In the face of several mounting uncertainties around the globe, finance chiefs in a recent survey remained relatively upbeat about their own company’s prospects and the American economy at large.
That’s according to the latest CFO Survey conducted Feb. 17 to March 5 by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond and Atlanta. When participants were asked to rate their optimism on the U.S. economy from 0 to 100, the average response came in at 61.7. That marked a small increase from the fourth quarter survey, which showed an average rating of 60.3 after an annual revision process.
Respondents’ optimism about their own companies also ticked up to 70.2, up from 69.6 in the prior quarter. The survey queried 473 CFOs.
“What we’re seeing overall is companies are fairly comfortable, and I guess confident in their numbers,” said John Graham, a Fuqua finance professor and academic director of the survey, in a phone interview with CFO.com. “Now, the numbers are not off-the-charts good or anything like that, but (CFOs) feel comfortable in the short run, over the next 12 months.”
The latest Duke-Fed survey was administered amid two major world events: The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against the Trump administration’s tariff regime on Feb. 20 and the start of the U.S.-Israel war in Iran on Feb. 28. Notably, though, researchers didn’t detect any big shifts in CFO optimism from either event, Graham said.
“We did before and after analysis on both of those, and in both cases, there wasn’t any kind of significant change,” he said. “This is a pretty stable outlook that they have right now.”
Graham described the CFOs’ outlook as “moderate optimism.”
Still, if the war overseas becomes protracted, things could change, Graham cautioned. “I can’t promise you that if we ran the survey today, there would be no effects of war,” he said, noting increases in the price of oil, for example.
Meanwhile, when respondents were asked to share their top concerns, tariffs and trade policy remained at the top for the fifth consecutive quarter, followed by labor quality and availability.
The fact that many respondents picked labor quality and availability as a top concern indicates that fears about widespread, technology-driven layoffs may be a bit overblown, for now. Graham instead pointed to a “skills mismatch.”
“At least in the types of skills that some companies are looking for, there’s not just people sitting on the sidelines who can’t get hired,” Graham said. “If you thought there was going to be mass layoffs across the economy, you probably wouldn’t be as worried about labor availability.”
Graham also pointed to another working paper that drew on Duke-Fed CFO survey data, which predicted that artificial intelligence is likely to drive a less than 0.4% decline in jobs, or about 500,000 jobs across the wider economy, in 2026. He noted that large companies may be more likely to enact job cuts due to AI, while smaller ones aren’t quite ready to take the leap. Graham said survey research suggests that large companies are simply taking the “first step” toward AI integration this year.
Indeed, when researchers in the latest Duke-Fed survey asked respondents why they might be laying off workers or declining to fill open positions, 24.1% said it’s due to “automated tasks.” Financial constraints were the top reason, cited by 58.6% of respondents.
When it comes to hiring, 57.1% of respondents said they’re doing so to replace positions, and 38.7% said it’s for new positions.
Respondents, on the whole, are forecasting increasing demand for their businesses’ goods and services in the next year, too. Just about 60% of respondents expect demand to increase, with 11% of that subset projecting demand to grow “substantially.” About a third (34.1%) expect demand to remain the same.
