The Tariff Impact Planning app, part of the spend management platform’s supply chain solution, is designed to help businesses navigate global trade policy, Coupa said in a Wednesday (Aug. 6) news release.

“A lasting trade war could be a black swan event with seismic impacts to supply chains, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the COVID-19 pandemic,” Dean Bain, Coupa senior vice president and general manager of supply chain, said in the release.

“As we’ve seen before, supply chains are extremely fragile, and the potential for severe disruptions create dramatic downstream business challenges for each of our customers.”

The release notes that more than half of CEOs say trade wars are the top geopolitical risk. To ease those concerns, Coupa says it’s designed the tool to let companies design supply chains that assess “current networks, future implications, and alternate strategies” to balance tariff reduction and operational efficiency, and safeguard their bottom lines.

As PYMNTS wrote Wednesday, tariff levels may fluctuate, but a lack of “visibility into future policy has become a binding constraint on strategic planning.”

Data from PYMNTS Intelligence’s June 2025 edition of The 2025 Certainty Project, “Tariff Uncertainty Craters Confidence to Zero at Exposed Consumer Goods Companies,” shows an eye-opening number: not one chief financial officer — zero percent — in the exposed goods sector had any confidence in their company’s ability to navigate the current tariff environment.

The report points to an increasing imbalance between operational execution and strategic development. Rapid shifts in tariffs — sometimes implemented on short notice or as part of wider diplomatic disputes — can hinder the planning cycles that mid-sized firms rely on for capital budgeting and contract negotiation.

More than half of all finance chiefs across industries said they have delayed or canceled capital investments because of tariff policy volatility. The figure was even higher — 63% — among consumer goods firms with large levels of import exposure. These delays affect initiatives ranging from expansion into new markets to supply chain digitization and product innovation.

The report found that a growing number of CFOs are implementing software systems that support scenario planning and tariff exposure modeling. These tools aim to help firms assess how cost structures may shift under various policy outcomes — and to tweak their sourcing, pricing and inventory strategies accordingly.

“At the same time, companies themselves are rethinking what resilience means,” PYMNTS wrote. “Increasingly, strategic agility is replacing efficiency as the core operational objective — a shift that may ultimately make mid-market firms more robust, but also more conservative.”

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AWS, in competition with Microsoft Azure for cloud market share, announced in a Tuesday (Aug. 5) press release that it will offer OpenAI’s two new open-weight models on its Bedrock platform.

OpenAI is considered the marquee brand in AI, but its models have only been available in the cloud on Microsoft Azure. All of OpenAI’s proprietary AI models are contractually exclusive to Microsoft, its early and largest investor.

OpenAI released its gpt-oss models in 120 billion and 20 billion parameters Tuesday. These open-weight models are available to anyone, including AWS. OpenAI has not had an open model since GPT-2 in 2019.

AWS’ celebratory tone at getting access to OpenAI models was apparent in the Tuesday blog post of its chief evangelist, Danilo Poccia.

“I am happy to announce the availability of two new OpenAI models with open weights” are now available on two of AWS’ platforms, he wrote in the post.

AWS created a landing page image featuring their two logos side by side, usually reserved for partners jointly announcing an alliance.

While anyone can access all of OpenAI’s models directly through its API rather than going through Microsoft Azure or AWS, enterprises need the robust compliance, security and expertise that hyperscalers provide.

However, OpenAI’s open-weight models are not truly open source in the sense that users cannot access the code and see what dataset was used to assess it for bias and other harms. OpenAI offered them under the Apache 2.0 license that lets anyone use, modify and distribute the models if there is proper attribution and a built-in grant of patent rights.

“OpenAI’s open-weight models may not represent the ‘leading-edge’ models” with capabilities “more similar” to a lightweight version of the flagship GPT-4 model, but they “do fit well with Amazon’s cost savings strategy,” wrote BofA analyst Justin Post in a research note shared with PYMNTS.

AWS said in its Tuesday blog post that OpenAI’s larger open-weight model gives enterprises 10 times more value for the price versus a comparable Gemini model, 18 times more than DeepSeek R1, and seven times over OpenAI’s o4 model. (Gemini and OpenAI o4-mini are proprietary; DeepSeek is open source.)

Poccia said in his blog post that the models “excel at coding, scientific analysis and mathematical reasoning, with performance comparable to leading alternatives.” The models also work with external tools and can be used in an “agentic workflow.”

AWS, a subsidiary of Amazon, already offers open models such as Meta’s Llama, DeepSeek and Mistral. It also offers Claude from Anthropic, in which Amazon has invested $8 billion. Claude, a main rival of OpenAI’s AI models, was not mentioned in the AWS press release.

“We see the addition of OpenAI to the AWS platform, while far from a comprehensive deal, as a positive initial step in the relationship, suggesting the companies are interested in working together,” Post said.

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

Read more:

OpenAI Targets $500 Billion Valuation in Share Sale

Anthropic Unveils Claude Opus 4.1 in Dueling Releases With OpenAI

Anthropic Yanks OpenAI’s Access to Claude Model

However, women, who are responsible for managing daily expenses, have a better sense of what can and can’t be cut when it comes to improving the monthly cash flow.

A PYMNTS Intelligence “Paycheck-to-Paycheck” analysis of 1,475 U.S. consumers found that the gender gap is wide enough to drive a budget spreadsheet through. Asked whether they could stop living paycheck to paycheck if their earnings stayed flat but their spending changed, nearly 1 in 3 men said “absolutely.” Fewer than 1 in 5 women said the same.

The split persisted even after leveling the family expense playing field. Married men maintained their conviction in the money makeover, and dads with kids under 18 were no less bullish than bachelors.

However, optimism must often crash up against reality, especially in an environment where inflation is stubborn and price increases are fueled by tariffs. The data showed that more than two-thirds of consumers live paycheck to paycheck, so finding some way to improve the ebb and flow of cash flow is paramount.

Women often quarterback day-to-day household finances and caregiving budgets, so they see the hard limits on discretionary cuts. Men, by contrast, may underestimate fixed costs.

PYMNTS Intelligence researchers drilled down into two statistically subsamples: 804 married respondents and 541 parents with children under 18. In each sample, participants answered the same core question: “If your income stayed the same, could you stop living paycheck to paycheck by changing how you spend?” Response options were a simple “Yes” or “No,” enabling a clean measurement of financial self-assessment.

Key Data Highlights:

• Overall Consumers Living Paycheck to Paycheck: Twenty-eight percent of men said they could break the cycle through spending changes alone, compared with 19% of women — an optimism gap of nine percentage points.
• Married Consumers: Thirty-six percent of husbands said belt-tightening would do the trick, versus 21% of wives — showing that shared mortgages and grocery bills don’t do much to erase women’s views that cash flow pressures persist.
• Parents With Children Under 18: Thirty-six percent of fathers living paycheck to paycheck were sure that spending tweaks would suffice, but only 23% of mothers agreed, underscoring that caretaking costs — tied to everything from school to recreation — weighed more heavily on women’s calculations.

The disparity is not merely about who shoulders more fixed expenses. Instead, respondents’ commentary suggested a behavioral explanation. Women more often manage family budgets and caregiving outlays, giving them a clearer view of non-negotiable costs. Men, who are less likely to run the household balance sheet, may assume more wiggle room than actually exists.

For banks, FinTechs and payments players, there’s a key takeaway and an opportunity to work with their customers to shore up the status of the household finances. Financial wellness tools, including budgeting apps, must account for gendered perceptions, not just gendered pay gaps, to improve cash flow and financial security.