What's up: The week we learned Big Tech's big AI spending is still not enough; using ChatGPT to train for marathons; IT services firm TCS builds a running culture; AI is co-writing financial reports.

Good morning. Amazon, Apple and ServiceNow add more evidence that this quarter is a milestone in the way that tech companies and their customers think about AI capital spending, which can’t seem to keep up with demand.

The WSJ Leadership Institute tech team listened to earnings calls from those companies. Here are our main takeaways, starting with my impressions.

Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy offered insight yesterday into how he expects AI agents to infuse online shopping with some of the qualities that people still find useful and appealing about bricks-and-mortar stores.

Jassy went deep into the subject of AI agentic commerce, an important area of investment in which tech giants are laying the foundations for new online shopping experiences:

I’m very excited about … long term, the prospects for agentic commerce. It has the chance to be good for customers. It has the chance to be really good for e-commerce …
If you know what you want to buy, there are fewer experiences that are better than coming to Amazon. But if you don’t know what you want, a physical store with a physical salesperson still has some advantages … You very often want to ask questions and get help narrowing what you are going to look for and you keep asking new questions … I think AI and agentic commerce are going to change the experience online … It is going to get better online even than it is in physical environments.

AI agents have the potential to take the experience of e-commerce to a new level. OpenAI aspires to be an important player in agentic commerce as well, creating new ways to shop and transact.

Jassy and Chief Financial Officer Brian T. Olsavsky also delved into the investment case for more capital spending on AI data centers and agents. The Wall Street Journal’s Asa Fitch makes the case that Amazon’s cloud business won’t be an AI laggard for long.

WSJLI’s Belle Lin says ServiceNow's strong quarter serves to demonstrate that there is enterprise appetite for AI—but it's not fully clear by how much it will grow, and just how quickly that will happen.

“Why ServiceNow in particular?” Belle asks. “If software companies like ServiceNow continue to illustrate that AI is catching on among enterprises, there may be fewer questions over how scary the AI bubble is, and more confidence that demand for the technology will turn into profit.”
She cites Water Tower Research analyst James Kisner who says that the company "sits at the nexus of enterprise AI adoption—they're the business process automation backbone for 85% of the Fortune 500, which makes them uniquely positioned to demonstrate AI value.”

WSJLI’s Tom Loftus says that in a week of Big Tech earnings, Apple is a little bit of an odd man out as far as capital expenditure on AI goes.

“The elephant in the room remains the invisible AI strategy,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote this morning in his earnings recap. With “the biggest consumer installed base in the world,” Ives notes, it is high time for the company to "accelerate its AI efforts.”

The week in Big Tech earnings. Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are already planning to pour $400 billion into artificial intelligence efforts this year. This week we learned that they all feel that it’s nowhere near enough, WSJ reports.

“We’ve been short [on computing power] now for many quarters. I thought we were going to catch up. We are not. Demand is increasing." — Microsoft CFO Amy Hood

“You’re going to see us continue to be very aggressive in investing capacity because we see the demand.” — Amazon CEO Andy Jassy

“I think it’s the right strategy to aggressively front load building capacity." — Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

This weekend, TCS will sponsor the New York City Marathon for the 12th year in a row. And of the 55,000 runners set to take to the streets this weekend (including WSJ Leadership Institute’s own Isabelle Bousquette), nearly several hundred will be TCS employees, friends and family. 

So why do they do it? And how does it actually fuel better business performance? Isabelle sat down with Bajaj to find out. Here are edited highlights of their conversation. And see below for Isabelle's account of how she trained for the marathon using ChatGPT.

WSJLI: What was it about TCS that made you want to run?

Bajaj: It got instilled because of the culture of the company. Some of my mentors within the company, our COO at that time, and now the chairman of the group, he was inspirational and he took up running. And I always thought to myself, if he can make time for himself and for running, I’ve got to give it a shot. I ran my first half marathon in Stockholm in 2007. That unlocked what it really meant to me not just at a physical level, but at an emotional, mental level.

I use it as a thinking companion sometimes, sometimes as an emotional support companion, sometimes as a meditative companion. I can't live now without running.

WSJLI: How does it affect your leadership style?

Bajaj: Before you manage others, you have to manage yourself. In certain ways, it makes you calmer, especially long-distance running. It is a perseverance game. And you need to stay at it. In that sense, it's both physical strength, but also mental strength: the perseverance to stick through things, to being in the moment. Resilience, patience, being more considerate, more observant and empathetic are some of the things that I have gotten in a very, very direct way from all of this.

WSJLI: How does it impact the type of innovation you’re doing as a company?

Bajaj: We are working on the Future Athlete Project where we are trying to build a digital twin of our body. It tracks different types of parameters from food to sleep, to the way you run, how your body responds to it. And you can in real time see what is happening to you, but also you can do various kinds of simulations with it.

WSJLI: How does this culture of running fuel the company’s growth?

Bajaj: One of our big differentiators is our culture. And wellness plays a very big part in both building that culture, but also building better humans, building considerate employees, building an engaged workforce, building empathy into our organization, the way we work with our customers and society at large. Absolutely it makes each one of us individually better, and together it makes the company better.

"The same day I signed up for the New York City Marathon, I logged on to ChatGPT.com."

When Isabelle started training for the New York City Marathon, she entrusted her entire preparation to ChatGPT, from training schedules, to pre-race meals to gear and even music playlists. The results, so far, have been decidedly mixed, but the true test comes Sunday when the cannon goes off on Staten Island.

Track Isabelle’s progress on Sunday by looking up “Isabelle Bousquette” or Bib #18399 on the NYRR app

Companies are increasingly relying on generative AI to help draft their financial reports.

Chip component maker ON Semiconductor has ramped up its use of AI to compile a draft of its financials over the past year, especially in sections that aren’t number-heavy, CFO Thad Trent said.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which has used its AI model for earnings-day prep, is getting ready to use it to formally produce a first draft of financial statements, possibly for the quarter ending in January, said Chief Financial Officer Marie Myers.

It's a practice, notes WSJ Leadership Institute's Mark Mauer, that aims to save time and money, even as it raises questions on trust and transparency.

The Securities and Exchange Commission requires all U.S. public companies to file financial reports quarterly and annually. Investors rely on the filings to inform their decisions, and false or misleading statements can create both civil and criminal liability.

For now, executives seem to be approaching gingerly. In an impromptu survey in April, 28% of attendees at a Financial Executives International event said they use generative AI to help prepare external reporting, such as 10-Ks, compared with 16% who said they use it extensively and 57% not at all.

Nvidia, Samsung to build AI factory. Samsung said the “megafactory” would use over 50,000 of Nvidia’s GPUs, embedding AI throughout its manufacturing flow to accelerate production of semiconductors, mobile devices and robotics. Nvidia is also planning AI factories with Hyundai and Korean conglomerate SK Group, WSJ reports.

Developer Related Companies has agreed to build a more than $7 billion data-center campus outside Detroit, the fourth new site announced as part of a giant, $300 billion contract signed between Oracle and OpenAI, WSJ reports. 

Palantir has sued two of its former employees, alleging they engaged in a prolonged campaign of deception and theft to help build a competing AI company, Percepta, owned by VC firm General Catalyst. The data-analysis firm further alleged that one of the former employees stole a set of highly confidential documents before departing, WSJ reports.

SpaceX is set to receive $2 billion to develop satellites that can track missiles and aircraft under President Trump’s Golden Dome project, people familiar with the matter tell the WSJ. Government officials have described Golden Dome as a complex system of satellites and other tech capable of destroying missiles before they hit their targets.

Google's first completely AI-generated spot depicts a toylike plush turkey using AI Mode in Google Search to escape the farm to a destination that doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, WSJ reports. It will begin running today on television, and in movie theaters and on social and digital media starting Saturday, according to the company. 

Lebanese militant group Hezbollah is rebuilding its armaments and battered ranks, defying the terms of a cease-fire agreement and raising the prospect of renewed conflict with Israel, according to people familiar with Israeli and Arab intelligence. (WSJ)

The Trump administration has fired about a dozen officials within Fannie Mae’s ethics and internal investigations unit, removing some guardrails meant to address and head off misconduct, according to people familiar with the matter. (WSJ)

More home-purchase agreements are being scrapped around the country, reflecting an intensifying standoff between buyers and sellers in a largely stalled housing market. About 15% of agreements were canceled in September, up from roughly 13.6% a year earlier. (WSJ)

President Trump urged Senate Republicans to end the filibuster, the longstanding rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation, in order to reopen the government without the support of Democrats. (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.