Despite Mamdani's attempts to appease, many business leaders remain wary. The mayor's attempt to create a business advisory council has been hampered by some concern that joining the council may be perceived as an endorsement of Mr. Mamdani. Listen · 8:49 min Aug. 14, 2026 After Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won the mayoralty of New York City over strong objections from the business class, he made nice, meeting with executives and even attending the groundbreaking of American Express's new headquarters in Lower Manhattan. But following a relatively fleeting détente, that fledgling relationship appears to have gone astray, waylaid by growing enmity and distrust. Many business leaders, some of whom are Jewish, bristle at the mayor's frequent anti-Israel statements. They take issue with his tax-the-rich rhetoric, the singling out of one exorbitantly rich hedge fund manager for public ridicule and the contentious rollout of his tax on expensive second homes. They found other signs troubling. Despite job growth remaining relatively weak, Mr. Mamdani was the first mayor this century to have no deputy mayor with "economic development" in their title, and it took him seven months to name someone to run the city's Economic Development Corporation. (His choice of Anthony Shorris, a longtime government veteran who became a partner at the consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, prompted business leaders to breathe a sigh of relief). Amid the rancor, Mr. Mamdani promised in late May to create a business advisory council of corporate leaders that would advise him on economic growth. The conceit of the council was that it would serve as a sounding board for the mayor, representing a collection of roughly 15 corporate leaders who would meet quarterly with the mayor, according to someone briefed on the effort. Yet more than two months after the council was announced, it remains a work in progress, its recruitment process marred by infighting among business leaders, many of whom question whether they can develop a working relationship with Mr. Mamdani. Two business leaders said they feared receiving - and feeling obliged to accept - an invitation to join the council, because they would then have to weigh their desire to help the administration against the appearance of serving as cover for policies with which they disagree. The divide between City Hall and Wall Street was only further exacerbated in July, when Mr. Mamdani disbanded a separate advisory board for the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City, a mayoral nonprofit that raises private money for city initiatives. The dismissed board members included several of New York's most prominent real estate leaders. Mr. Mamdani's team said he would replace the advisory board, but not until this fall, and asserted that the board had not been particularly active. Last year, only four of the advisory board's members, of which there are about 30, had paid their $25,000 dues, according to City Hall. The Mamdani administration has encouraged those who want to remain on the board to reapply; two former members have indicated their desire to do so. The mayor's effort to fill his business advisory council has also been choppy. Antonio Weiss, a former head of global investment banking at Lazard; Robert Wolf, the former chief executive of UBS Americas; and Jose Tavarez, the president for New York City at Bank of America, were among the first to be publicly linked to the council. Other business executives later emerged, including Kevin Ryan, a major New York tech investor; Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder of Chobani; and Scott Rechler, the chief executive of RXR, a real estate company, according to five people familiar with the effort. Backlash soon followed. Some executives at the 30 Rockefeller headquarters of Lazard were irked that the bank was linked to Mr. Mamdani in news accounts, two people familiar with the matter said. Another Wall Street executive, given anonymity by The New York Post, took a potshot at Mr. Wolf in a column mocking the council and anyone willing to join it. "I know there is a lot of uninformed noise surrounding this advisory board and some shots are being taken at the business leaders considering joining," Mr. Wolf said. "But my view is simple: If executives can use their experience and insights to help N.Y.C. thrive economically, than they should be willing to help." In an interview, Mr. Rechler said that while he shared some of his colleagues' concerns about the impact of Mr. Mamdani's anti-Israel rhetoric, he believes in engaging with those with whom he disagrees, particularly given the repeated, constructive interactions he has had with the administration. "He loves the city; I love the city," Mr. Rechler said. "We may have different views on what the city should look like, but that doesn't mean we don't engage." Mr. Mamdani's office has also reached out to a number of other executives, including Priscilla Sims Brown, the chief executive of Amalgamated Bank; Ken Chenault, the former chief executive of American Express; and Charles Phillips, a private equity executive, two people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Ryan, Mr. Ulukaya, Mr. Phillips, Ms. Sims Brown, Mr. Tavarez and Mr. Chenault did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment for this article. The advent of the council comes as New York City business leaders are navigating the best way to work with, or resist, Mr. Mamdani. Steven Fulop, the new leader of Partnership for New York City, a powerful business consortium, has described the business community's reservations about the council on social media, citing the administration's rhetoric and "concerns around antisemitism." "Mayor Mamdani has opened the doors of City Hall to New York's business leaders, welcoming them to bring their experience and strategic guidance to the work of building a stronger, more dynamic economy," said Dora Pekec, a spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani. "In the coming weeks, we will announce the members of our Business Advisory Council, who will be essential partners in our work to strengthen New York as the business capital of the country and create good-paying jobs." The balance between elected officials and corporate America has always been a delicate one. Executives believe they have a unique understanding of what New York City businesses need to generate the revenue that helps the city run. But elected officials do not want to be - or appear to be - beholden to corporate interests, a concern that is especially true for democratic socialists. Among themselves, business leaders have debated whether it is better to pragmatically maintain a line of communication with the mayor, even at the risk of their participation being construed as tacit support for Mr. Mamdani. The mayor has repeatedly tried to assuage the business community's concerns about his leadership. Most prominently, he retained Jessica Tisch, the technocratic billionaire heiress, as police commissioner. Under Ms. Tisch, crime numbers continue to fall. Mr. Mamdani also abandoned his opposition to mayoral control of schools and, like mayors before him, made moves to cut red tape for small businesses. City Hall aides also pointed to several indicators suggesting that the New York economy remains strong. New York City companies raised more venture capital funding in the second quarter of 2026 - $10.8 billion - than any quarter since 2021, according to a recent Economic Development Corporation report. The office leasing market continues to tighten. But some of Mr. Mamdani's acts and antics have also antagonized Wall Street, including his decision to record a video outside the lavish Midtown Manhattan home of a billionaire hedge fund manager, Ken Griffin, to make his case for taxing pricey second homes. The video prompted Mr. Griffin's business partner and ally, the Vornado chief executive Steven Roth, to compare Mr. Mamdani's rhetoric on the wealthy to hate speech. Following that video, Mr. Mamdani set up meetings with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and David Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs. But the relationship remains tenuous. "The unfortunate reality is that the mayor's approach out of the gate has served to confirm the business community's wariness about what a Mamdani administration would bring," said Edward Skyler, a former deputy mayor who now works at Citi and was dismissed in July from the mayor's fund advisory board. "That said, we are in Year 1, so hopefully he will come to the conclusion that this isn't serving his or the city's interests and will course correct," Mr. Skyler said.

What McKinsey's cuts should tell every commercial construction leader. The news came out quietly, the way these things usually do. McKinsey is cutting 3,000 to 4,000 positions in 2026 - roughly 10% of its global workforce, the largest reduction since 2008. Bain, BCG and Deloitte are doing variations of the same thing. Slower hiring. Headcount reductions. A pulling back that the firms themselves describe, carefully, as a response to AI productivity gains. Read that again. The world's most prestigious advisory firms are cutting people because AI is doing the work those people used to do. That is not a technology story. That is an operating model story. And if you lead a commercial construction firm, it is your story too - whether you see it yet or not. The work that was cut. McKinsey didn't eliminate partners. They eliminated the analytical layer underneath them - the associates and analysts who spent weeks synthesizing research, building models, producing deliverables that clients paid for at premium rates. That work turned out to be compressible. Not because the people weren't capable. Because the work itself - pattern recognition, document synthesis, comparative analysis, structured reporting - is exactly what artificial intelligence (AI) does well and fast. Now look at your own organization. Who tracks RFIs and summarizes status for the project executive? Who pulls together the weekly schedule report? Who runs the first pass on subcontractor bids? Who writes the owner update? Who coordinates the submittal log across three trades? That work is not the same as McKinsey analyst work. But the underlying structure is identical. Information processing. Pattern recognition. Synthesis and reporting. Work that requires training and intelligence - and that AI is now compressing on a timeline most construction leaders haven't fully absorbed. This is not a prediction. It is already happening. Firms using AI-assisted estimating are running comparables in hours that used to take days. Document review that required a coordinator's full afternoon now takes minutes. RFI response drafts that sat in someone's queue are being generated in real time. The compression is real. The question is whether your operating model is designed for what comes after - or still built for what worked before. What the compression exposes. Here is where most firms get stuck. They see the compression coming, buy a platform, run a pilot, and call it an AI strategy. The tools do what they were built to do. And then not much changes - because the tools were layered on top of an operating model that was never redesigned to use them. The technology is not the problem. The sequence is. An AI strategy matters. You need one. But an AI strategy built on top of a fragmented operating model does not create leverage. It accelerates the existing dysfunction. Faster reporting on a project with unclear decision rights is still a project with unclear decision rights. Better data flowing to people without authority to act on it is still a bottleneck - just a better-informed one. McKinsey learned this at scale. They built a business model on billable analytical hours, and then the thing that made those hours billable got automated. What survived was senior judgment - the partners who could walk into a boardroom and tell a CEO something they didn't already know. The analytical scaffolding underneath that judgment turned out to be the exposure, not the asset. Your firm has the same anatomy. The question is whether you know where your exposure sits. AI needs people. Specifically, it needs judgment. There is a version of this conversation that treats AI as a headcount reduction strategy. That framing will cost you. AI does not manage owner relationships. It does not make the call on a subcontractor who is three days behind and won't say so. It does not read the room when the GC and the owner's rep are heading toward a dispute that will cost six weeks if it isn't defused today. It does not carry the pattern recognition that comes from having delivered 40 projects and knowing what a schedule looks like two weeks before it slips. What AI does is give the people who carry that judgment more room to use it. That distinction - between work AI compresses and judgment AI amplifies - is also the most important lens you can apply to your next hire. The coordinator who executes a checklist is being replaced by technology faster than most firms have planned for. The person worth hiring in 2026 thinks clearly on incomplete information, makes good decisions under pressure and works alongside AI tools without needing someone to manage the process around them. Firms still writing 2019 job descriptions are going to find themselves with a 2019 workforce in a market that has already moved. The order matters - And so does the design. The AI conversation in commercial construction is happening almost entirely at the tool level. Which platform. Which integration. Which demo looked most impressive at the last industry conference. That conversation is not irrelevant. But it is starting in the middle. Consider what the day actually looks like in most firms right now. A project executive is running three jobs simultaneously. The owner on Job A wants a schedule update. The answer requires calls to the super, the MEP sub, and the PM who is on-site at Job B. By the time the information is assembled, two hours are gone and the update is already 24 hours stale. Meanwhile, a submittal on Job C has been sitting for four days waiting for an approval that requires the VP of operations - who didn't know it was waiting because it was buried in an email chain he wasn't copied on. That is not a technology problem. That is a decision architecture problem. Who owns the schedule update? What is the trigger for escalation? Where does approval authority actually sit versus where the org chart says it sits? Until those questions have clear answers, AI produces better-formatted versions of the same confusion. Now redesign that scenario with the operating model fixed first. Decision rights are clear. Escalation triggers are defined. The project executive knows exactly which decisions are hers and which ones require the VP. Information flows to the right person automatically because the system was designed to move it there. In that environment, AI does something genuinely powerful - it compresses the time between information and decision. The owner update that took two hours now takes 20 minutes. The buried submittal surfaces before it becomes a delay. The schedule variance that used to show up in week three shows up in week one, when there is still time to act. That is what AI-enabled decision architecture looks like in practice. Not faster chaos. Faster clarity. But clarity has to be designed first. AI accelerates whatever operating model you have. Build the right one, and the acceleration compounds. Leave the fragmented one in place, and AI gives you more data on a problem you still can't resolve quickly enough to matter. The firms that will look back at this period as a structural advantage asked a different question than their competitors. Not which tool to buy. But how work is actually designed inside the business - and what has to change so that AI makes decisions better and faster, not just more documented. Three questions worth asking this week. You do not need another platform evaluation before you answer these. Where are your best people spending time on work that AI could compress in the next 18 months - and what would they do with that capacity if it were freed? Where do decisions stall on your projects because the right information isn't reaching the right person with the authority to act? And where is senior judgment - yours, your VPs', your project executives' - being spent on problems that should have been resolved two levels below? Those answers will tell you more about your AI readiness than any technology audit. They will also tell you exactly where the operating model work has to happen before the AI investment pays off. McKinsey didn't see the exposure in their own model until the cuts were already decided. You have the advantage of watching it happen first - and enough time to design around it rather than react to it. That window is not staying open indefinitely. Jane Gentry is founder of Jane Gentry & Company, a strategic operating model advisory firm working with mid-market CEOs and senior leadership teams in construction, manufacturing, logistics and professional services. She helps leadership teams clarify how work gets designed, how decisions get made and how AI creates leverage instead of accelerating drag. If these questions are live inside your business, a 60-minute diagnostic conversation is a good place to start. Reach her directly at [email protected].