- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady interviews ADP CEO Maria Black.
- The big leadership story: ‘AI is fantastic for old companies.’
- The markets: A global selloff is underway, led by tech stocks.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. While the jobs report tells you what happened last month, Maria Black can tell you what’s happening now. As CEO of ADP, she sits on real-time payroll data for one in six American workers and sees how AI is shaping employment across different occupations. Earlier this month, ADP teamed up with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab to provide a real-time public tracker, called the Canaries Dashboard, that shows up to 16% fewer jobs in AI-exposed sectors like software development since 2022 and fewer jobs for workers aged 22 to 25.
I spoke with Black yesterday about that disruption and how she’s managing it in her own workforce. She’s three and a half years into her tenure as ADP’s first female CEO and came in at No. 1 on Comparably’s 2025 ranking of top CEOs. Her company is listed as one of Fortune’s Sector Leaders, as well as on our list of the World’s Most Admired Companies and America’s Most Innovative Companies.
Her approach starts with how she frames this moment for her 67,000 employees. “Jobs are being disrupted at the task level,” says Black. “Take a given job and unbundle it into a series of tasks and apply wages to those tasks. That is what’s going to guide the world of work toward role convergence and reskilling.” In other words, stop talking about jobs going away and focus instead on amplifying value-added tasks.
Focus on the bottom, not the top. Black rose through the ranks of ADP, having started in sales in 1997. “Transformation can only happen at the front lines. It’s a groundswell, not a top-down initiative,” she said. “Culture is the most important thing that any company has, especially in heightened innovation and transformation cycles.”
Her other advice is to prioritize people, not technology. “Don’t confuse AI confidence with real intelligence. Human intelligence is about judgment, context, and perspective—navigating the gray—and that can only be taught by being out in the world and connecting,” she said. “Just because you can automate something doesn’t mean you should.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com