What's up: Highlights from Day 1 of the the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Technology Council Summit in NYC; U.S. reaches outline of TikTok deal with China; Apple's Liquid Glass is here.

Good morning. Business leaders are figuring out how to get the most out of AI. That requires some grasp of the technology, but it’s only the starting point. The real work, from an organizational perspective, is about leadership.

“It’s going to be all about the change management,” Carolina Dybeck Happe, who last year became Microsoft’s first chief operating officer in nearly a decade, said Monday evening at the The Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute’s Technology Council Summit in New York. Ninety percent of polled participants at the event agreed.

When Dybeck Happe got the call from Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella to join the company from General Electric, she said she understood the importance of Microsoft proving itself as customer zero when it comes to adopting AI if it wants to have credibility with customers that it is in turn selling AI to. But immediately she knew the challenge would be more people-focused than anything else.

The starting point. Dybeck Happe focused on people and processes before technology, and tapped kaizen, which emerged in post-World War II Japan as a method for rebuilding the nation’s economy and supercharging its steel manufacturing industry. The principle refers to continuous, incremental improvements in efficiency. It has since been employed by companies across the world, from Subaru to Dr Pepper. Read our full story here.

As an example of improving business processes, Dybeck Happe said the tech giant drastically cut down the number of steps required for customer onboarding from 230 to under 40.

That task required alignment from Microsoft’s sales, marketing, product and finance teams, Dybeck Happe said. Then, a further 75% of the onboarding steps were automated with the help of AI agents—the autonomous bots that can perform tasks on behalf of humans.

Admit it. Your process is messy. It begins with a clear-eyed understanding of the process that needs fixing.  “A lot of people would tell you what they think the process looks like, what they wish the process looks like,” she said. “But if you understand what it really looks like—and it always gets really messy—then you can say, ‘OK, this is what we’re working with,’ and you get that alignment.”

The WSJLI Technology Council Summit will continue throughout the day. We’re excited to see how this conversation unfolds. Follow the Download for full coverage, and use the links at the end of this email to add your voice to the discussion.

🎥 | Microsoft’s AI First Mission. One year after her appointment, Microsoft COO Carolina Dybeck Happe discusses the role she’s playing in the company’s efforts to put AI at the heart of everything it does and gives insight into what the company could look like in the future. Watch. 

U.S. and Chinese negotiators reached a framework deal on TikTok. The WSJ calls the agreement a concession by Beijing to keep alive its ambition for President Trump to visit China. Chinese authorities previously had resisted U.S. demands that TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sell its controlling stake to U.S. investors.

The outline came together as China escalated its regulatory campaign against Nvidia. People familiar with the matter say the Chinese regulator’s action was taken to provide Xi Jinping with political cover for the TikTok deal so he wouldn’t appear weak to his domestic audience.

Apple rolled out Liquid Glass, its biggest software update in years. Beyond its "translucent, shimmery look," iOS 26 includes new features including call screening, a polling mechanism for Messages and hold assist, WSJ Tech Columnist Joanna Stern reports.

Alphabet on Monday became the fourth company to hit a $3 trillion market cap. It joined Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple, CNBC reports. Google also announced that it would spend $6.80 billion in the U.K. over the next two years.

OpenAI said Codex, its AI coding agent, will be powered by a new version of GPT-5. The company said the new model, called GPT-5-Codex, is optimized for agentic software engineering. 

Robotics company Dyna Robotics raised $120 million, boosting  valuation to more than $600 million.  Participants included the venture arms of Salesforce, Nvidia and Amazon, Bloomberg reports.

CoreWeave said Nvidia will tap its cloud services in a contract valued at $6.3 billion. It is a rather unique arrangement given that Nvidia is essentially renting its own chips, notes The Information.  Nvidia, a major CoreWeave shareholder, maintains a similar arrangement with Lambda Labs, the Information says.

Fiverr, a freelance services marketplace, said it is “resizing.” The company plans to cut some 250 employees as it prepares to be a “leaner organization with an AI-native infrastructure and mindset.”

Claude is the name of the alligator, who inhabits a key bit of real estate at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences. Claude is also the name of the popular AI models developed by the $183 billion AI startup.

They’ve become inseparable, the WSJ Leadership Institute's Isabelle Bousquette reports, with the SF-based AI startup's office crawling with stuffed albino alligators. Earlier this year Anthropic announced that it would sponsor Claude (the alligator), including footing the bill for enclosure maintenance and introducing the ClaudeCam livestream.

The White House is moving swiftly to galvanize the outpouring of support for slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk into political momentum, as President Trump’s advisers weigh a slate of executive actions targeting liberal organizations. (WSJ)

A federal appeals court on Monday night rejected an emergency Trump administration request to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook ahead of the central bank’s next meeting. (WSJ)

South Korea is conducting a government investigation into potential human-rights violations against more than 300 Korean citizens related to the U.S. immigration raid at a Hyundai Motor construction site in Georgia earlier this month. (WSJ)

The U.S. military attacked a second vessel in international waters on Monday that was allegedly transporting illegal narcotics to the U.S., killing three people. (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.