Business
Many worlds of AI: For investors, the implications are significant – The Times of India
Two stories from the past few weeks capture something essential about where we are with AI.The first concerns Salesforce, the enterprise software giant that aggressively embraced AI for customer service. CEO Marc Benioff proudly announced that AI deployment had allowed the company to cut support staff from 9,000 to roughly 5,000. Then reality intervened. Reports from late 2025 indicate that the company is now withdrawing from AI due to widespread failure. The AI agents confidently gave wrong answers, dropped instructions when given more than eight steps, and lost focus when users asked unexpected questions. Customers complained that AI support took longer than the simple old search function. Salesforce is now retreating to rigid, rule-based scripting–essentially admitting they were, in their own words, “more confident” than the technology warranted.The second story is a zeitgeist shift. Over the past couple of months, the conversation around AI and coding has transformed completely. People who were skeptical six months ago–senior developers who actually write code for a living–are now saying the age of human beings writing code is ending. Not in some distant future, but imminently. Entire features are being shipped by AI with minimal human intervention. The productivity gains are no longer incremental; they’re structural.How can both be true? How can AI fail comprehensively in customer service–seemingly straightforward–while revolutionising software development, which appears far more complex?The answer is that we’ve been thinking about AI wrong. We treat it as a single phenomenon that will sweep through the economy at roughly the same pace. However, AI in business is not a single story. It’s many parallel stories, moving at wildly different speeds. And the distinction has almost nothing to do with how intelligent the AI is.I’ve written about this tension before. A year ago, I argued that “the fact that a revolution is real doesn’t mean that every business claiming to be part of it will succeed.” More recently, I observed that “the gap between what AI demos well in controlled environments and what it actually delivers when confronting the messy real world remains enormous.” I now think there’s a more precise way to understand this gap. It’s not random. It’s structural.Consider what makes coding fertile ground for AI. Code is formally structured and machine-verifiable–it runs and passes tests, or it doesn’t. The feedback loop is immediate. When AI makes a mistake, a developer (or another AI agent) notices, fixes it, and moves on. Errors are private and reversible. Now consider customer service. Customers don’t speak in data schemas. Emotion, sarcasm, and cultural context matter enormously. One wrong answer can escalate to social media outrage or regulatory complaints. The failures are public and often irreversible.The difference isn’t intelligence. It’s what I’d call error economics. AI thrives where mistakes are cheap, private, and correctable. It struggles where mistakes are expensive, public, and permanent.We received a clear illustration of executive disconnect just a few days ago. During Bajaj Finance’s Q3 call, CEO Rajeev Jain announced that AI had listened to 2 crore calls and generated 100,000 new customer offers. “We’ll be able to listen to 100 million calls next year,” he said proudly. The response on social media was predictable hilarity. As the entire country, except apparently Mr Jain knows, Bajaj Finance’s incessant spam calls are the butt of countless jokes. Here was a CEO using sophisticated technology to optimize something customers actively despise. Machine learning works perfectly; the learning about customers is absent.For investors, the implications are significant. When you hear “AI” attached to a business function, ask: what happens when it’s wrong? If the answer involves customers, regulators, or reputations, progress will be slower than vendor PPTs claim. If the answer is “someone notices and fixes it,” that’s a different world entirely.The story of AI in business is not one of universal acceleration. It’s one of the selective escape velocities. Coding has left the atmosphere and gone into orbit. Customer service is still fighting gravity. Most other functions lie somewhere in between–mistakenly assumed to be closer to the rocket than they really are. The many worlds of AI are not converging. They’re diverging. And that divergence will determine which investments succeed and which disappoint.(Dhirendra Kumar is Founder and CEO of Value Research)
The UK could face some food shortages by the summer under a worst case scenario drawn up by government officials.
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The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building stands after it was reported the IRS will lay off about 6,700 employees, a restructuring that could strain the tax-collecting agency’s resources during the critical tax-filing season, in Washington, D.C., Feb. 20, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
For seven years, wealthy Americans faced a looming deadline to take advantage of tax provisions that were set to expire at the end of 2025. While the One Big Beautiful Bill Act alleviated much of the uncertainty by making most of the cuts permanent, lawyers and tax accountants say the ever-shifting tax code requires constant planning.
With this year’s Tax Day now behind us, here are five of the most important planning strategies wealthy investors and high earners are thinking about for next year and beyond.
1. Long-short tax-loss harvesting
Last year’s tax bill permanently raised the estate tax exemption to $15 million per person, up from $13.99 million. (It was initially set to be cut in half at the end of 2025.)
The higher threshold has prompted a shift in focus from minimizing federal estate taxes to lowering taxes on income and capital gains. Minimizing capital gains has become crucial after several years of strong market gains, according to Mitchell Drossman, head of national wealth strategies in Bank of America’s chief investment office. The S&P 500 has surged more than 75% since the beginning of 2023.
“The biggest tax story to me is a capital gains and investing story,” said Drossman. “You have lots of clients who are sitting on significant gains.”
Investors are increasingly turning to long-short tax-loss harvesting, an aggressive form of a popular strategy, in order to minimize capital gains, Drossman said. With traditional tax-loss harvesting, investors sell losing assets to offset realized gains on others. Long-short tax strategies, on the other hand, borrow against the portfolio to buy short positions expected to fall and maintain long positions expected to thrive.
“If there’s natural volatility in the markets, you have, now, a greater amount of an asset base to choose from in terms of harvesting losses,” he said. “But when you look at your overall portfolio, you’re still kind of neutral.”
2. Bonus depreciation
The 2025 tax bill renewed bonus depreciation, allowing businesses to deduct the full cost of qualifying assets like machinery, computers or vehicles the first year they are used.
Adam Ludman, head of tax strategy at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, said many clients with operating businesses are investing with bonus depreciation in mind, such as buying private jets.
Real estate developers and investors are trying to get the most bang for their buck by assessing which parts of their properties can be depreciated faster, according to Ludman. For instance, while a commercial building can take 39 years to depreciate, a parking lot can be depreciated over 15 years, allowing owners to recover costs faster.
3. Changing domiciles
A wave of blue states are considering new taxes on top earners and high-net-worth individuals in order to cover cuts in federal aid. California’s one-time billionaire tax proposal may end up on the November ballot, while Maine and Washington have recently passed millionaire taxes.
Jane Ditelberg, chief tax strategist for Northern Trust Wealth Management, said a growing number of clients are asking how to change their tax status as these proposals gain traction. Depending on their state, residents can avoid state-level taxes by creating trusts in states with favorable trust income laws like Delaware.
The most straightforward way to avoid local taxes is to change your domicile, which is easier said than done, according to Jere Doyle of BNY Wealth. The senior estate planning strategist based in Massachusetts, which imposes a millionaire tax, said he has had clients move to New Hampshire and establish residency before selling their businesses.
But clients are often loath to take the steps necessary to establish intent not to return, Doyle said. For instance, moving to Florida may not be enough to avoid Massachusetts taxes if you refuse to sell your Martha’s Vineyard home, he said.
“Everyone thinks that if they spend 183 days in another state, you’re domiciled in that state. That’s not necessarily true. Each state’s a little bit different,” he said. “You [have] got to change where you vote, where your car is registered, even where your doctors are, what clubs you belong to, golf clubs, country clubs, things like that.”
4. Bunching charitable gifts
One notable drawback of last year’s tax bill was a reduction in the tax benefits of charitable giving for top earners.
The bill limits top-earning donors in two ways. First, starting this year, donors who itemize will only be able to deduct charitable contributions in excess of 0.5% of their adjusted gross income, or AGI.
Second, taxpayers in the 37% tax bracket will have their itemized deductions reduced by 2/37th of the value. This ceiling reduces the effective tax benefit from 37% to 35%.
Ditelberg said many clients accelerated their charitable giving last year before these new rules took effect. She said she anticipates clients will continue to “bunch” their donations, by giving a larger sum in one year rather than spreading it over multiple years, so they only trigger the 0.5% haircut once, either through their foundations or donor-advised funds.
5. Opportunity zones
The tax bill also offered an incentive for business owners and real estate owners to postpone selling their assets. The bill made permanent the qualified opportunity zone program, which allows investors to defer capital gains by rolling them over into a fund that invests in a low-income community.
The opportunity zone funds created under the first Trump administration still exist, but you can only defer the taxes until the end of the year. The new opportunity zones, which have yet to be designated, come with enhanced benefits, especially for investors in rural communities. For instance, if you hold your investment in a qualified rural opportunity fund for five years, your capital gains are reduced by 30% for tax purposes.
But you only have 180 days to roll over your gains, and the new opportunity zone rules don’t take effect until 2027, Ditelberg noted.
“If you’re thinking of incurring a major gain, you may want to defer it until August or September, instead of doing it in May or June, if you think you would like to take advantage of the opportunity zone deferral,” she said. “I think we’re going to see people who are incurring gains in the second half of this year.”
That said, investors are waiting to see what the new funds entail. Drossman said some clients are reluctant to invest in opportunity zones again after their previous investments underperformed.
“It’s a classic example of not letting the tax-tail wag the dog because these need to be sound investments,” he said. “Like with all investments, there is an element of risk and return.”
Illuminated logo for Pepsi on a soda fountain in Walnut Creek, California, March 4, 2026.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
PepsiCo on Thursday reported quarterly earnings and revenue that topped analysts’ expectations as its struggling North American food business reported a return to volume growth.
Here’s what the company reported compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: $1.61 adjusted vs. $1.55 expected
- Revenue: $19.44 billion vs. $18.94 billion expected
Pepsi reported first-quarter net income attributable to the company of $2.32 billion, or $1.70 per share, up from $1.83 billion, or $1.33 per share, a year earlier.
Excluding items, the company earned $1.61 per share.
Net sales rose 8.5% to $19.44 billion.
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