Thasunda Brown Duckett is managing $1.5 trillion at TIAA and she is trying to fix America's broken retirement system

Thasunda Brown Duckett's father worked for three decades and never once contributed to his 401(k), even though the option was available to him. He had a small pension. Combined with Social Security, it was not going to be enough. "That was a hard conversation, and it's one American families are having every day," Duckett wrote in a 2025 New York Times op-ed.

Duckett is the president and chief executive officer of TIAA, the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, one of the largest financial institutions in the United States with over $1.5 trillion in assets under management and more than five million active and retired clients. She joined as CEO in May 2021. On Fortune's 2026 Most Powerful Women in Business list, she ranked seventh. She is one of only two Black women currently serving as CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

TIAA was founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1918 to provide retirement security for educators. Under Duckett, it has pushed into the broader American retirement market with a product she describes as essential: guaranteed lifetime income.

America has a retirement crisis. The savings gap stands at approximately $4 trillion. Duckett's answer centers on annuities. An annuity converts a portion of a retirement portfolio into a monthly payment that lasts for the rest of a person's life regardless of how long that is.

The problem is that most American employers do not offer them in their 401(k) plans. Duckett has taken her argument to Congress and to every platform available to her. The SECURE Act of 2019 and its 2022 expansion made it easier for employers to include annuities in 401(k) plans. She describes those changes as a start and pushes for more.

"Making annuities more widely available may seem like a tiny fix," she wrote. "But it is a big step toward achieving the security that all American workers should enjoy in their retirement."

TIAA's AI systems recently flagged an unusual request from a 76-year-old customer attempting to withdraw his entire $3 million retirement portfolio in a single transaction. The alert was passed to a fraud specialist who eventually reached the man's daughter. The family intervened. The money never moved.

The customer later told TIAA staff: "You saved my bacon."

Duckett described what happened on Fortune's Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. "He was being scammed, but our AI tool flagged it," she said. Convincing the customer proved harder than catching the fraud. "The first thing is you don't want to believe you've been scammed. You've almost been trained to defend the scam."

She used the story to make a broader point. "It's still all about the humans," she said, describing how neither AI nor human intervention alone could have prevented the loss.

Duckett is optimistic about AI and the future of work. She does not believe automation will render work obsolete. "I don't believe we will have a scenario where none of us are working and we're just enjoying life. I don't even think we would enjoy life if we're not working," she told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell. "Working comes with dignity, working comes with purpose."

She expects jobs to change and new ones to emerge, particularly in cybersecurity, fraud prevention and AI oversight. TIAA has partnered with Accenture to integrate AI across its operations. "I'm seeing thousands of employees embrace AI skills and capabilities, showing me that our people are ready to lead in this AI-powered future," she said.

She describes agility as the most important skill set for the moment. "AI comes with a lot of anxiety, and it comes with a lot of, 'What will this mean for me?'" she said. "We have to be willing to have those open conversations, those honest conversations."