American finance chiefs say they’re feeling less confident about the nation’s economic outlook in the coming years, according to a recent survey by U.S. Bank.
In a survey of 1,000 senior finance leaders in March and April, just 36% of respondents said they have a positive outlook on the U.S. economy over the next year. That’s down from 42% in the fourth quarter of 2024, which was the last time the bank conducted the survey.
Over a three-year timeframe, 58% of survey takers said their outlook on the U.S. economy is positive, down from 63% in the last survey. Stephen Philipson, U.S. Bank’s vice chair and head of wealth, corporate, commercial and institutional banking, said the results seem to suggest a “cautious outlook.”
“But what I think finance leaders have learned the last couple of years is that you can’t be paralyzed by the macro uncertainty and geopolitical headlines,” he said in an interview. “The economy keeps moving.”
He pointed to respondents’ sentiments on mergers and acquisitions, for instance. The survey revealed that just about half of respondents (49%) are more likely to make acquisitions over the next year than they were in the prior one.
Respondents apparently believe that their peers are likely to do the same, with 46% saying M&A activity is “likely to rise in their sector in the next 12 months, with finance leaders in healthcare, life sciences and pharmaceuticals, and technology among the most likely to say this,” the report stated.
Meanwhile, as war and trade conflicts scramble supply chains around the globe, finance leaders surveyed by U.S. Bank appear to be taking proactive steps, according to the survey.
“In the past 12 months, 62% of finance leaders working at organizations with overseas manufacturing and supply chain operations say they have nearshored manufacturing activity closer to the U.S.,” the report said. “Many (51%) businesses with domestic or international supply chains have diversified suppliers and sourced from multiple countries, while 37% have reshored manufacturing facilities to the U.S. There are signs that this shift toward more domestic operations could continue when considering new facilities. Some 81% of those with manufacturing facilities at home and abroad say they are more likely to do so than they were last year, as do 73% with U.S.-only facilities.”
Philipson said he’s heard similar anecdotal sentiments among clients. Whether due to on-again, off-again tariffs or war, many companies are “very focused on being more nimble in their supply chain management.” Their goal, in many cases, is to build an “all-weather supply chain model,” as Philipson put it.
U.S. Bank’s survey also probed respondents’ sentiments on artificial intelligence and its promised economic gains. The return on investment of AI, though, continues to be elusive. In this survey, 59% of participants said that it’s “very challenging to calculate the ROI of AI investments.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, firms with bigger revenue were more likely to attempt to measure the ROI of artificial intelligence. Among companies with revenue exceeding $5 billion, respondents on average said they measured the return on investment on just about half of their AI ventures (49%). But at companies with revenue between $100 million and $250 million, participants tracked ROI across 36% of AI investments.
For those AI investments that were tracked, just under half (47%) produced a positive return on average, according to the survey.
Philipson said that the number of firms that have started to measure the ROI of AI was actually “a little bit higher than I would have anticipated.” That’s because “so many companies are still in that experimentation phase” with the technology, he said.
The report said that, for now, the “data suggests that building the necessary capabilities to track ROI (of AI) is uneven across the market.”
