After a week of stock market losses fueled by AI jitters, I have two related CFO conversations for you — Arm’s Jason Child on investing in silicon chips, and Synopsys’ Shelagh Glaser on pulling in schedules.

If there’s one thing keeping CFOs up at night now, regardless of industry, it’s AI spending and the cost of tokens. Talking to executives, I found that companies pursue a handful of strategies: setting companywide or individual spending limits, steering employees toward cheaper models and building dashboards to measure whether tokens are actually used productively.

It’s getting harder to find a corner of the market that’s untouched by AI. The technology is becoming part of more business models, with companies signing deals with AI firms or hyperscalers directly. Those transactions can generate substantial revenue and profits for shareholders. But they also raise a question for CFOs: At what point does benefiting from AI leave a company (too) exposed to it?

Budgeting used to be a fairly predictable, albeit intense and laborious exercise at many companies. Each September or October, finance leaders would kick off the process, which stretched over several months and involved number crunching, scenario planning, forecasting and – perhaps most importantly – compromising over which spending to prioritize. But with artificial intelligence upending their processes, many chief financial officers are realizing their old ways of budgeting no longer work.

Going into the year, bond traders were pricing in several rate cuts. Companies reacted by increasing their allocations to fixed-income instruments, while cutting their cash holdings, according to Clearwater Analytics, which tracks $1.6 trillion in holdings from roughly 800 companies, most of them US-based.

After peaking in June, duration started to decline as it became clear to treasurers that the war in Iran wouldn’t be ending soon, and that its inflationary effects would build over time.

Traders’ current outlook, which includes three further rate increases by the middle of next year, is making the case for treasurers to allocate more money to cash and cash-like instruments such as money market funds, and less to fixed-income securities.

Finding the right time to sell debt may soon become more difficult for CFOs. High energy prices are driving up inflation and interest rate expectations ahead of the US midterm elections in November, essentially shortening the window for executives to this month and October. Ahead of the Fed’s rate decision on Wednesday, I spoke to finance chiefs and advisors about where the credit markets are headed.