Two days after American bombs struck Tehran, economists at the University of Colorado began surveying more than 200 local business leaders to gauge how things were shaping up financially for the next quarter.
Perhaps no surprise, the future outlook was negative. However, it was less negative than a year ago, when the threat of high tariffs, federal job cuts and the new presidential administration contributed to the lowest business confidence index since the pandemic in 2020.
Brian Lewandowski, executive director of the Business Research Division at University of Colorado Boulder, Leeds School of Business,. (Tamara Chuang, The Colorado Sun)“Business leaders are signaling that they are getting more used to operating in an environment where there is uncertainty,” Brian Lewandowski, executive director of the business research division at CU’s Leeds School of Business, said during a press conference Wednesday.
On a scale of 1 to 100, with 50 considered neutral, the 213 respondents ranked their business outlook for the second quarter at 41.9, or 10 points higher than a year ago, according to the Leeds Business Confidence Index.
“If it was just a standalone event of the war with Iran and we weren’t talking about tariffs or federal restructuring or anything else over the last year, maybe it would have been a greater dip. Maybe it wouldn’t have,” Lewandowski said. “But now uncertainty is sort of status quo.”
Colorado’s job growth slowed in 2025. Upcoming revisions to last year’s data could result in downward revisions and leave the state with zero growth for 2025, according to economists at the University of Colorado’s business research division at the Leeds Business School. (Screenshot)According to federal data, the U.S. economy grew more slowly than expected at the end of last year. Colorado’s labor force has also been shrinking. And after the Bureau of Labor Statistics revises data in the next month or so, the state’s job growth may end up being zero in 2025.
“And we continue to have slow growth forecasts for this year, 2026,” said Rich Wobbekind, senior economist and faculty director of CU research division.
AI tech disruption
Another concern — or opportunity — for business leaders is that artificial intelligence has become a major potential business disruptor for the workforce, with 40% of the business leaders saying AI and automation is transforming work and jobs.
Most said they use AI for work at least monthly, if not daily, and 69% said it increased productivity slightly or significantly. Another 32% said they had limited or no AI use at work.
“We’ve had disruptors like that before. The chip and other types of things, like the internet,” Wobbekind said.
But this is somewhat different, he added, because AI’s disruption coincides with immigration policies and other changes impacting slowing job growth — “not the model we have had historically over time.”
Richard Wobbekind, Associate Dean for Business & Government Relations, Senior Economist and Faculty Director of the Business Research Division and at the University of Colorado Boulder. (Tamara Chuang, The Colorado Sun)A number of large companies announcing layoffs in recent years — including Oracle this week — have been linked to the rise in AI use at work. And that is causing concerns of its own for workers and employers, though some feel blaming AI is just an excuse to cut staff after overhiring following the pandemic.
“What I’m suggesting is you need to think of the economy in a different mindset. Not that we’re going down a bad alley but when you are analyzing the economy, maybe it isn’t all about employment growth (or) GDP growth,” Wobbekind said. “Is it more based on productivity? Are we able to generate enough income from this increased productivity to support the overall society? I think these are really important questions when you have a smaller percentage of people in the workforce and a smaller percentage of people receiving wage payments.”
Coincidentally, the CU business research division used AI conversational tool Blendification for the first time for the new report to analyze open-ended survey responses. The company, based in Superior, uses AI to conduct conversations to better understand what’s behind a response. The analysis revealed that responses linked to geopolitical risks, Lewandowski said, “negative emotional tones outweigh the positive emotional tones by a wide margin.
“When we looked at the individual emotional tones, the negatives were a sense of risk, a sense of fear and frustration,” he said. “The positive emotional tones were a tone of trust. Understanding that emotional tone behind responses was a different value-add than we’ve had before.”
The team is just testing out the AI tool, and making sure the AI summaries match up to the responses. So far, Blendification isn’t being used to dig deeper into why someone responded the way they did, Lewandowski said.
“I worry that people might get into a conversation with AI and it ends up going on longer than we expect people to spend on the survey,” he said. But, he added, “Sometimes when we get a single word answer, it is nice to be able to follow up and really ask somebody why.”
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