- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady interviews ADP CEO Maria Black.
- The big leadership story: ‘AI is fantastic for old companies.’
- The markets: A global selloff is underway, led by tech stocks.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. While the jobs report tells you what happened last month, Maria Black can tell you what’s happening now. As CEO of ADP, she sits on real-time payroll data for one in six American workers and sees how AI is shaping employment across different occupations. Earlier this month, ADP teamed up with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab to provide a real-time public tracker, called the Canaries Dashboard, that shows up to 16% fewer jobs in AI-exposed sectors like software development since 2022 and fewer jobs for workers aged 22 to 25.
I spoke with Black yesterday about that disruption and how she’s managing it in her own workforce. She’s three and a half years into her tenure as ADP’s first female CEO and came in at No. 1 on Comparably’s 2025 ranking of top CEOs. Her company is listed as one of Fortune’s Sector Leaders, as well as on our list of the World’s Most Admired Companies and America’s Most Innovative Companies.
Her approach starts with how she frames this moment for her 67,000 employees. “Jobs are being disrupted at the task level,” says Black. “Take a given job and unbundle it into a series of tasks and apply wages to those tasks. That is what’s going to guide the world of work toward role convergence and reskilling.” In other words, stop talking about jobs going away and focus instead on amplifying value-added tasks.
Focus on the bottom, not the top. Black rose through the ranks of ADP, having started in sales in 1997. “Transformation can only happen at the front lines. It’s a groundswell, not a top-down initiative,” she said. “Culture is the most important thing that any company has, especially in heightened innovation and transformation cycles.”
Her other advice is to prioritize people, not technology. “Don’t confuse AI confidence with real intelligence. Human intelligence is about judgment, context, and perspective—navigating the gray—and that can only be taught by being out in the world and connecting,” she said. “Just because you can automate something doesn’t mean you should.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top leadership news
Legacy companies’ AI edge
L'Oréal's chief innovation officer Delphine Viguier-Hovasse told Fortune Brainstorm Tech that legacy companies have a structural edge in the AI era because of their proprietary data, pointing to 40 years of consumer research that lets the beauty giant test new molecules in three months instead of years. "AI is fantastic for old companies," she said.
BofA’s new Fed prediction
Bank of America reversed a previous forecast Monday and predicted the Fed will hike rates a quarter-point in September, October, and December after Fed chair Kevin Warsh signaled unexpectedly hawkish views at last week's FOMC meeting. Not everyone agrees: Alpine Macro global strategist Chen Zhao argues rate hikes remain unlikely, writing that "the likelihood of actual tightening remains very low" if the Iran conflict winds down and oil prices fall.
Elon Musk's 'Mars-shot' pay
SpaceX's IPO filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk stands to collect 1 billion additional restricted shares, worth roughly $165 billion at current prices, contingent on the company reaching a $7.5 trillion market cap and settling at least a million people on Mars. "We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs," the filing reads.
The markets
S&P 500 futures are down 1.42% this morning. The last session closed down 0.37%. The STOXX Europe 600 was down 1.14% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.52% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 3.55%. South Korea’s KOSPI was down 9.99% today. China’s CSI 300 was down 2.77%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down 1.82%. India’s NIFTY 50 was down 0.71%. Bitcoin was down at $62K.
Around the watercooler
The World Cup’s biggest winner so far? Prediction markets, where a $5.4 billion betting frenzy has shattered previous records by Camila Grigera Naón
Insilico Medicine, SK Biopharmaceuticals strike $2.5B AI drug discovery deal targeting neuroimmune therapies by Nicholas Gordon
Nvidia says its new data center design will fix AI’s water problem by Jacqueline Munis
What leaders can learn from the Knicks ending their 53-year championship drought by Melissa Dawn Simkins
Meet the 2 men putting New York’s $300 billion pension fund in play for the first time in 20 years by Nick Lichtenberg
CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.












