The legal risks facing companies in 2026 present a shifting, and in some ways unexpected, focus for CEOs. Overall dispute volumes are plateauing—but the cases that do go to trial are producing much higher verdicts. Regulatory actions have shifted with state regulators filling enforcement gaps left by federal agencies pulling back. Reverse discrimination claims are rising, reshaping how companies need to think about their diversity programs and hiring practices. And the AI tools companies adopted to drive efficiency are generating a new category of liability. In January, Norton Rose Fulbright released its annual Litigation Trends Survey, which revealed that only 29 percent of in-house legal leaders felt “very prepared” for what was coming in 2026—down from 46 percent just a year ago. One-third of the way through 2026, it seems that in-house leaders’ consternation may have been well founded, as 2026 has already demonstrated the unpredictability in where, what and how much litigation companies face.

2026 began with state data privacy statutes taking effect in Indiana, Kentucky and Rhode Island, and AI statutes taking effect in California, Texas and Illinois. Three weeks later, the EEOC rescinded its guidance on harassment in the workplace and returned greater litigation oversight to the EEOC chair, who prioritizes ending “unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination” and “anti-American national origin discrimination,” among other priorities. In April, a Texas jury awarded $1.6 billion to the family of two men killed in a workplace explosion. And numerous instances of hallucinated cases appearing in legal briefing have drawn attention to the potential for professionals to improperly use artificial intelligence at work. In other words, the headlines are full of news stories confirming the concerns of corporate counsel.

Here are five of the most pressing litigation risks for CEOs and their leadership teams right now, and what to do about them.

1. Cybersecurity and data privacy: understanding the convergence of class actions, multi-state enforcement and vendor risks

To start the year, 38 percent of companies surveyed said their legal exposure in cybersecurity and data privacy had grown over the past year, and 82 percent reported that state attorneys general are ramping up enforcement as federal agencies pull back.

Companies face lawsuits on multiple fronts: vendor disputes over data handling, shareholder lawsuits tied to cyber incidents, False Claims Act whistleblower claims, and tracking-technology litigation. Cyber/privacy class actions increased in 2025 (40 percent vs. 32 percent in 2024), and 74 percent reported plaintiffs using “mass arbitration”—filing hundreds of individual arbitration demands to overwhelm companies with filing fees.

With state privacy laws proliferating and attorneys general coordinating enforcement, companies face regulatory scrutiny from multiple directions. Mass arbitration filing fees alone can exceed traditional class action defense costs.

Consider the following options to mitigate risk:

• Address “compliance drift” proactively. When policies fall behind evolving legal requirements, litigation risk increases. Compliance risk related to evolving cybersecurity and data privacy requirements and regulations is the top driver of expected cyber exposure (66 percent) this year, followed by attacker sophistication (57 percent) and AI-related challenges (50 percent).
• Establish cyber due diligence for vendors and acquisitions. Require cybersecurity certifications and contractual audit rights. Third-party breaches can create liability for your company.
• Prepare for multi-state enforcement. Map your customer footprint to state AG priorities and ensure incident response plans account for multi-state notification requirements.
• Go beyond paper compliance. Use technical tools like network traffic analysis to identify over-collection or data leakage that policy reviews won’t catch.
• Revisit arbitration clauses. Calculate mass-arbitration filing-fee exposure and consider fee caps, carve-outs or bellwether procedures (resolving sample cases first to guide settlement).

2. “Nuclear” and “thermonuclear” verdicts: what they are, why they matter and how they’re changing litigation strategy

Nuclear verdicts (over $10 million) and “thermonuclear verdicts” (over $100 million) are reshaping litigation risk assessments. From the report: 64 percent of survey respondents report higher settlement demands as a result of the “nuclear verdict” trend, 53 percent cite increased litigation costs, and 45 percent say plaintiffs are less willing to settle.

About half of those surveyed expect verdict amounts (49 percent) and settlements (48 percent) to keep rising in 2026, with ripple effects including higher insurance premiums and increased use of jury consultants.

To reduce nuclear verdict risk, consider the following:

• Develop a comprehensive strategy early. Regularly reassess your valuation of cases. Invest in jury research during initial assessment to inform early settlement and trial staffing decisions. Test case themes with focus groups, encourage candid internal feedback and be ready to pivot as evidence develops.
• Budget for risk mitigation. Nuclear-verdict concern correlates with earlier settlement negotiations, more consultants and heightened board/executive involvement, so plan accordingly. Update your litigation budgeting templates to include trial consultant fees, settlement authority matrices and board reporting milestones.
• Tie trial-risk planning to staffing reality. Implement case assessment protocols (regular updates, feedback loops, off-ramp strategies, escalation procedures, upstream reporting) to avoid ad hoc decision-making under pressure. A standardized high-stakes case assessment protocol ensures consistent quality even when your team is stretched thin.

3. State enforcement surge after Chevron: what the end of agency deference means for your company

Changing federal enforcement priorities are creating uncertainty. While 39 percent of respondents expected federal regulatory investigations to increase in 2026, the bigger story is at the state level: 82 percent reported increased state enforcement activity as state attorneys general step in to fill gaps left by federal agencies.

In 2024, the Supreme Court overturned “Chevron deference,” which had required courts to defer to agencies’ statutory interpretations. As a result, 55 percent said this development increased the number of lawsuits involving regulatory matters in 2025, while 63 percent say companies now have greater incentive to litigate and 55 percent adjusted internal compliance processes.

To lower enforcement risks, evaluate these action items:

• Create a “state AG heat map.” Track which attorneys general are investigating your industry. Pattern recognition provides early warning of enforcement waves.
• Rebuild compliance documentation for judicial review. In the absence of Chevron deference, courts review agencies’ interpretation of statutes independently. Compliance documentation should withstand scrutiny under both existing administrative guidance and potential judicial review of the relevant statutes.
• Monitor shifting federal priorities by agency and topic. Enforcement priorities now vary significantly across agencies. Review your regulatory risk exposure quarterly and shift monitoring resources to match the areas where enforcement is most active.

4. Employment litigation evolves: navigating DEI scrutiny, reverse-discrimination claims, accommodations and leave law complexity

Employment and labor litigation remains the second most common area of disputes (34 percent of respondents experienced it). It ranked second for both increased exposure in 2025 (31 percent) and expected increases in 2026 (30 percent). Three key drivers are reshaping this area: (1) increased scrutiny of workplace diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs; (2) growth in “reverse discrimination” claims-where employees allege they were disadvantaged because of their race, gender or other characteristics-particularly after the Supreme Court’s June 2025 Ames decision; and (3) more disputes over disability accommodations.

Paid sick leave and family leave disputes are also rising sharply as a source of litigation (36 percent of respondents cited it in 2026 vs. 24 percent in 2025). This reflects the growing “patchwork” of leave laws, with multiple states and cities expanding or enacting new leave requirements in 2025-creating a compliance maze for multi-state employers.

Companies should consider the following options to lower their employment-related risks:

• Treat employment policies as litigation controls. Review and update employee handbooks, manager training programs and arbitration agreements to reflect today’s risk environment. Reassess non-solicitation and non-competition agreements. These documents will be scrutinized if litigation arises.
• Strengthen your accommodations process. Standardize “interactive process” documentation and remote-work criteria. Every request should trigger a documented, good-faith response.
• Build a leave-law compliance matrix. Maintain a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction leave matrix with payroll and HR triggers. This is especially advisable as states simultaneously expand and roll back leave laws.
• Review programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion now. Before litigation arises, audit your diversity, equity and inclusion programs in light of emerging and evolving guidance from state and federal authorities.

5. AI enters the litigation landscape: governance challenges and opportunities extending beyond IT to legal operations, intellectual property and product liability

Companies are embracing AI tools while grappling with new risks. More than 60 percent of respondents now use customized generative AI (tools that create text, images or code) and agentic AI (tools that can take actions autonomously). Yet 59 percent say managing litigation risks from AI has been challenging. The regulatory landscape is evolving rapidly.

AI risk extends beyond how your company uses AI internally. Vendors may use your company’s data to train AI models in ways that create legal exposure. Product liability theories are emerging against AI platforms, including claims that AI systems are defectively designed or fail to adequately warn users of risks. On the intellectual property front, AI creates new questions about who owns AI-generated content and who qualifies as an “inventor” for patent purposes. Technology companies report the highest IP exposure (37 percent in 2025), and smaller tech firms are particularly focused on AI product liability risk (47 percent).

Consider the following options to lower AI-related dispute exposure:

• Establish litigation-ready AI governance. Vet internal and vendor tools, set “circle of trust” rules, implement policies and procedures, and continuously train and reinforce across stakeholders. Your AI governance framework should address data inputs, model transparency, human oversight and vendor due diligence—with clear audit trails.
• Update outside counsel AI guidelines. Specify permitted tools, confidentiality requirements and quality controls to prevent issues like “hallucinated” cases in briefs.
• Factor litigation funding into case assessments. Third-party funding is increasing, particularly by fueling patent lawsuits by non-practicing entities. Consider this dynamic and the potential for increased patent disputes when assessing budgeting, legal staffing, and case risk.

How to operationalize all five trends with limited resources

The common thread is the need to do more with less:

1. Build protocols and eliminate accountability gaps and blindspots. With preparedness declining and leaner in-house litigation teams, create case assessment and management protocols for litigation matters. Craft, and regularly update, response playbooks for cyber incidents, accommodations and regulatory inquiries. Stress test those response playbooks with tabletop exercises.

2. Consolidate work with trusted outside counsel who know your business. Companies spend an average of $2.4 million annually on litigation, with 56 percent going to outside counsel. Organizations are responding by consolidating: 62 percent now use just one–five law firms (up from 55 percent in 2024). Concentrating work with fewer, well-aligned firms can improve efficiency and reduce costs.

3. Prioritize prevention. The most common litigation prevention tools are tightening contract language and providing employee training. Reassess language in contracts (particularly non-compete and non-solicitation agreements), review indemnification provisions and evaluate the appropriateness of your insurance coverage. Invest in contract improvements and compliance tools that reduce exposure before disputes arise-prevention is almost always cheaper than defense.

The current litigation environment rewards preparation. While dispute volumes may be plateauing, risk is concentrating in areas where impact is severe and the landscape is evolving rapidly. CEOs and in-house legal teams who build systematic approaches to these five trends, backed by repeatable playbooks and disciplined resource allocation, will be better positioned to manage litigation when it arrives—and to prevent it in the first place.

Kate Gulliver has been Wayfair's CFO for four years. But she has effectively worked for five different companies under the same roof. There was a story of a pre-IPO toddler, a super-growth rocket ship, a COVID-19 boom, a post-COVID-19 hangover, and now a pivot to growth. Add to this six years of running a human resources function, and you have one of the more unusual and profitable executive trajectories in American business.

She shared what she learned at the CFO Leadership Council's 2026 Spring Leadership Conference in Boston.

Survival reveals everything. When Wayfair finally decided to turn a profit, every decision boiled down to one question. “Will this help us achieve our goals?'' It turns out that lack of choice is a strength of leadership.

“We didn't have a choice. It was a matter of survival for the business. In that sense, I think a lot of us who had been there for a long time actually benefited from the transition because we all felt so strongly about the business and its ability to survive that we were willing to do whatever it took to do everything. We moved towards that goal. And that made the decision very clear, because we knew we had to get there, we had set a date where we had to get there, and all other decisions were made for that one goal.”

Simple compression trumps sophisticated compression. Wayfair ties almost everyone's compensation to overall performance, rather than team or region-level goals. It may sound counterintuitive, but Gulliver says this is what allows for rapid pivots, with no one fighting to defend a goal that is going into the sunset.

“We've deviated from that from time to time and come back again. Whenever we've tried to achieve a goal that's actually very team-specific, that's how we're motivated, but really we're all ultimately motivated toward the same goal. Most people… We don't want to keep in mind all these little different goals that are being adjusted. They want to work collaboratively. And if each team has their own goals, we can't pivot and change them separately.”

Finance belongs to operations, not above them. She jokes that Gulliver's strategic finance team is so embedded in the business that sometimes it's hard to tell who they're working for. Her advice for CFOs looking for more influence is: “Spend real-time time in operational roles.”

“I always say go into business, manage a small P&L or get into an operational role somewhere and volunteer to run another department or geographic region or whatever, because you get a sense of what's actually doable. The solution is that it's greatly enhanced by spending time in an operational role. When I was in consulting and private equity, I was recommending things and I was like, oh my gosh, I had no idea how difficult operations were.”

Repeat the message until you get bored. Then continue. Wayfair executives have been hammering home the same message for months as it seeks to improve profitability. When finally someone asked if it could be changed, the answer was “No, not yet.”

Staying connected at all levels of the organization, whether it's warehouse visits, store tours, or spending time with junior staff, is the secret to repetition. “I think the biggest thing is something that we as senior leaders tend to let go of a little bit because our daily lives are so busy. It's really important for leaders to actually interact and engage with their frontline teams in addition to getting their message across.”

“I meet with people from all parts of the company. I spend time with junior and mid-level people. I love talking to interns. The more leadership is involved at all levels and everyone is on the same message, the more it helps advance that mission.”

About AI: Data cleanup remains the real work. Wayfair has been using machine learning in its pricing model for years. The move to generative AI is more recent, with early wins coming when the data was already clean. For example, in an automated audit of transportation costs, small errors across millions of transactions can quickly add up.

But Gulliver was candid about how that promise has yet to materialize. “What we haven't seen the fruits of yet is that there's still a lot of data cleanup going on across the business to enable those early wins.” Initially, there was a lot of hope that AI would solve it by just dumping the data into a data lake, but “we just haven't seen it yet.”

Choose people's roles, not their titles. Gulliver's career advice goes against most conventional thinking. She chose her next move primarily based on who she worked for, rather than the scope of the role or the title that came with it.

She further narrows it down to two relationships that are more important to CFOs than any other. “I choose roles primarily based on the people I've worked with in the past, and it has very little to do with title. For a CFO, the relationship with the CEO is a relationship, and the second relationship is probably the board and the key members of the board involved.”

“I’ve been very fortunate to work with a wide range of people,” she said. “But I always chose the role to work with them, not so much for the role itself but for the opportunity to partner with them.”

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Jennifer Langton has built a career through strategic pivots. Beginning in the finance sector, eventually earning the CFO seat at Atari, Langton switched gears for an operational role as senior vice president of player health innovation at the NFL. Now, she’s become a strategic advisor to organizations undergoing transformations of their own.

She credits her time as an athlete for the mindset that helped her succeed, no matter the title. At 13, she was the only female player on an all boy’s lacrosse team, and went on to join the Youth Hall of Fame in Long Island and play for a national championship team at the University of Virginia. “That had changed me, breaking barriers, but my own identity, understanding my skills and how to play them forward. That certainly helped me in the many years ahead,” says Langton.

In conversation with host Jack McCullough, Langton digs into her journey to leadership, her most recent career pivot and how to inspire change in a digital world. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly trimmed and edited for clarity, follows.

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Listen to the podcast here

Welcome back, Rockstars. You’re going to love this episode. We have one of the most intriguing guests that we’ve had. Jennifer Langton is the former CFO of Atari and joined the NFL as the Senior Vice President of Player Health Innovation. She has led major transformations by leveraging technology and analytics to improve performance, safety and growth across diverse industries. She’s now advising organizations on driving growth and transformation through bold strategies, visionary planning and the integration of cutting-edge technology to improve operations, safety and competitiveness.

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Jennifer, welcome to the Secrets of Rockstar CFOs.

Thank you, Jack. Thank you for the warm introduction.

It’s great to have you here. I am one of those people who oversimplify. It’s a family trait. Maybe you can fill in the blanks a little about what you’ve been working on since you moved on from the NFL.

Thank you. After 15 very meaningful and transformative years at the NFL, personally and professionally, I have gone out on my own to do speaking engagements to impact others on how to embrace innovation, inspire change and lead with purpose. I made a major career pivot from a CFO to an operational role. I used my own leadership style in something that I call CTG, connect, trust and grow, to present myself with purpose. It’s to embrace innovation, inspire change and also lead with purpose. I have the tricks that have worked for me to share with others.

In addition, it’s consulting and coaching individuals or organizations on how to inspire change in this world of digital distribution. It seems like the world is now being digitized. There’s a process. We’ve always called it the engineering process. There’s a process for which you create a vision, but it’s the quick wins on how to get there, how to build expert ecosystems, how to use data for conviction, but then the quick wins. That is what I love to do to impact individuals and companies.

It’s fantastic that you’re able to do that for your career. We’ll get into your career journey and some of the early experiences that have shaped you to that. For my readers, because I hadn’t heard of it before, what does NFL stand for? It’s not well-known in the United States.

It sure is, National Football League. It’s a global brand.

When you think of the best brands in the world, there are Apple Computer, Disney and maybe the NFL is third. It’s certainly right up there. You had quite a run there. We’ll absolutely explore that. I want to chat a little about your early years before we get into that. Where did you grow up?

I grew up on Long Island, New York, in a town called Port Washington.

What was that like living there? Did you have a large family, brothers and sisters?

I’m the youngest of three. I had a very athletic family. I was athletically and academically gifted. I was an active youth. My sports journey, as well as my academic journey, accelerated my growth and my growth in understanding. I can give you a funny story. It is my growth in understanding my skills and who I was that I had transformed the values, playing sports in childhood, into the blueprint for my career, and the transformation that I’ve made for myself, but then for organizations. Everything goes back to the childhood roots for me personally, a very loving but athletic family.

We have a lot in common because you were good at sports and academics, and I always aspired to be good at sports and academics. We have a common bond right there. I probably oversimplified that you were good at sports and academics. The sports one, you were playing lacrosse against the boys as an early teenager.

I was at the age of 13. The way that this story had come up, I often share it in speaking engagements. I was inducted into a Youth Hall of Fame on Long Island. Unbeknownst to that organization, I only played for one year in that organization. Here I am inducted. When I was writing my acceptance speech, the first thing I wanted was for my father to be there. Unfortunately, he has passed since, but I wanted to thank him for the experience, for the story I’m going to share with you.

When I wrote out that acceptance speech, the memories were so vivid from that one year. Yes, it was playing on an all-boys team, but what that one year taught me is how I break barriers. Many people ask, “How did you survive in the male-dominant world?” It was that experience, that one year. It was uncanny how vivid the memories were, but now, I use that as a center focus for my story.

When I was 13 years old, my father was an athlete himself. He was a big basketball player. He was asked by that youth sports association to help recruit and fill the team rosters. Lacrosse was a new sport. There was no lacrosse for women or girls at that time. He was standing in our kitchen in Port Washington, holding up an incomplete roster, making this case not to me, but to my mother. It is that they needed one more individual to complete the team roster so that the team could play that year.

It so happened that one player was my age from my age group. My mother resisted immediately, “She’ll get hurt,” but my dad saw potential in me. Therefore, I started on, and an all-boys team was the big catch. Understanding my skills, if you could imagine, I was 13 years old. I played other sports like soccer. I was a dominant athlete. I was always succeeding in goals and presence. I was always in the local paper and clips, but here I go out. I’m walking out on the boys’ field. There is not one woman. There’s not one stream of pink. Absolutely nothing.

I have to put on for the first time a bulky helmet and a shoulder pad. I was more afraid that I was either going to get killed out there or hit. There’s always that looming possibility of getting hit, but they wouldn’t accept me. With every ground ball, because you’re practicing nonstop before your first game, with every assist and every goal, my confidence started to build.

Here was the big, real barrier change for me. It was our second game. I would always point to where my father was on the sideline because he was my anchor of support. I got flattened to the floor. The ref comes running over. They do their safety checks. He does his safety check. He says to me, “Remove your jersey. Remove your equipment.” I am like spinning, looking around, and thinking, “I’m the only girl. I am not doing that.” I brace myself, and I scream so loud, “I’m a girl.”

This one kid came running. I had assisted him. He knows that I assisted him. The memory is so clear. He said to me, “You were hit so hard. Are you okay? We need you back out there.” That is where I was like, “It’s okay to be a girl. This is not a gender thing.” I made my stance. I didn’t have to be like one of the boys. I didn’t have to play, but I had a skillset that was unique within an environment for which I was very different, and that was gender.

I learned how to be authentic and how to connect with people. If you don’t connect on a team, you’re not building trust, and you’re not going to have growth. What I did the very next day is, and you’ll laugh, I had an Aunt Sally. My Aunt Sally loved pink but did not think girls should play sports. I used to hear it all the time. She called. She says to me, “I heard that you got hit,” hoping that I wasn’t going to play. I said, “Yes, but I’m okay. Everybody supported me. I feel more comfortable now.”

I wore pink every time I got on the field. Whether it was my blonde ponytail hanging out, I wore pink because I was so proud of being authentic. The team accepted me more because I was authentic and unique to myself. I wasn’t trying to be like one of the boys. I was playing as me. That had changed me, breaking barriers, but my own identity, understanding my skills and how to play them forward. That certainly helped me in the many years ahead.

Even at the NFL, I was different. When I took on health and safety, I was not a biomechanical engineer. I was not an epidemiologist. The NFL hires and attracts the world’s renowned specialists. I had to run this innovation platform. It’s okay to be different. Use your differences as strengths. That’s what I had done. It is a long way of saying that one example and that one experience of having to do an acceptance speech opened up so much to me. It was like, “That’s where it came from.”

You’re probably familiar with the butterfly effect. Getting hit at that lacrosse game probably had a butterfly effect on everything more than you could have imagined in the moment.

It was the support, though. The team rallied around me. Thank gosh, Jack, that I had done that assist, and that kid did want me back, but it was a pretty unique experience. I played through the rest of that entire year. I was nominated at the end. It took two years for girls’ lacrosse to come into existence. I only played one year, and I went on to play girls’ lacrosse in junior high school. In college, I grew to be a four-time All-American, which was pretty unheard of. I was recruited onto the national championship team at the University of Virginia. All that being said, it’s worth that experience and worth those breaking barriers, but it transcended the next decade of my life.

I can imagine. It’s remarkable. Jess and I joke about it. Every guest I’ve had on this thing, and we had 80, 77 of them were more accomplished athletes than I was. I’m not exactly setting the bar high here, by the way, but there’s something about exposure to sports. Maybe they’re cliches, but I’m learning that they’re cliches that are true about helping you develop character, becoming a team player, and becoming more resilient. I do think that those all probably translate to success in the corporate world.

My experience was 100 percent it did. I know we’ll get more into my career. There are two elements of my life and experiences that I would complement for my success. One of which is being an athlete. The second is my finance experience and background. Just to understand that was my health check. It was my check of financials, like where we were growing and how we were growing. Change your strategy. That multidiscipline taught me so much about the fine-tuning of the build for operations and the execution of it with metrics, with confirming checks, and the ROIs on things. Those are the two things.

More specifically for sports, like I was saying, you have to be authentic. This is very much of my leadership style. I’ve always done emerging technologies. When you’re doing an emerging technology, you’re rolling out a new system and deploying it. Many CFOs do. An individual is not going to trust the technology. They trust you first. That’s similar to that boys’ team. They trusted me. They trusted when I was authentic and when I showed myself not competing with them, not trying to be one. That authentic connection is what builds and fosters trust on any team, whether that’s a sports team or in the corporation.

When you can build that, then comes your growth, whether that’s revenue, whether that’s processes, whether that, for me, is the health and safety of the world’s most elite athletes at the NFL. No pressure, Jack. It is the same model. That connect, trust and grow is a very repeatable approach to my personal life, but also to work. The foundation of that is exactly what you’re saying. For that, I think you said 80 percent. Sports, the discipline, the perseverance, there’s so much of the values associated with team, teamwork, being authentic, showing yourself, your skills and understanding what your skills are not that play forward.

I want to explore your career path because it’s fascinating, but Shannon told me to ask you about your first job. Is there a funny story there?

Other than babysitting, my first real job that was on the payroll was at a marina on Long Island in Sands Point, with lovely boats and an amazing environment. I didn’t always have the opportunity to work because I was always on the road playing sports. My sister had worked at this marina called Capri Marina. She is five years older than me. One summer when I had a gap between summer camps and sports lacrosse camps, she asked me if I would woman not man the gas dock. I was put on payroll. A big yacht would pull up. They’d hand me the ropes.

You actually could tie, but the crew would jump off and tie. Because we’re in such a litigious society, you couldn’t pump the gas. All you could do was put the lever on and hand them the pump so that the crew could pump the gas. The first job, when I was telling Shannon, I was like, “It’s pretty unique and funny because I didn’t do much, but the amount of money people spent to get a full tank of gas before they went out, and then the tip that I would get, that was an amazing first job.” There’s not much that I have done, but be kind, be nice and be helpful. Because I was athletic, I could tie the ropes, but it was a lot less work than you would think for a very good sum of money at that age.

I would imagine people who own yachts are probably pretty good tippers.

They are. In relative to the amount of money that they were putting into their yachts, it was fractional.

I’m glad Shannon encouraged me to ask that one. I want to talk a little about the career journey. You started in finance. Finance skills tend to be transferable across most industries. The last three traditional jobs you worked before you started what you’re doing now are Viacom, Atari and then the NFL. The common thread isn’t super duper obvious. I’m wondering how you approached your job in very different industries, particularly the role of the NFL was so different.

It became so different, but the actual thread between those first jobs was very consistent. I was hired by Viacom CBS for the 39 broadcasting stations, working in finance to do a financial implementation. Everybody was in Excel hell for all the CFOs. How do we best approach the consolidation so that the bosses, being my CFO and my CEO at that point, can be more real-time and metrics-based? I had done an RFP. We had selected Microsoft at that point in time with their products. We had done this consolidation, reducing the close time from weeks to days across the 39 broadcasting stations.

It caught Microsoft’s attention. I’m going to date myself here. They were rolling out the first SharePoint portal, which is a website product. I was asked to pilot it with the executives. Here was an invaluable lesson, which played forward at the NFL. When we were customizing the dashboards, I’d have to meet with the CFO and CEO. “What metrics do you use?” When we had these pretty bells and whistles in a dashboard, they would still calculate manually. I’d have to go and sit with them.

I would actually compare and contrast daily for two weeks their manual calculations to the system’s results. They hadn’t had consolidation systems at that point in time, nor did they have metrics that were then delivered for them. I’ll never forget the days sales outstanding, DSO, calc. They still had to write it. Their trust came first in me and then in the technology. Why? It is because I authentically understood what their concerns were. I understood what their needs were.

I meet and do the test with them and the due diligence to say, “This is exactly what you’re calculating. With this real-time nature of it, you could be doing A, B and C, which is the actual management and execution, not sitting and writing. It was automation. It was making it much simpler. The more insights that you have, the better you can manage the business and then you can act.” Play that forward, that’s exactly what I did later at the NFL, which we’ll get.

After Viacom, I was hired, tapped by a former employee whom I started working with at Arthur Andersen, which was my first job out of college. I did another financial implementation. He knew that I had done it at Viacom, but the gaming brand, being the iconic Atari, if you remember the 2600 console, they were having financial trouble. I did a financial implementation. I built their first product P&L. What that product P&L and what the business was saying via the data was that we needed to restructure.

Here I was, a new gun there doing this financial implementation, similar to Viacom. When we did the financial implementation, the difference here was that I had to then consider my reputation, building as an executive, but I put my reputation on the line to tell the board of directors that this time, we need to restructure. They never had a product P&L before. Here, it’s still the financial and financial implementation, but it’s data and insights that you’re now able to provide.

Right after that experience, I was named North American CFO at that time because I had done the entire restructure we brought in a consulting firm. At a young age, I was accelerating, but I was accelerating because of the financial implementations and the knowledge I was gathering to then report out to the executives. The NFL then hired me to restructure its apparel strategy, just like I had done at Atari. Here, however, we were not in financial concerns. It was a very different picture. I had the likes of the heads of Nike, New Era, and all of the brands that were pitching and presenting to me and the team there, the executives, to be on the field for licensing.

Here was a simple learning that I translated again into finance. I entered the NFL as VP of Finance in Business Venture. Business Venture is all the businesses that were venturing and growing into new streams of revenue. International growth strategy was in there as well. I came in, and the NFL was going to send out an RFP book that was this thick. For every product by every distribution channel, they would have to fill it in. I said, “At Viacom, I built a website for the executives to manage their DSO. With that experience, what if we, not I, built a digital bidding platform? You would have real-time bids and reporting.” It’s insights again.

That was such a game-changer for them. “She’s innovative.” I think about different ways through those experiences to generate insights so that executives, and I was climbing up the ladder at that point, so that executives could make quicker, more effective and efficient decisions. I know it might not come across when you take a look at my profile, but it was very consistent in the type of work that I was bringing on. It is more of a restructure, but with always emerging technology associated with it.

As you were sharing all of this, with Viacom in particular, there’s a technical challenge and there are financial challenges, but when you’re selling this, modernizing the reporting process or opening up product lines, which is something that nobody had thought of before, it’s a leadership and a communications challenge more than anything else. You’re entrusted, particularly at Viacom. I’m not sure how old you were at the time, but you changed the game at a relatively early point in your career.

That’s very much that skillset of mine. It is being authentic, going in and asking the questions. “What if we?” What I did at the NFL was the same thing. It’s like, “We’ll learn it together. I need the support to do A, B and C.” With each success, you leverage that success as a springboard. Starting at Viacom, when we had done the consolidation, our close changed. They approached me to say that I was working well with the implementation and the success of it. “Would you ask if we could pilot?”

I was the one who had to go to the CFO and the CEO at that point in time and share with them the benefit that it would have for them. Here, it’s never about you. If you can tie your purpose and your experiences to the operations or the executive’s mission, that’s a win-win. People don’t always get that. Show what the win is going to be for them. For me, I was getting this incredible, extraordinary experience if I asked, but I had to ask the right way. I never, at such a young age, came up with that myself.

I worked so hard with the consulting firm that we were using to have them, “What is successful or what has been successful in your pitch to executives, so I can get this over the goal line, because I personally have an interest to learn it?” If you can work and make sure that you’re fine-tuning, then my communication, my pitch, with their support, that’s a win-win situation. It wasn’t me doing it on my own.

If it were just you on your own, it would be a massive failure. Salesmanship is so critical in any leadership-type job.

It’s the way in which you communicate. As I’ve said, it’s not just “I, I’ve done, or me.” It’s very much, “Did I understand at that point in time the type of experience?” Yes, but I love change. If I were in finance and doing a monthly close, I know I would get tired of that. I wanted the change. I love the restructure. I love the build of things and the impact that they could have. That has been consistent throughout my career.

That’s something I wanted to ask you about, because clearly, you’re an innovator, a risk taker, or however I want to phrase it. Fundamentally, you grew up in finance. You started at Andersen as an old school CPA firm, as there was at the time, and various CFO roles. You’re still a financial steward. How can you advise these young people? More and more CFOs are having the opportunity to be innovators, while not letting go of what some might consider still a core responsibility of CFOs.

Those coming in new, one of the most valuable things that people don’t do, and they don’t ask, is to be in the room. If you are working on your monthly close, you do not get to understand from the C-Suite perspective at that point in time, how it’s delivered, what the reactions are, and what you should anticipate so that you can question it. If you can shadow your boss at those periods of time and understand that boardroom dynamic on what’s important, what works, and what doesn’t work, then it gets you a step further.

You also know what to aspire for. Being able to work with the CFOs, I didn’t know what a DSO calc was when I started day sales outstanding. It was so important for them to get paid. How many days outstanding are we that we haven’t received our revenue? It was key to their metrics. In those conversations, you learn so much more about how executives think, so that you can actually start to get your own education to then fill their needs.

I would say my first advice would be to ask, “Can I shadow? Can I learn?” If they say, “No, it’s private. It’s a C-Suite only,” make sure that in your reviews, or if you have a weekly, ask, “Can I ask how you delivered that and what the response was or what the tough questions are?” It is so that you learn. Most people want to help. It’s just that they’re busy at work, so they don’t always have the time, but put time on the calendar because that will expedite your own interest. Is that the position that you want to be in? It’s what skills you need and what polishing you need to be able to enter there and expose yourself with success.

I commend you for doing that because I talked to a lot of young professionals. They’re afraid to ask people to be a mentor or to ask people for advice. I’ve been doing this a little bit. They might say no, but they’re never angered by the request, or they might say, “No more because I don’t think I’m an appropriate mentor for you,” for whatever reason.

Most of the time, it’s time management that they either won’t have the time, but most people, when you ask them, “Can I understand, or can you help me with this?”, they’re flattered. They want to share their knowledge and their expertise. They’re probably not somebody that you would want on your team and you would want to be working with if they’re not willing to be open to teaching you and to nourish you, so you could grow. That’s a team.

I’m one of those classic imposter syndrome-type people. Even at this point, I still have it a little bit, but when people ask me if I will be a mentor to them, did you run out of every other person you could have? Why me? There are so many better people. When I have taken it on, I’ve done a good job with people.

You have wisdom and knowledge. Don’t have that discount. I always say that for all the years that I’ve worked, there are so many different use cases where you’ve had situations. If you are open to helping people, it’s not about you, but what you can offer them. I come to you for advice, Jack.

A lot of people do. It’s ultimately the person’s decision whether or not they want to accept it, but I’m very free with giving advice at this point. There is one thing I wanted to ask you. You reference it a little bit in your early sports career. It strikes me that in gaming and football, you entered male-dominated industries. I’m curious how you built credibility amongst these circles. Maybe you had a head start from your early teen years experience playing lacrosse.

I didn’t intentionally go for male-dominated environments. It just so happened that it did play out that way. There are two things. I can tell you a bit more about my leadership model and style with Connect, Trust, Grow. It’s what I call the CTG. It has helped me achieve, personally and professionally, to transform myself in my life, being very authentic, like what we’re talking about, building trust on a team, and then quick wins to grow.

If you think about it, if you don’t connect with people, you’re not going to build trust. If you can’t build trust, then where’s your vision? Where’s the growth? It’s a very simple model, but what I do is I distill and break it down to the values that I created, how I used it at Viacom, that blueprint of my own transformation. When I got to the league, I used it there for a quick win, but to do the transformation of the work. That being said, there’s one key value that I always have and I firmly believe in. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

How did a CFO go on to become a Head Senior Vice President at the NFL to run an innovation platform? I asked for it. I used my CTG model, meaning I had gone back to business school after I had first started at the NFL. I was doing the apparel strategy. After doing the new portal for bidding, we grew the business 220 percent. We had a billion-dollar deal, my first billion-dollar apparel portfolio deal I’d ever done. We brought Nike and New Era on the field. I was like, “What an opportunity.” One, from the exposure from the NFL, the power of that brand, and how it resonates, but also, the amazing opportunities that the NFL could provide me if I had flipped my experience there and put my purpose into it. What was I passionate about at that time?

I did a lot of work. First, I went back to business school because I had gotten into schools here in New York, and the NFL had asked me to defer it for the apparel strategy. I went to NYU. I was immersed in leadership studies, new perspectives, but I listened to my career. There was one teacher, Anat Lechner. She would have these case studies on how to think outside the box and how to build teams, to make that transformation happen, but it was like sci-fi stuff to me. Where did that vision come from? How do you tap into that vision to create a strategic plan, which is what I always loved to do?

After business school, it so happened that the NFL had a new talent mobility program. It could not have been a better time. It was for VPs, vice presidents. They wanted to stimulate the culture to think differently about what you could do and fine-tune different skill sets. With a little bit of business school spirit and type A, I spent a lot of time on what I called the Langton Roadmap. I built this Langton Roadmap, which was an integrated plan. It was one page. I put all my accomplishments, what I had done, and how it impacted the business.

People don’t do an internal resume. You think, “I’m going to do that externally,” but what I was doing was my internal resume, because people in positions change, especially in HR at that time. Here, we have a new program. I’m going to show you. I had all my accomplishments. The middle column was manager feedback, my leadership skills, what they said about me in constructive criticisms and then it was my blue sky. In my blue sky, it was very clear that I wanted transformational growth and leadership opportunity at a time when there was a league of denial with all the concussion crisis. I wanted to help because it was so personal to me.

I wanted to help build out the league-wide youth strategy because of what sports did to me in my youth. They were having issues with kids coming into sports in the pipeline at that point in time. It was also to help build out the health and safety portfolio or the safety strategy for athletes. Why? It is because in my second year of college, I not only blew out my knee playing at the Yale Bowl, that was a career in my identity that I lost. It was a career-ending injury.

I also lost my mom to cancer. With that double blow, here was an opportunity to say, “I can turn this into purpose.” If I could help to mitigate injuries that happened to me and that experience that I had to happen to most elite, then it was my passion. I connected my purpose and my passion to what the league needed at that point in time. It was somebody to come in with a strategy and somebody to come in and help build out that vision. It was a team. It was not just me. They responded to my request.

In 2014, at a time when the NFL was being very scrutinized as the League of Denial and the Concussion movie with Will Smith was coming out, there were Frontline episodes and Congress was holding hearings, I stepped into this new role. I don’t think I knew what I was asking for, but I was passionate about it. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. My passion is what helped me to not only be so stimulated there, but be more transformative, because I played into what my skills were, not what I didn’t have, which is the science. I’m not a doctor. There are many things I’m not, but I know what I’m good at. I played into that. When I started in the league, it was all of that scrutiny. Upon leaving, the league was down to the lowest number of concussions in history.

That’s amazing.

It went from the league of denial to what I call the league of solutions. Why? It is because of what we built, data and insights like those of other companies. The more data you have about the injury, the more we can give the data to the athlete management teams that work with the players to mitigate those injuries. There are numerous different examples that I can go to, but better insights, and insights they have not had before. What we could consolidate across 32 teams, 53-man rosters, is different than what a team could do. With that power of the N and the insights that we were able to provide, they were more educated. We made their job more efficient by providing them with data so that they can manage their players in real time, which they hadn’t had before.

That’s remarkable. Like most Americans, I’m a big football fan. Few things are more enjoyable than watching people play football at a very high level. When you hear these stories about concussions several years ago, whenever it was, and you’d see these players getting injured, I actually remember thinking, is the future society going to look back upon us the way we look back at Romans feeding the Christians to the lions? Is this going to be considered barbaric? Thank God for you and your team for the remarkable achievement that you did. Thinking about where we were, you did it in less than a decade. That was unthinkable several years ago.

That truly is the power of the NFL when I say it was a meaningful experience. I grew as a human, but I also grew as a female. I played into my strengths, which is building those authentic connections with numerous different disciplines that never worked before. The expert ecosystems were compounded of who we were bringing in and excellence. It was my ability to authentically connect. I’m going to go back to a point that you made about the transformation. It was to build that team. It was the quick wins and the continuous growth.

Here’s why they trusted me. It is because of my passion associated with it. I once spoke to a school that was considering canceling its football program. I had explained to them all that we had done at the NFL. With every intent that it will trickle down, not only football at the college and youth level, but through all sports. I do firmly believe that. I said to this board, “I’m sitting here in front of you today. I would not be in my seat. I would not have been afforded the opportunities that I’ve had if I didn’t play sport. I blew out my knee. I had a career-ending injury. Would I do it all again? Absolutely.

What I would encourage you to think about is the values and what it’s going to offer, not be in fear of an injury. That’s not a way to look or see, especially in the digital age when people are so digitally connected. You need the human connection. You need those authentic connections. You need to learn how to build trust and accelerate a team and growth.” That’s why every single one of our teams that were so diverse with different experiences believed in me.

That’s leadership in a nutshell, pretty much. It’s a rare opportunity for me to interview you, because top of mind for CFOs is AI and analytics. Few people know how transformative these can be as you do, given what you’ve done. What advice can you give CFOs to embrace these technologies? They’re not innovative. They also have concerns that other executives don’t have around data privacy and cybersecurity generally, that maybe some other members of the C-suite aren’t thinking about.

This goes back to many of the talks that I give. As I said, it’s very authentic to me. Being the only girl on a boys’ team, here I am in a space where we’re starting this new department in health and safety. We had numerous different quick wins with different partnerships, etc., but we were manually counting. I’m going to go to my advice in a second. We were manually counting the number of head impacts in a game.

NFL technicians took four days to count the number of head impacts. We do a double blind review to make sure that it was consistent, statistically significant. That’s eight days. I was like, “There’s a better way to do this. All of the implementations that I’ve done in the data insight, there is a better way to do this.” Do you think I would have done that on my own? No. Data privacy is this. You have to build and connect first with the expert ecosystem. You will never have all the answers, and it is overwhelming, whether that is a lot of times you’d have consulting firms, but bring together the areas of expertise and excellence.

What I did at that point in time was we came up with a vision. How do we quantify our game, meaning the number of impacts on the field, so that we don’t have to go through that very laborious approach of counting? We knew the data was so rich and was impacting. We were giving that to helmet manufacturers. It was created for rule changes. The insights were so profound. However, you can’t scale that way.

We went on a roadshow where I had one of our chief engineers and numerous others, where we pitched what our vision was to all big tech partners, to MIT, and to Columbia, who were on the forefront of new technologies in the space, and knew from a commercial corporate perspective who was doing what. That is education. We were learning. Get out, understand what the market is, and understand what the opportunities are. I will say that, yes, many people wanted to work with the NFL. If you don’t get out, learn, and build that expert ecosystem that you need, no one CFO, I couldn’t have done that on my own.

Build the right expert ecosystem that surrounds you so that you can either go and present and pitch that to a CEO or your COO. Get the area of expertise and the knowledge that you don’t have to play that forward. You could have it internally. You have to make sure that when you’re presenting these big visions, there have to be quick wins. If I were to go in and say, “We want to predict injuries for NFL athletes,” what? We had to start.

The start was, “It takes us four days to count.” Is there, and there is, a computer vision technique because we have all the impacts in video? Is there a way that we can, by code, count and track a player and those impacts? There was. Here was a vision where there was a technology that could be deployed then. We ended up crowdsourcing those two algorithms. Ready for this. In seconds, near real-time, the NFL has had impacts back to 2015 because of two algorithms that were built.

Sitting in your seat or me as a CFO, would I have had the vision to do all of that? No, it was getting out of your seat and getting the area of expertise. I always say, and this is what I do a lot in my consulting, is to coach. Who do you need to help refine that idea or build that strategy? What expert ecosystem do you need? It’s overwhelming. Once you have the confidence and once you do that due diligence, it’s much easier to go in and to present for funding, for a new strategy, or for a strategic partnership to get that done.

It led to what you’re doing now, where you’re advising a lot of organizations on growth and transformation. I’d love to learn a little bit about that. In particular, one of the things I noticed that you’re doing is you’re utilizing AI strategies to support human work, not to replace human work. That’s critical. Can you share a little bit about that?

This is my experience. I know that, through the years, AI has been transformative broadly and publicly. The AI application that we were building was a closed environment. It was longitudinal records and quantifying body movement, where we can predict injury. That is very different from what the world in the digital space and AI is offering. I wish that I had had that when I was working. An important principle is that when you are building AI or you’re building technologies to deploy, it has to be human-centered.

Go to the experience that I had offered at Viacom. If I didn’t sit with those executives, compare and contrast, and understand their concerns and their needs, they wouldn’t have used the application. It sunk. If you don’t understand the human need for it, and you’re not able to convey with confidence that they’ll have more utility, then what are we doing? It has to be human-centered. Another example of that is we created this engineering roadmap.

It was an investment in how to better understand counting the head impacts, but reviewing every concussion and video. We annotated so many variables. It was such rich data. We could give that data to helmet manufacturers so that they could better design helmets for each position to withstand that type of severity in those types of locations and impacts. It is very different for different positions. One of the hardest things is to have an elite NFL player who has grown, who is the top performer on his team, and you’re going to tell him to change his helmet?

Probably not.

In my experience, working with the equipment managers at each one of the clubs, if I didn’t educate and inform them, because they were the conduit to educate the player and outfit the player, then we would not have been successful. With all of the data, the richness of the data, and new technologies, whether AI or helmet technologies, if you don’t focus on the human-centered approach, then you’re not going to have a successful deployment. It could fall flat, and that’s the risk.

The third example is when we built this AI platform for the athletic management team. You’re talking about the sports scientists, the athletic trainers, the team positions, etc. You’re giving them information, insights they hadn’t had before. Because we integrated and aggregated data across all 32 teams, all rosters, you can compare one running back, loads, and exertions across all running backs, de-identified. They hadn’t had that before. It gave them more insights to do their job more effectively and made them smarter.

We weren’t replacing them. When I say human-centered focus, AI is coming. It’s here. If you don’t adapt and embody it so that it can evolve your role and make you more efficient and smarter, then you’re going to be left behind. That’s very similar to when we had the dot-com boom, and you had all those local mom-and-pops that didn’t want to go online. I’m sure your sales are hurting. Climb on board. This is my experience. In my experience, when we have built technologies, AI platforms, if you don’t work with the end user and make it human-centered, then you risk the lack of adoption, the lack of use, and the lack of rollout. It has been my experience. In this day and age, it is so important for individuals and corporations to get on board.

As soon as you were talking about the human thing, I’m old enough to remember when most hockey players didn’t wear a helmet. When the league mandated that they had to wear a helmet, they fought it. You wouldn’t remember it. You’re a few years too young. They actually grandfathered you in if you’re already playing and not using a helmet. You didn’t have to. It was the rookies, and anyone after that had to. I remember Phil Esposito still playing into the mid-1970s with no helmet. He was the last one, as far as I know.

I won’t name names, but we had gotten to a place where we were able to work with the NFL PA. The NFL is working with the Players Association, where we tested every helmet in a laboratory to understand the helmet’s performance. I’m overly simplifying. There were some helmets that were correlated to a higher risk of injury. It was proven. We had the data and the science to support it, yet the player wouldn’t change out of that helmet.

It’s exactly what you’re saying. You have the conviction with data, which is very important. That’s that trust element, but behaviors are hard to change. We had to grandfather certain players in so that they would adapt and acclimate to a new helmet over the course of that year, because they were well-known players. They’re all well-known, but you have to have an acclimation period. We at the NFL went through that as well. It was brilliantly handled.

This has been a lot of fun, Jennifer. I know you have a lot going on. Thanks for taking the time to do it. I’d like to close. One thing I noticed from your website, your mission is to inspire the next generation of innovation leaders. It’s a coincidence that we used almost the same phrase, because our mission is to inspire the next generation of financial leaders. I’d like to ask you, maybe some closing words for the next generation of innovative financial leaders. What should they be thinking about?

I love it. I very much enjoyed the conversation and appreciate you, Jack. It’s been fun. I’ve shared a lot. One of my caveats is that if you don’t ask, you don’t get. For many of those looking to climb into the C-suite CFO position who are climbing the finance ladder, ask to be in those boardrooms. Ask for the report out, pre and post, to learn. When I did my career pivot, I asked for it, but I didn’t make it all about me. I tied it to my own personal passion and purpose, but aligned it with the league’s organization.

Think about strategic ways to transform oneself and for an organization, which are extremely important. I had given a talk that was for a healthcare organization. I do have a website, Jennifer Langton Inc. My speaking engagements and my consulting are so important. I’m going to give you a concrete example of why. I had gotten up, and I was explaining to the women the Langton Roadmap and how it was transformative because many people asked how I went from being a CFO to running an innovation platform.

There were a few other tidbits that I shared in the AI space, going on the technology roadshow. There was a line of women because it was women pioneering in healthcare. There were two follow-up consulting jobs that I had done, which resonated so much with me that this is how I want to impact the future generations. There was one woman who started in mental health, a business, and a platform. She wanted to better understand how she did her own roadmap to tie her own passion into it. She had lost somebody to mental health, but that’s nowhere in her pitch deck. I coached her on how to build out her own storyline. That was purpose and passion. It was so rewarding to me.

Another one was, how do we build out or think about an infrastructure for AI? People are overwhelmed. That roadshow is going out. It’s like, “Yes, I can bring you through the rigor that we went through on the things to think about. It’s not just a cloud and cloud computing environment. You need people to build with subject matter expertise.” That’s the type of impact from years of working. I still consider myself young, but from years of working, that’s the type of impact that resonates and I do care about. That’s influencing the younger generations. Sometimes, it’s the older and wiser, but they need new, innovative learning in this day and age.

I’m always reluctant to ask advice for the next generation because occasionally, I do have guests who are 38. I have a niece. She was teaching robotics. She was seventeen. She was teaching robotics to thirteen and fourteen-year-old girls. She won a robotics contest. She loves teaching the younger generation. “You’re seventeen. I worked at Burger King. What do you mean?” This has been a lot of fun. Thank you again for your time. I’d like to give you the final word to wrap this up.

Thank you very much. As I said, one of the greatest life lessons and opportunities that I’ve had was the value of sports and finance. They were my backbone to transform my career. That’s what I want to do and play forward. If there are any of your guests who are open to a speaker that had to create that transformational impact and consulting, please reach out directly to me. Everything is listed on my website, Jennifer Langton Inc. I want to impact the next future generations like you did, Jack.

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The headlines don't seem to agree on where the economy is heading, and business leaders, economists, and most importantly, consumers don't seem to agree. Stock markets are booming as millions of wage earners strain under high prices. Employment statistics can be strong or weak from month to month. And with the policy environment changing weekly, planning can feel almost futile.

Emily Mandel, senior economist and associate director at Moody's Analytics, came to the CFO Leadership Council's Spring 2026 Leadership Conference in Boston to read up on what's happening, what could happen, and what CFOs can do about it.

Her conclusion is that while the baseline is not a recession, the risks are real and asymmetric, and it's worth stress testing now. This is the economic situation she presented.

The Strait of Hormuz will continue to be the number one watch item. The conflict, which cuts off one of the world's most important oil shipping routes, poses the biggest near-term risk to the U.S. economy. Shipping traffic through the strait has fallen to almost zero, and unlike financial shocks, oil supply disruptions will not recover quickly. Countries have depleted their stockpiles to prepare for soaring prices, but that buffer is now all but gone.

Mundell's baseline assumes the Strait will reopen by roughly the end of June. If that happens, oil prices (currently near $100 a barrel) will gradually normalize, but not back to previous levels. Otherwise, calculations quickly become difficult.

“If we keep the Straits closed until Labor Day, we have a very bleak scenario: a recession. The United States is in a relatively advantageous position and produces a lot of oil, so if we go into a recession, the rest of the world will go into a recession as well.”

Tariffs are not a one-time blow, but remain a persistent drag. One year after Liberation Day, the effective tariff rate increased from about 2% to about 10%. The Supreme Court's recent ruling that some of the tariffs were illegal did not change much, and the administration moved quickly to implement similar taxes under another authority.

Mandel's reading: Tariff rates will remain largely unchanged. The price pass-through took longer than expected, but it happens. For CFOs who rely on imported materials, this is an ongoing cost pressure, not a temporary one.

Labor supply is slowly tightening due to immigration restrictions. Both legal and illegal immigration declined sharply, reducing the available labor force. So far, the economic impact has been contained, largely because employment has slowed enough that the labor crunch is not causing significant wage pressures.

But Mandel warned that this was a slow-building risk. In the coming years, industries that rely heavily on migrant workers, such as agriculture, construction and manufacturing, will feel even more strained.

AI is a real tailwind, but it's not yet a productivity story. The AI ​​boom is contributing to GDP growth primarily through capital investments such as building data centers, building infrastructure, and purchasing equipment. In industries where AI adoption is progressing, business formation is also progressing.

However, the productivity improvements that the stock market is pricing in have not yet been reflected in economic indicators. “There are expectations, and certainly they are factored into the stock valuation, but the contribution so far has been primarily on the investment side.”

Consumers are holding on, but cracks are starting to show. Private consumption remains positive but is slowing, and its composition is becoming increasingly concerning. Most of the growth in spending came from households in the top quintile, which saw the largest increases in wealth.

The bottom 80 percent are dealing with rising gas prices, rising inflation, and stagnant real wages, and the trend is beginning to show. Credit delinquencies are increasing across the mortgage, auto loan, and student loan categories.

Tax rebates provided a short-term cushion against rising gas prices, but that cushion is now nearly exhausted. “If these high-income households cut back on spending a little bit, we wouldn't get the same growth, because right now the lower end of the distribution doesn't have as much savings.”

Rate cuts aren't coming. There is also a possibility of interest rate hikes. The Fed is watching both mandates go wrong at the same time, with the unemployment rate creeping toward 4.3% and inflation accelerating again.

Moody's criteria has kept interest rates constant throughout this cycle, on the theory that the labor market is not strong enough to justify a rate hike and the Fed will treat the energy shock as temporary. However, the possibility of a rate hike is increasing. For CFOs approaching variable rate debt or refinancing decisions, fixed rates to higher rates should be the premise of their plans.

What should CFOs do about all this? When asked directly how finance leaders should navigate this environment with their teams and employees, Mandel emphasized transparency and scenario planning rather than false confidence. The headwinds are clear for everyone to see, and employees are reading the same headlines as CFOs.

Her suggestion is to clearly lay out your base case, clearly name your two or three biggest concerns, and outline what your business would look like under each scenario. In such an uncertain environment, honesty about a variety of outcomes is more reliable and useful than single-point predictions.

“Be honest about the unknown. There are a lot of unknowns in the current environment,” she said. “It's not a secret to people.”

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Karen Walker has grown finance organizations at some of the technology industry's fastest-growing companies, including Uber, Pandora, PagerDuty, and cloud security company Sysdig, where she currently serves as both the CFO and a member of the CEO's office.

This last role is a new problem. When Sysdig's co-founders needed an operator to go to market and run the company while focusing on product and engineering, Walker stepped in.

At the CFO Leadership Council's Spring 2026 Leadership Conference in Boston, she shared what she learned about scale, influence, cyber risk, and what it takes to grow beyond the finance chair.

Before investing in AI, understand what you're protecting. Because Sysdig's business is cloud security, Walker thinks about AI risk differently than most CFOs. The speed of AI-powered attacks—threats that unfold in minutes—means defenders need AI-powered tools to stay even.

However, internally, the company is equally focused on governance. Shadow AI is a serious problem. An employee swipes a credit card to get a tool, a lawyer loads a plugin on a laptop, and the data is sent somewhere no one can track it.

Her solution is a center-led approach. Rather than an employee one-off, be sure to have an enterprise-grade AI setup that provides zero-day retention protection and ensures that corporate data is not used to train models, while helping the CISO set guardrails. “As a CFO, I don’t think you can keep track of your spending by just having people swipe their credit cards. You’ll be surprised after the fact.”

Measure AI outcomes before scaling up AI spending. Walker is skeptical that companies will go “all in” on AI without defining what success looks like. Productivity gains are real, but they are often difficult to see at the company level. Also, no one is yet claiming dramatic improvements in financial profile or time to market.

Her approach is to sit down with heads of engineering, CMOs, and other business partners to agree on the outcomes they want to drive and build accountability for spending before it escalates. “I think it's absolutely important to take a programmatic approach and think seriously about risk assessment. If you don't, you're going to have big challenges.”

Influence is driven by curiosity, not just data. As CFOs take on broader operational roles, the ability to shape decisions, not just validate them, becomes essential. Walker's take: To gain that influence, you need to show a genuine interest in how other parts of the business work, rather than driving every conversation from a financial perspective.

She attends client meetings, engages with the field and uses it as a two-way interaction with bankers and investors. “I always like to say, and this is what I try to instill as a mantra in our finance team: If we wake up every day and think about what's best for our customers and act like that, then we're doing the right thing.”

Want to try a broader role? A leader with vulnerability. When Walker joined the CEO's office, she suddenly found herself leading departments she had never grown up with, including sales, marketing, and operations. Her advice for CFOs taking on more responsibility is to “be honest about what you know and don't know, ask the leaders around you what they really need, and find people you already trust to help fill in the gaps.”

“I think the advice I would give to someone who is stepping into such a broad role is to be very vulnerable and candid about what you know and what you don't know. People appreciate that honesty.”

You may need to leave to reserve your seat. Walker has a direct message for pre-CFO leaders who are waiting for an internal promotion. “Don't expect a promotion to come.” The CFO-CEO relationship is a close bond, and incumbents often simply expand their authority rather than pave the way for their successors. Be clear about yourself, ask for clear feedback on the path forward, and be willing to take the leap externally if you can't find an answer. “You may need to take action. Internal promotions are less common.”

The CFO and CEO partnership is the job. Walker came to Sysdig primarily because she looked at relationships with CEOs from the beginning, which she believes is the right filter. The best CEO-CFO pairs are built on complementary skills and a willingness to be candid, even when it makes you uncomfortable.

Her role is not to validate the CEO's ideas, but to be a partner who says what others won't. “Aside from the CEO, I think we have the broadest insight into running and operating the business of anyone on our executive team. So I think this position is a very strong place to start.”

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Coordinated retirement of employees, often referred to as “collective retirement,” is no longer limited to Wall Street and insurance brokers. Competitors across industries are increasingly hiring entire teams to accelerate growth, gain customer relationships, and avoid the slow process of building capacity organically. For CEOs, the impact goes far beyond hiring new employees to replace retirees. Sudden team departures can disrupt operations, weaken customer trust, damage reputations, compromise sensitive information, and cause widespread attrition across the organization.

In many industries, hiring established teams is a faster and cheaper growth strategy than acquisitions. Companies can gain customer relationships, organizational knowledge, and market share without the integration costs of traditional M&A transactions. Some companies assessed the economics and accepted the risk of potential litigation costs and damages in exchange for the financial benefits of accelerated growth, even in the face of restrictive covenants.

Littler's 2026 Annual Employer Survey Report found that 18 percent of responding companies had experienced a planned departure to a competitor in the past year, and only 8 percent had no employee departures to a competitor. This trend shows no signs of slowing down, and it's not just talent that's at risk. Employers said that among a wide range of respondents who reported individual or collective resignations, more than half said some form of restrictive covenant breach or breach of confidentiality had occurred.

What starts as a talent issue can quickly become a company stability issue. CEOs need to start preparing now, not after their teams leave the company.

Business risks due to collective retirement of employees

Operationally, the sudden departure of a cohesive team can be difficult to deal with. Replacing one or two employees is difficult. Replacing dozens at once can cause major disruption to your business. Customer relationships are also at risk, as departing employees often maintain close relationships with customers.

There is also the potential for a broader loss of market confidence. Massive turnover can give the impression, both internally and externally, that the organization is unstable or in decline. That perception can quickly become self-reinforcing as remaining employees reevaluate their positions and external recruiters ramp up their outreach efforts. Large group departures can also have a negative impact on a company's own recruiting efforts, leaving potential hires wondering why groups would choose to leave at the same time.

Competitors may further accelerate this move. Beyond the organizations directly employing departing teams, other market players may seize the opportunity to target both talent and customers, positioning themselves as more stable alternatives or positioning departures as evidence of a rival's declining capabilities. This can result in secondary losses of business and personnel unrelated to the original departure.

Taken together, these effects can result in a “fit-and-fit” scenario where disruption in one area causes widespread erosion of the entire tissue.

Strategies to prevent and respond to mass employee turnover

Given the scale of the potential impact, advance preparation is essential. Above all, these four steps will help you prepare.

1. Modernize employment contracts. CEOs should work with their teams to ensure contracts are up-to-date, legally enforceable, and consistent with evolving state and federal laws and with genuine and legitimate business interests that need protection. In addition to confidentiality and non-solicitation provisions, companies incorporate forfeiture of stock, clawbacks, and deferred compensation provisions. Notice periods can also help delay coordinated termination and create significant response time, but enforcement across multiple jurisdictions becomes increasingly important.

2. Enhance monitoring and early warning capabilities. Companies should have systems in place to detect possible planned departures, such as unusual access to sensitive information or monitoring large data transfers. As AI adoption accelerates, it will be important for organizations to consider AI-enabled access and transfer of sensitive information. Implementing and reviewing enterprise AI platform policies can help mitigate these emerging risks, but early visibility gives you time to react before escalation.

3. Strengthen retention through culture and incentives. Compensation is important, but so is culture. Organizations that foster open communication can retain key individuals who can identify concerns early and, in some cases, provide insight into coordinated activities. Creating an environment where employees feel safe to enhance external opportunities serves as an additional safeguard.

4. Develop a response plan. CEOs should treat response planning as a company-wide resilience exercise. Legal, HR, IT, and communications teams should collaborate on response protocols, including internal messaging, forensic investigations, client outreach, and potential legal action. In a time-sensitive situation, having an experienced attorney is extremely important.

Reduce risk when hiring

Companies considering a team-based hiring strategy should be careful.

It is especially important to consult experienced legal counsel early when trade secrets or confidential information may be at issue. Littler's 2026 Employer Survey found that 37 percent of terminations experienced by respondents in the past year involved copying or deleting sensitive data, and nearly half of employers faced with planned terminations filed lawsuits or lawsuits against employees. Even inadvertent retention of confidential information can expose the employing organization if that information enters its systems, and courts have imposed particularly harsh remedies for trade secret lawsuits.

Similarly, when recruiting groups of employees, employers should consider and mitigate the risks of breaches of fiduciary duty, such as avoiding pre-solicitation of customers or employees by potential employers. Breach of such obligations could result in significant potential damages even in the absence of enforceable restrictive covenants.

To mitigate this risk, companies must put clear protocols in place, including contractual restrictions, onboarding guidance, and technological safeguards to prevent the transfer or upload of sensitive information and breaches of fiduciary duties and covenants. These may be well-known steps, but they take on even more importance in the context of group recruitment. If done incorrectly, these can lead to significant legal and operational risks.

Preparing for the future of talent competitions

As competition for talent continues to intensify, group selection will become increasingly important in the business environment.

The challenge for CEOs is not only to respond to these events as they occur, but also to anticipate them as part of a broader risk management and growth strategy. By strengthening consensus, improving visibility, investing in culture, and preparing a coordinated response, organizations can better position themselves to successfully navigate this evolving dynamic.

When Gina Geter joined Hasbro three years ago as CFO and COO, business wasn't in great shape. With thin profit margins and a vast portfolio, the company best known for Monopoly, Nerf, and Transformers needed to figure out what it actually wanted to be when it grew up.

Getter has been working with CEO Chris Cox to lead what the company calls its Playing to Win strategy. The idea is to pivot Hasbro away from being a toy company and into, in her words, a “modern play company” built around IP that can survive across physical products, digital games and entertainment. She shared her learnings at the CFO Leadership Council's Spring 2026 Leadership Conference in Boston.

Start with an honest portfolio assessment. One of the first things Getter and Cox did was build a simple framework for every business in their portfolio, whether it was growing, optimizing or reinventing. So we had to quickly have some difficult conversations about where the money was going, where it wasn't going, and what actually needed to be done to protect the brand long-term. “That allowed us to be pretty decisive about who gets the money, who gets the resources, and so on. It also allowed us to realize the honest truth of what we need to do to ensure we reinvent these businesses for the next 100 years.”

The strategy is subtraction. In a creative company, ideas are never a problem. What is the priority? Getter challenges his team to move beyond brainstorming and do the hard work of figuring out what actually makes a difference. Because no company has unlimited capital, personnel, or time. “The easy part of strategy is coming up with ideas, having brainstorming sessions, and throwing everything at the wall. The hard part of strategy is boiling it down to what's actually going to matter, what's going to create the biggest impact, and what's going to create the most value for stakeholders.”

The combination of CFO and COO is one job, not two jobs. Getter does not consider her two titles to be additive. All management decisions are reflected in financial statements. Any financial constraints form operational constraints. The real advantage is speed. That means fewer approvals, fewer handoffs, and faster decision-making. “I don't have a finance team that's separate from the operations team or the technology team. We're one team. We're not people sitting on the sidelines keeping score and producing fancy reports. I want my team to be just as interested in what's happening in the supply chain as I am in what it means and how it's reflected in the P&L.”

The CEO-CFO relationship is built on candor. Getter and Cox openly argue before the organization, something that took some getting used to for the Hasbro team. She is clear about where the lines are: fighting privately and presenting a united front publicly. But if you find yourself always agreeing with the CEO, you're doing it wrong, she says. “He expects me to tell him the honest truth and be a part of that discussion. And I also have to find moments where I have to support him. He's the CEO and I support him 100 percent. It's about finding that balance of where the line is that you want to make sure you never cross.”

Get comfortable in gray. Getter's career has been built on saying yes to unpleasant assignments. These include an early boss at General Mills who simply told him to “do the finances” without any further explanation. She built a team of 4 to 100 people and spent three years rebuilding the entire function. Her advice for CFOs who want to grow beyond finance chief is to get as close to operations as possible, as quickly as possible. “From a personal perspective, every situation I've put myself in has been gray or ambiguous or very unpleasant. That's where I've grown the most.”

About AI: Don't drop millions of dollars on SaaS you don't need. Hasbro has made AI tools available company-wide and is seeing early productivity gains. On the creative side, we just launched Six Walls, an AI studio that allows Hasbro characters to power B2B experiences. Imagine an Optimus Prime receptionist greeting visitors, commenting on what they're wearing, and giving directions around the building. But on the enterprise software front, Getter is intentionally pumping the brakes. “I'm not going to spend another million dollars on a software-as-a-service solution until I understand what AI capabilities are coming. I don't think there's going to be a return.”

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For years, most boards have followed the same ritual. Two weeks before a board meeting, directors receive a thick digital packet (often over 100 pages) and do their best to find the “needle in the haystack” before showing up in the boardroom. Florin Rotar, group CTO at Atos and former chief AI officer at Avanade, believes that those days are rapidly coming to an end.

“I think it's important to move away from the old-school approach of big decks and piles of materials in terms of being prepared before the board meeting, asking the right questions during the board meeting, and making sure there's good follow-up,” Lothar says. “It really helps you digest what’s important.”

A veteran technologist and board advisor, Rotor sees AI not as a replacement for boards, but as an amplifier. AI will soon become important. “I don't think anything should be automated. I think it should be scaled,” he says. “With AI, boards can have a richer perspective, see the needle in the haystack, and support diverse thinking. This is very powerful, and I think this will become the norm.”

From board book to “virtual board member”

The cutting-edge boards Rotar is working on already use AI to summarize sprawling pre-reads, surface KPIs and financial anomalies, and flag potentially hidden trends. “By being able to digest information more quickly and integrate information, we can find out through the data what really matters, which is the key here,” he says.

Some are trying to push it even further by using AI as a simulation partner. “This is experimental for now, but I've seen it used as a sparring partner in simulation scenarios,” says Lothar. “It's a bit like a tabletop exercise of how cyber used to be done. We use AI to simulate and prepare for scenarios like activist investors and unilateral takeover attempts, and we use AI to provide a contrarian perspective.”

He said it's not hard to imagine AI playing a more visible role in deliberations. “AI will be used to augment boards, to provide additional perspective, to help with a bit of role-playing and what-if analysis,” he says. “Who knows? We'll probably have AI agents as virtual board members at some point.”

He noted that some sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East are already publicly experimenting with “virtual board meetings” to support investment decisions. “I’m sure it’s a bit of marketing and hype,” he says with a laugh. “But I don't think it's completely outside the realm of possibility.”

Sovereignty AI as the “corporate cortex” of the board of directors

Behind the scenes, technology itself is also changing. Lothar said serious efforts are moving away from a one-size-fits-all publishing model to tightly controlled and highly customized systems.

“For serious stuff, we usually use customized versions, because otherwise there's too much risk,” he says. “There will be hallucinations, and you'll have to worry a little bit about security and privacy.”

On the frontier, some companies are going even further. “In the most sophisticated scenario I've ever seen, it's not just customization, it's a custom, proprietary model, it's a sovereign model,” Rotor explains. “Today, what companies build almost from scratch is part of their secret sauce, their most important asset. It's know-how, the 'corporate cortex,' if you can use that word.”

Just a few years ago, this would have been out of reach for all but the largest companies, he notes. “What was $1 billion five years ago and $100 million two or three years ago is suddenly about $10 million,” he says. “It's rapidly becoming more affordable and more realistic. I'm not saying it's easy for the average midsize business, but it's doable.”

A new kind of board work

If boards want to see real value from AI, they need to change the way they personally handle AI, Lauter says. It starts with using systems that are actually capable of deep inference and pushing them to the hilt.

“There is no substitute for practical experience,” he insists. “You can join every school program in the world. Nothing beats the experience of using AI on a daily basis.” Pitfall: “Unfortunately, most people are using free or degraded versions of AI. My recommendation is simply to invest in purchasing access to the best AI that money can buy.”

He also urges board members to treat AI less like a magical oracle and more like a very unconventional colleague. “To get really good results with AI, especially modern inference AI, you have to approach it in much the same way you would approach a human, but some aspects of it are very atypical of what a sane human would do,” he says. “The more active you are with AI, and the more you tease it, speculate with it, and question it to some extent, the better it will become.”

Rotar also allows you to use multiple models for the same question and critique each other. “The best results I get are when I ask them to do pretty much the same thing and then pit them against each other and ask them to critique and synthesize each other's work,” he says. “You would never do that to a human. It would show a lack of trust. But that's actually how AI works.”

When Charlie Wagner joined Vertex Pharmaceuticals in April 2019, he joined the company six months before the approval of Trikafta. Trikafta is a cystic fibrosis drug that later became the standard treatment for 95% of CF patients worldwide. He could see what was going to happen. Although the science was strong and the pipeline was interesting, the company was not ready to scale.

Over the next seven years, revenue grew from $3 billion to $13 billion, market capitalization from $40 billion to $110 billion, and 2,500 employees were transformed to 7,000. Wagner, who now holds the titles of both CFO and COO, calls himself an architect at heart, someone who isn't intimidated by holes in the ground or piles of lumber, but instead draws energy from them. At the CFO Leadership Council's Spring 2026 Leadership Conference in Boston, he shared what he learned from that ride.

Team comes first, everything else comes second. Mr. Wagner's first action when he joined the company was to build a leadership team with the intelligence, skill and stamina needed to take on the challenges ahead. “I knew we couldn't do it without a world-class team. So the first thing I did was start building a leadership team and the team below it. It was incredibly strong and enabled.”

Know your margin of error. He makes it clear that high standards and high speed are not mutually exclusive, but perfectionism is the enemy of scale. Speed ​​requires comfort with incomplete information. When decisions get stuck, he asks his team: “How likely am I to be wrong, and what is the real cost of being wrong?” “Understanding the margin of error in decision-making and understanding the cost of being wrong actually allows you to make decisions faster and act more quickly. And that was essential as we scaled the company.”

Think portfolio, not features. Wagner added the title of COO a year ago, absorbing human resources, IT and communications in addition to finance. And he thinks leading these departments has more in common than you might think. He said the transition will not be as difficult as CFOs assume. “If you think about roles as chief portfolio manager, chief resource allocator, and chief performance manager, it’s much easier to switch roles between functions.”

Treat AI like a new employee. Vertex identifies six AI value driver buckets and builds implementations around high-ROI use cases with teams ready to deploy them. Wagner's most useful reframing is to think of agents as units of labor rather than software deployments. “You have to deploy it, train it, develop it, and evolve it over time.” Expecting it to work out of the box is a mistake most companies make, he says.

Learn to tell stories. Wagner begins all his major communications with a story written in plain language and then finds data to support it. “People can't rely on data to tell the story.” He calls financial storytelling one of the most undervalued CFO skills. “Effective, persuasive, and persuasive communication is one of the most important skills a CFO can have.”

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Sandra Clarke has seen healthcare cost management from all angles, including pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and finance departments. A former chief financial officer at Blue Shield of California, she points out that the company paid for its employees' medical expenses like any other employer. “We didn't have free health care,” she told a room packed with CFOs at the CFO Leadership Council's Spring 2026 Leadership Conference in Boston this week. “We paid like everyone else.”

We live in an era where premiums are increasing by 10 percent annually for most employers and more than 20 percent for smaller employers. Only one in four employers can absorb increased health care costs without making cuts elsewhere in their business. And financial and legal risks are increasing. When Johnson & Johnson employees sued the company for failing to properly manage health care costs, it set off a wake-up call, even if the case was ultimately dismissed. “Employees and other groups have become more vocal about what that cost is and what they are going to do about it.”

To help with this, she laid out six “watchdogs” for CFOs, questions that all finance leaders should be addressing right now.

1. Do you have the right data (including all claims and pharmacy costs) to make informed decisions?

Clark returned to this issue again and again. Without clean and complete data, it is impossible to control healthcare spending. Without it, everything is just speculation. “If you don’t own that billing data, or at least have access to it, you’re budgeting blindly.

“Do we have the right data to make good decisions about what our strategy should be, what our budget should be? And how well do we understand the health of our population and its stability or instability? Because if we don't have good answers to these questions, our decisions about the type of coverage we want and the partners we want to use are going to be influenced, and perhaps negatively impacted.”

Be wary of vendors who charge additional fees for access to your information. “We’ve seen some companies try to sneak in extra fees if they want more access to their data,” she said. Pharmacy data is a particular blind spot. Specialty drug costs are the fastest growing item for most employers, and despite industry claims to the contrary, transparency in PBM pricing remains largely illusory, according to Clark.

2. How well do you understand risk pools and volatility?

Knowing your data is step one. Understanding what that means for specific employees is step two, but many CFOs skip it.

A young, healthy population is exposed to very different influences and risks than an older, more attrition workforce. Carriers consider multi-year claims experience when pricing and renewing plans. Your industry also matters. Some sectors are inherently more vulnerable to health outcomes simply due to the nature of the work. And geography shapes choices in ways that aren't always obvious. A rural workforce with one hospital system within a 100-mile radius has little bargaining leverage. Meanwhile, urban employers choosing whether to include major academic medical centers face truly significant financial decisions.

3. Is there a broker or benefits consultant focused on our goals and needs?

Not all brokers work for you. There is a big difference between an advisor who takes your situation seriously and an advisor who runs a commodity strategy. She also notes the difference between a broker, who primarily presents options and handles trading issues, and a consultant, who strategically looks at the big picture of overall profits. Both have value. The key is knowing which one you're using.

“Did they give me a sheet that they had given to a lot of other organizations? Or did they really listen to what we were trying to do and help us come up with options? Perhaps it's not a bespoke program, but choosing the option that best suits my company's needs from what's available.”

4. Have you considered all planning options, considering cost and employee satisfaction?

Because costs and employee satisfaction go in opposite directions, Clark urges CFOs to be honest about where they actually land on that spectrum.

“If you're using a no-wear program, it's probably too expensive. But think about that balance and think about whether you're actually leaning too far in either direction.”

The more difficult conversation is aligning leadership, she said. in front Make changes that your employees don't like. Her example is taking a well-known and expensive hospital system off the network.

“If you were in Northern California and we took Stanford out of the network, what would you yell about? It's a very expensive system. Are you willing to choose your local academic hospital? Look, we're going to take your best interests out. Do you want to say, “I know you don't like that even though we're doing this as a priority?'' We may have to change doctors, but this is what it means in terms of meeting our overall business goals and being able to pay for other things.''

In a recent survey, about 80% of people believe that doctors act only in the best interests of patients and that the problem lies with insurance companies. This is the sentiment that CFOs judge when trying to streamline network decisions. Hospital systems are adept at pressure campaigns. “They're very good at convincing patients that if they don't go back into the network, they're going to be in serious harm to their health,” Clark said.

5. Are vendor incentives aligned with our goals?

How you pay your partners determines their optimization. She acknowledges that the concept of value-based care, where vendors are compensated when costs go down and quality goes up, is actually incomplete. But the intent is right. If your broker, third-party administrator, or specialty vendor is not being compensated in a way that aligns with your goals, consider that their advice reflects that.

“Make sure they're also participating in the game, so they're getting paid for their performance and the results they show.”

6. Does our contract provide full transparency regarding fees and pricing?

Please read the contract. Specifically, find out what data access costs, how pricing is structured, and whether there is true transparency and a well-packaged overview.

Clark is particularly skeptical of pharmacy benefit managers who claim to have moved to transparent pricing models. “When all of these models came out, they all employed a lot of very smart actuaries who modeled exactly how to change the revenue model in a way that doesn't impact revenue. So I'm still very skeptical that it's really going to reduce our costs.”

Her recommendation: If possible, get competitive bids. “Rather than choosing one, we will be looking at several options, just like any other contractor.”

For Clark, it's not a matter of mastery, it's a matter of confidence. CFOs don't need to be healthcare experts, she says. But you need to have an educated conversation, recognize that the answers you get aren't good enough, and feel equipped enough to push back. “If we can change this trend in the spending line even a little bit, it can have a big impact,” she said.

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