CEOs of Wells Fargo and Pfizer caution the U.S. could lose its edge to China without innovation

Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla sounded the alarm Wednesday over the potential for the the U.S. to lose its competitive edge to China, but said artificial intelligence could help America maintain its lead.

Speaking at CNBC’s inaugural Invest in America Forum in Washington, D.C., the two executives said that while the U.S. still leads in many sectors, inconsistent policy and underinvestment is ceding ground to China. AI, they said, poses both risks and benefits for the U.S. economy.

Scharf said AI will likely reduce the size of workforces — but will boost productivity.

“We will likely have less people, absolutely,” Scharf said. “When we look at the tools that we’ve implemented just for people that are coding, you see 20%, 30%, 40% improvement in coders. We haven’t reduced our head count by 20%, 30% or 40%. We’re actually doing more than we otherwise would have been able to do.”

Wells Fargo big bank peers like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are already hiring fewer people because of AI advancements.

Scharf also said the financial sector is poised for major regulatory changes despite an ongoing political stalemate in Washington.

“We ultimately do expect significant changes in capital requirements, liquidity requirements,” he said. “We do expect to see changes which will allow people in the industry, not just big banks and medium-sized banks, but smaller banks as well, to do more in these [local] communities.”

Bourla, meanwhile, expressed concern about China’s growing strength in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, pointing to a surge in research and development spending, regulatory reforms and a national strategy focused on life sciences.

“They [China] filed more patents this year than the U.S.,” Bourla said. “That’s never happened in history. Five years ago, the split was 90%-10%. … The gap is closing, but they probably will become [better than us] unless we get our act together.”

Bourla urged the U.S. to shift focus from trying to slow China’s progress toward improving its own productivity and innovation.

“We spend more time trying to think about how to slow down China rather than think how we can become better than them,” Bourla said. “We need to have regulatory changes here. We need to have stability. Tariffs and pricing was not helping.”

Pfizer recently agreed to a drug pricing deal with the Trump administration as part of a broader effort to remove long-standing uncertainties around pricing, Medicaid reimbursements and distribution. As part of the agreement, Pfizer secured a three-year exemption from pharmaceutical-specific tariffs, contingent on additional investments in U.S. manufacturing. 

“Tariffs and the uncertainty of drastic correction of U.S. pricing — with this deal, we are removing both uncertainties,” Bourla said Wednesday.

He also called artificial intelligence the next frontier for medicine, predicting that AI will revolutionize drug discovery by dramatically accelerating timelines for finding treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer.

“We tried for years to find cures … AI will make it happen,” Bourla said.