What's up: U.S. needs more power for AI; Intel says layoffs are in store; IBM is back.

Good morning, CIOs. And a warm welcome to all our AI managers, AL/ML engineers, AI data specialists, computer vision architects, chief AI officers and other holders of job titles that did not exist just a few years ago.

As the Journal’s Isabelle Bousquette reports this morning, rising demand for generative AI talent has spawned myriad new job titles, confusing job seekers and challenging HR departments.

“This is all still very much nascent and developing,” says Don Vu, chief data and analytics officer at insurer New York Life, about the explosion of titles. “Is this an AI manager? Is it an AI coding agent? Is it an AI coding agent manager?” He added, “There’s a lot of new titles that didn’t exist before that are now manifesting.”

Do you know what’s not manifesting? Prompt engineering. Hailed as one of the buzziest jobs in tech, fetching salaries of up to $200,000, the job title is obsolete, a victim of  improving AI models and companies’ own maturity in terms of understanding how to use the technology.

“Two years ago, everybody said, ‘Oh, I think prompt engineer is going to be the hot job.’” said Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at Work at Microsoft. “It’s not turning out to be true at all.”

A recent survey commissioned by Microsoft asked 31,000 workers what new roles their companies were considering. Prompt engineering was second from the bottom, Spataro said.

But never fear, for every prompt engineer delisted from job boards, there surely is a freshly minted AI trainer or AI data specialist or AI security specialist or agent whisperer to take its place. 

“We’re seeing an acceleration in the job market’s evolution,” said Karin Kimbrough, chief global economist at LinkedIn, adding that some 20% of the people in the U.S. who took on a new job in the past 12 months took on a job title that didn’t exist in 2000, according to LinkedIn’s data. Read the story.

U.S. needs more power for AI—but critical equipment is pricey and scarce. Tariffs are impacting new energy projects of all kinds, from renewable energy to fossil fuels,the Journal reports.

👉 About 28% of planned wind, solar and battery projects have been delayed or canceled, according to an Atlas Public Policy analysis of government energy data. Efforts to build natural-gas-fired power plants face similar challenges.

• Nuclear power is back. And this time, AI can help manage the reactors.

The company posted a quarterly loss on Thursday and gave a forecast of roughly $11.8 billion in revenue for its current quarter, lower than Wall Street forecasts. Intel also said it was reducing its gross capital spending target by $2 billion this year to $18 billion, reflecting a slowdown in a manufacturing expansion undertaken by Tan’s predecessor, Pat Gelsinger.

Google posts solid earnings. Alphabet’s first-quarter revenue rose 12% to $90.23 billion, higher than forecasts of $89.18 billion. Google’s advertising revenue rose 8% year over year to $66.9 billion, while cloud revenue jumped 28% year over year to $12.3 billion. 

SK Hynix posts strong first quarter earnings on AI chip demand. The South Korean company is the main supplier of high-bandwidth-memory products for Nvidia’s most advanced graphics-processing units.

European chip maker STMicroelectronics, which counts Apple, Samsung Electronics and Tesla among its customers, is projecting lower sales this quarter as weak demand for some semiconductors continues to plague the industry.

IBM is back. Now it must prove its mettle in AI. Chief Executive Arvind Krishna has built up $6 billion of bookings around generative AI, mostly consulting contracts for companies trying to harness the technology. The WSJ's Asa Fitch says it still has a lot to prove: "Companies are still largely in the experimentation phase, and it is unclear whether they will need as much of IBM’s hand-holding as the technology matures." Read the story.

Apple’s AI chief loses another unit.  In March John Giannandrea’s AI organization lost the Siri voice assistant. Now a “secretive” robotics unit under his purview is moving to hardware engineering, part of what Bloomberg describes as a shake-up in the wake of Apple’s ongoing AI struggles.

• ​​Apple and Amazon promised us revolutionary AI. We’re still waiting.

Kaiser Permanente named Neil Cowles as chief information and technology officer. Cowles joined Kaiser in 2012, serving most recently as chief technology officer.

Rimini Street announced the appointment of veteran IT executive Joe Locandro as chief information officer. Locandro comes from Auckland, New Zealand-based Fletcher Building, where he was CIO.

• As financial stress mounts, chains like Dollar Tree and Academy that cater to the budget-conscious are seeing more of a new class of shoppers.
• Businesses need to prepare for the AI-driven rise of a relentless, always-on economy.
• Private-equity firms see opportunity in a sector they once considered too unreliable: advertising.
• As tariff wars raise supply-chain uncertainty and green initiatives see a pushback, some renewables-focused companies are forging new relationships, including in the defense industry.

The CEOs of American Airlines, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble and many other major U.S. companies warned that shape-shifting tariff threats make it virtually impossible to plan and are spooking consumers. (WSJ)

President Trump’s latest plea to Russian President Vladimir Putin to halt his attacks on Ukraine highlights the risky premise Trump made in his quest for a quick end to the war—namely, that the Kremlin wants peace. (WSJ)

A federal judge in Maryland has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of another man who was sent to an El Salvador prison as part of the government’s push to swiftly remove alleged members of a Venezuelan gang. (WSJ)

President Trump suffered a string of defeats in federal courts on Thursday as judges ruled to curtail measures targeting immigration enforcement, voting and diversity initiatives in education. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.