With Trade War Back on, CFOs and Product Chiefs Reset and Reboot

As the U.S. reignites trade tensions with the rest of the world, corporate finance chiefs and product teams aren’t panicking. They’re planning.

In contrast to the chaotic uncertainty of President Donald Trump’s past tariff flare-ups, executives now see a clearer, if potentially harsher, path forward. Data from an upcoming edition of the 2025 Certainty Project by PYMNTS Intelligence reveals a surprising trend: perceived uncertainty has dropped to its lowest point in nearly a year, among services firms surveyed.

Executives, it seems, are treating the current environment like spinach. It’s not what they want, but they’re eating it, because they finally know what’s on the plate.

And what’s on the plate is more heapings of uncertainty requiring operational agility across key areas like supply chain management, procurement and product.

PYMNTS Intelligence has been tracking the tariff landscape since Trump first announced his policies in February. What we’ve found so far is this: the age of passive globalization is over. If the 2010s were defined by efficiency, scale and lean globalization, the 2020s are shaping up to be defined by resilience, optionality and adaptability.

Read more: Trump’s Global Tariffs Position CFOs as New Supply Chain Architects 

The only certainty that today’s uncertainty provides is that firms can no longer take open access to international inputs for granted. Instead, they are being forced to rethink, retool and in many cases, reshuffle operations — just to maintain a competitive edge.

A more complex and dynamic model of product leadership is emerging. One that blends supply chain awareness, geopolitical acumen, digital capability and agile product thinking.

As highlighted in “What Uncertainty Means: U.S. Goods Firms Retool Product Plans Amid Tariffs,” 57% of product leaders report having adjusted their product lines in response to tariffs. This is not a mere reshuffling of SKUs but a fundamental rethinking of what gets made, where and for whom.

These adjustments are not cosmetic. More than half of firms have pivoted to domestically sourced materials, while a growing subset is deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and digital tools to simulate tariff scenarios and optimize supply chain paths in real time. The shift is as much about technology as it is about operations.

In fact, 52% of companies have accelerated AI adoption as part of their mitigation strategy. This includes everything from demand forecasting to dynamic pricing models that account for fluctuating input costs under changing tariff schedules.

See also: B2B Firms Are Betting on Time to Cash to Manage Uncertainty 

Across every study in the PYMNTS series, a sobering throughline emerges: even the most sophisticated firms are brushing up against the hard limits of what operations can control.

You can retool. You can nearshore. You can simulate a thousand tariff permutations. But you cannot predict with certainty what policy Washington or Beijing — or Brussels — will adopt next quarter.

As one study notes, 48% of firms cite budget constraints as a barrier to deeper operational innovation, while others worry about betting on the wrong platform or vendor ecosystem.

Roughly 60% have built new scenario-planning functions to model supply chain risk and product rollout strategies. The rise of “operational foresight” is now seen as table stakes for firms looking to navigate tariff cycles with any degree of stability.

And in an environment where cost volatility is becoming the norm, businesses are making hard choices. The “Tariffs, Uncertainty, and the Limits of Operational Response” study reveals that 44% of companies have passed tariff costs onto consumers. Another 39% say they’ve absorbed the costs internally, cutting margins and delaying capital expenditures.

The economic trade-offs are particularly acute for middle-market firms, which lack the pricing power or global reach of larger competitors. Among firms with annual revenues between $50 million and $250 million, nearly 70% report “serious” impacts on product profitability.

As reported in “Tariff Turbulence: Product Leaders Shift Strategy to Blunt Fallout,” firms are increasingly embedding resilience into product design. This means designing products that can be assembled with multiple sources of input materials, or reconfiguring modular architectures to switch components rapidly in response to supplier changes.

Perhaps that explains why upcoming PYMNTS Intelligence research confirms that firms managing more extensive supplier networks tend to experience lower levels of uncertainty. For instance, 25% of goods firms working with over 100 suppliers reported low levels of uncertainty. This indicates that as companies expand their supplier relationships and grow in size, they may achieve greater operational stability rather than facing increased complexity challenges.

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