Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh is listed to moderate 3 of the 4 sessions at the Fed’s Productivity and Jobs Task Force Conference on Monday, 16 November, according to the San Francisco Fed’s agenda. He gives the opening remarks at 9:00 a.m. Pacific, and the last session is a fireside chat he moderates with Marc Andreessen and Gina Raimondo.
Reuters previewed the conference on 13 November, framing it against growing public wariness of AI. The agenda says the task force is “assessing the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including super intelligence (SI), to inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments”. Seven of the 13 speakers the agenda lists carry a chief executive title, by our count.
Business Pill · Forecast vs Commitment Explained
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on the difference between a forecast and a commitment. It teaches the concept and does not discuss the Fed conference.
The key insight: The San Francisco Fed’s agenda lists Chairman Kevin Warsh as moderator of 3 of the 4 sessions at the Fed’s Productivity and Jobs Task Force Conference on 16 November, after his opening remarks; seven of the 13 listed speakers carry a chief executive title, by our count.
The Fed Board’s calendar lists the speech as Chairman Kevin Warsh, Opening Remarks, at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The SF Fed page says the Board and the bank host the conference on the economic impacts of new technologies, and that it will be livestreamed for the public on that page. In-person attendance is limited and by invitation only, the page says.
Warsh moderates the first panel, “At the Frontier: What Is the Pace and Scope of SI Adoption?”, with Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto Networks, Patrick Collison of Stripe and Max Levchin of Affirm, the agenda shows. The agenda also lists him as moderator of a panel on how SI could reshape the economy, with Nick Bloom, Dan Huttenlocher, Jonathan Levin and Cecilia Rouse.
San Francisco Fed President Mary C. Daly moderates the one session Warsh does not, on what happens when businesses adopt SI. Her panel lists Svenja Gudell of Indeed, Jim Liefer of Ambi Robotics, Michael Senske of Pearson Packaging Systems and Erik Wexler of Providence. The programme runs from 9:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Pacific, the agenda says.
The 16 November agenda of the Fed’s Productivity and Jobs Task Force Conference, from the San Francisco Fed’s event page. The count of sessions Warsh moderates is ours.
What Fed Officials Said This Week
Governor Michael S. Barr spoke on AI at Yale on 12 November. His published text says: “As fast as AI has grown, its implementation is still limited so far, and no one knows the degree to which its benefits will be shared”. It adds: “We are already seeing signs that AI may be a labor substitute in some sectors, especially for younger, less-experienced workers”.
Barr’s text also says: “AI could be what some researchers call capital-biased innovation, in which the returns go primarily to capital rather than to labor”. Vice Chair Philip N. Jefferson is listed on the Fed calendar to speak on 13 November on “New Technology, Old Questions: Assessing Productivity Puzzles and Their Implications for Macroeconomic Activity” in La Jolla.
As we read the agenda, the Fed chair has placed himself at the centre of the task force’s public input on AI: he moderates the adoption panel with Arora, Collison and Levchin, the economists’ panel, and the closing chat with Andreessen and Raimondo. Barr’s text this week, that AI’s implementation is still limited and that some sectors show signs of labor substitution for younger workers, sets out one of the questions the panels are titled around.
Governor Michael S. Barr, Yale, 12 November 2026
“As fast as AI has grown, its implementation is still limited so far, and no one knows the degree to which its benefits will be shared”
Three Implications
FOR COMPANIES Seven of the 13 speakers on the agenda carry a chief executive title, by our count, from Stripe, Palo Alto Networks and Affirm to Providence and Ambi Robotics.
FOR WORKERS Barr’s published text says there are signs AI may be a labor substitute in some sectors, especially for younger, less-experienced workers.
FOR MARKETS The SF Fed page says the task force was set up to inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments; the calendar lists Warsh’s opening remarks at 12:00 p.m. on 16 November.
The framework says: “It describes the intersection of three powerful forces: geopolitics, cultural transformation, and economic change.”
As we read it, a central bank convening chief executives on the pace of SI adoption is the economic layer of that loop being written into policy work. The framework predates the conference and does not discuss it.
The 13 speakers on the San Francisco Fed’s 16 November agenda, moderators excluded, grouped by the titles the page lists. The grouping and count are ours.
What Is Not Established
Warsh’s remarks have not been delivered, and the Fed has not published a text; nothing here describes what he will say. We could read only Reuters’ headline, not its article, so the poll on public wariness it refers to is not quoted here. The SF Fed page says the task force operates independently; what it will recommend, and when, is not in the pages we read.
This Week In The AI Supercycle
The Great Convergence of Capital, Power, and Geopolitics
This week’s issue: for two years the AI build-out was priced as a supply story, and last week as a credit story. This week it was priced as a permission story, and the answer arrived as a cost, not a ban.
On the SF Fed’s agenda, Warsh opens the Fed’s Productivity and Jobs Task Force Conference on 16 November and moderates 3 of its 4 sessions, closing with Andreessen and Raimondo. This week Barr said AI’s implementation is still limited and that some sectors show signs of labor substitution for younger workers.
A note on sourcing. The agenda, times and speaker titles come from the San Francisco Fed’s event page and the Federal Reserve Board calendar, read on 13 November. Barr’s quotes are from his published speech text. Reuters’ article page served a bot check, so we read only its headline and do not quote the poll it cites. The counts of sessions and chief executive titles are ours. We did not contact the Fed or the speakers.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
