66% of CEOs are freezing hiring while betting billions on AI. It’s a costly miscalculation

Corporate America is making one of the biggest capital bets in decades on artificial intelligence while simultaneously cooling the labor market needed to make that investment pay off.

This is not fiscal prudence. It is operational paralysis. According to a recent survey of more than 350 public-company CEOs and investors managing $19 trillion in assets, 66% of CEOs plan to freeze or cut hiring through the rest of 2026.

As a gender economist, I see a deeper structural failure...