From the role of AI to the potential impacts of federal policy changes, three Wilmington executives discussed the issues facing their companies during the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce’s 2024 Economic Summit & Executive Leadership Outlook on Tuesday.  

The event featured MegaCorp Logistics CEO Ryan Legg, nCino chairman and CEO Pierre Naudé and Steve Uebele, CEO of Frontier Scientific Solutions along with a presentation from UNCW's Swain Center regional economist Mouhcine Guettabi, highlighting current local and national economic trends.

On a national level, the economy is “still humming,” Guettabi said, as consumers spend steadily, the labor market keeps adding jobs and inflation rates have slowed. 

New tariff, immigration and tax policies stemming from the November election of President-elect Donald Trump have the potential to affect the economy on a national and local level, Guettabi added, but the exact impacts remain unclear.

“There's a lot of uncertainty here, and so we don't know a lot of things,” he said. “We don't know what these policies potentially are going to look like, and we don't know how they're going to be implemented.”

Guettabi said he expects new tariffs to put upward pressure on prices and impact the agricultural industry. More restrictions on immigration could also lead to workforce shortages in the area’s construction and agricultural sectors, Guettabi said. 

“Our direct exposure is actually fairly limited as a region, but clearly, we're not isolated, and we're dependent on what happens at the national level,” he said. “As we continue to grow, we've become a hub for a lot of spending that comes from other places.”

Legg said his company serves the oil and gas sectors along with car manufacturers and sees the newly-elected administration’s support for those industries as a boon for business. 

Uebele, likewise, said the administration’s proposed tariffs could be a positive for Frontier Scientific because they will incentivize companies to use its Foreign Trade Zone in Wilmington, he said. Uebele also expects to see an overhaul of the Food and Drug Administration, which could mean more regulations that could generate additional need for product storage and transport. 

Naudé said he expects the incoming administration to cut some regulations in the banking industry and expects to see an uptick in bank mergers and acquisitions.

Looking to the future, Naudé sees big potential in AI to make cloud-based banking even more efficient.

“It's probably the fastest commoditization of any technology I've ever seen," Naudé said about AI. "We've shifted massive amounts of resources to AI. … We believe with AI we can actually cut that workflow process by about 50%. The biggest impact is going to be not only the automation of manual task and data entry but actually the reading of existing and unstructured data and turning that into data, as well as analyzing the data and coming up with answers.”

Uebele said his company, too, is harnessing AI as a predictive tool to recognize challenges within the company’s supply chain.

Frontier Scientific is trying to take advantage of serving an industrywide shift toward specialized medicine.

“You're going to see a lot of investment being made in pharmaceutical end users to specialized medicines,” Uebele said. “Those all have to be transported in temperature control units. It's highly regulated, so the specialty market for that is very immature in the industry.”

Each of the executives said they are working with local colleges and universities to develop a local workforce and recruit employees.

Although high land prices have posed a challenge in keeping up with MegaCorp’s ongoing growth, Legg said the company is able to recruit.

Naudé said nCino is working to market Wilmington as a destination to draw employees from outside the area.

“We actually packaged the region, the city, as well as the jobs and the company together," he said, "to give you a realistic view of what kind of a lifestyle you're going to have."