Good morning and welcome to Markets Desk.
AI capital expenditure is becoming one of the defining macro stories of this cycle. A T. Rowe Price fund manager is projecting hyperscaler spending could reach one point six trillion dollars next year, drawing comparisons not to the dot-com bust, but to nineteen ninety eight — the build-out phase before the payoff. The argument is that returns on invested capital are coming in fast enough to justify the scale.
That spending context makes Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel's comments all the more pointed. Fogel said plainly that AI will carry a human cost in employment, and he's already moving his HR department to make every worker AI literate as a hedge against displacement. He named banks and tech firms as equally exposed. This is a C-suite executive saying the quiet part loudly, and the market is watching how that labor transition prices into services sector valuations.
And on the corporate adoption side, PwC's US chief executive Paul Griggs built himself a custom AI agent he calls PG's Whisperer, running two models simultaneously throughout his workday. It's a small story on its face, but when the person running one of the four largest professional services firms in the world is personally engineering his own AI workflow, that signals something meaningful about where enterprise adoption is heading.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
