The economists favor “a mix of structural measures to boost growth, spending restraint or entitlement reform, and higher taxes to address the fiscal gap,” Daco added.

Keep reading.—NP

It’s a mad dash to build the digital arsenal required for the ongoing AI arms race. Tech companies are trying to quickly build data centers, promising hundreds of billions in capex spending.

Amidst the scramble, experts and industry observers warn of the challenges facing these digital infrastructure projects.

Research firm Sightline Climate noted in a new report that between 30% and 50% of the data centers slated for 2026 are “unlikely to come online before the end of the year.”

Sightline recommended that hyperscalers “distinguish speculative pipeline from executable capacity.” Further, investors and lenders should separate the projects that “remain early-stage announcements” from those that have secured capital, permitting, and tenants, according to the report.

Data centers have become a political hot potato, with politicians, activists, and communities raising concerns over issues like energy usage and environmental impacts.

Keep reading.—AZ

TL;DR: Within 36 hours of one another, Anthropic and OpenAI both made major enterprise pushes. Just days before that, a viral memo imagined how those kinds of moves would hollow out white-collar work (and even be the end of enterprise). Now, investors and executives are caught between embracing AI and wondering if they're accelerating their own obsolescence.

What happened: Yesterday, OpenAI unveiled partnerships with four major consulting firms, including McKinsey and Accenture, to roll out its nascent Frontier enterprise system. The goal: help large organizations deploy AI agents inside existing operations. Anthropic made a parallel move. The company announced it’s expanding plugins for Claude Cowork, adding custom skills—for everything from financial analysis to HR onboarding—to tools their employees already use. But perhaps the most telling detail: It revealed that Claude can now modernize COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still handles 95% of US ATM transactions and underpins IBM's consulting empire.

The enterprise race heats up: Companies spent about $37 billion on generative AI last year, which is roughly triple consumer spending, and that gap is widening. OpenAI is trying to claw back its enterprise revenue share, which has dropped since 2023. Meanwhile, Anthropic already generates most of its revenue from corporate customers and can’t afford to cede that advantage. Google is gaining fast too, selling 8 million paid Gemini Enterprise seats in about four months.

Keep reading on Tech Brew.—WK

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.

• Head of Finance, TAAP at Thomson Reuters
• Chief Accounting Officer at ChristianaCare
• Oracle Cloud Finance Senior Consultant at Deloitte LLP
• Senior Private Banking Associate at Sunflower Bank, N.A
• Global Financial Controls Sr Analyst - AVP at Citi