Increased deportation efforts will lead to follow-on effects not talked about during the election campaign—chiefly, inflation, said Larry Fink, founder and CEO of BlackRock, one of the world’s largest investment firms.

Fink, whose company manages more than $11 trillion in assets, said the U.S. is in for a period of continued inflation thanks to the ramped-up deportation efforts started by the Trump administration—followed by deflation as artificial intelligence (AI) technology takes hold in business.

“I've talked to CEOs in the ag sector, and they remind me that 70% of the men and women who work in agriculture were not born in the United States,” Fink said at CERAWeek by S&P Global on March 10. “Many are U.S. citizens now. Many of them have work permits, and many of them don't. And 40% of the construction workers were not born in the United States.”

Most likely, the deportation efforts will subtract the non-permitted workers from the labor pools for agriculture and construction, driving up food and infrastructure costs, he said.

America has had deflationary pressures for two decades thanks to the importation of cheap labor or the export of manufacturing overseas, Fink said. Those factors have also likely had some negative effects on workers in the U.S.

However, the U.S. can adjust to the change in the short term, over the next two years, he said. After that, the country is likely in store for lower costs as businesses begin to implement AI technology on a major scale.

“It’s going to change everything,” Fink said.

AI has the potential to affect all aspects of global society, the BlackRock CEO said, pointing to warfighting methods being used in Ukraine with drones, to advancements in robotic technology in Taiwan.

While the advancements will be startling, they will also threaten the jobs of a large number of people.

“I was with a CEO, an Asian CEO that builds chips,” Fink said. “They're now applying AI to their robots; robots that have much more tensile dexterity. They believe over the course of the next two years, their workforce will be down 30% with the advent of more technology and more robotics.”

Robotics will therefore play a much larger role in the industries of the future. While manufacturing will increase in speed and decrease in price, many workers are likely to lose their jobs.

“If you're thinking farther down the road, you really have to think about the social implications and the social adjustment,” Fink said. “They’re pretty frightening, and we have to be thoughtful about it.”

For the energy industry, the CEO’s forecasts are in line with others, seeing a long-term demand for natural gas as the primary source to supply a growing demand from the AI sector.

Other sources do not have the scalability of natural gas, he said, except for nuclear, and the U.S. currently has no national strategy for growing nuclear power.

“We've been talking to a lot of the hyperscalers and about four years ago they would say, ‘If we're building a data center, it must be renewables,’ and about two years ago they said, ‘We prefer renewables,’ and today, they care about power,” he said.

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