AI Just Showed Up in Guidance

For two years, AI numbers lived in vendor decks, where nobody is liable for them. In the last two and a half weeks they moved onto earnings calls and into forward guidance, where a chief executive says them out loud to investors and gets measured against them later.

In this episode, Stephen Forte covers:

• The backfill ratio — WTW's chief executive Carl Hess told investors that standardization, process improvement and automation are letting the firm backfill roles globally at a rate of nine for every ten leavers. Alongside it: roughly $400 million in run-rate savings on an investment of about $625 million, and a target operating margin near thirty percent by the end of 2028.
• Half the revenue, and the contract worth copying — Adecco said fifty percent of group revenue is now enabled by AI agents, by its own definition, ahead of its target, and raised the goal to seventy percent by the end of 2026. The detail worth stealing is a fixed-cost contract with its AI provider for unlimited volume. A staffing company solved the AI cost problem through procurement rather than architecture.
• A bank putting a date on it — Customers Bancorp told investors it intends to move its efficiency ratio from about fifty percent today to the low forties by 2027, largely by raising revenue per employee, and is building the software itself rather than buying plug-ins.
• The fine print — With about sixty-two percent of the S&P 500 reported, blended earnings growth of roughly forty-seven percent falls to twenty-eight point eight percent once Amazon and Alphabet are excluded, and most of their contribution was unrealized gains on stakes in Anthropic and SpaceX rather than operations. Block posted a record twenty-seven percent margin six months after cutting more than forty percent of its staff.

Plus the sorting rule that separates a cost programme from a growth programme: every AI number is a cost avoided, a head not replaced, or a dollar earned. Only the last one compounds, because the first two are subtraction and subtraction has a floor.

Sources:

• WTW Q2 2026 earnings call transcript — The Motley Fool
• Adecco Group Q2 2026 earnings call highlights — Yahoo Finance
• Customers Bancorp Q2 2026 earnings call summary — Yahoo Finance
• The AI-driven boom in profits comes with some caveats — Axios
• Block beat earnings expectations after cutting 40% of its workforce — Quartz

The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.