Good morning. Today, a Google veteran will lead marketing at AI’s dominant chip maker; Instacart’s discontinued price test won’t fade away; and xAI takes heat for its high-engagement, low-guardrails chatbot.

Nvidia has hired Google marketing vet Alison Wagonfeld to be its first CMO, Patrick Coffee reports for the WSJ Leadership Institute.

Wagonfeld will consolidate responsibilities that had been handled by multiple people and report to CEO Jensen Huang, whose role at the top AI chip maker has made him a face of the artificial intelligence boom.

One big question, of course, is why now?

Nvidia reported record sales of $57 billion in its most recent quarter, up 62% from a year earlier and topping analysts’ consensus estimates—not exactly screaming for a brand reset. But Patrick told me:

I’ll add the observation that AI as a concept remains fraught.

Thirty-eight percent of people said they were concerned that AI could replace them in their current job, according to a national poll conducted late last month for the WSJ Leadership Institute by research firm TrueDot.

That’s despite the fact that 46% agreed that AI has had no impact on their work over the last year, saying they don’t use it on the job at all, and another 23% said they’d only experimented with it occasionally.

Both stats actually suggest to me that—whatever Huang has in mind for his new CMO—the AI industry as a whole could benefit from a new marketing leader at a company with the profile of Nvidia.

Note: Yesterday I misstated the valuation that Anthropic, maker of the AI chatbot Claude, is seeking in a new funding round. The correct figure is $350 billion. I regret the error.

Instacart is getting more feedback than it wanted from those price-testing experiments it shut down last month.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has demanded information of her own about the tests, which the grocery delivery service ended after following a report that shoppers were charged different prices for identical products from the same stores, Elias Schisgall writes for The Journal.

Questions include whether the company was exploring the kind of pricing that would trigger a new state law requiring the disclosure, “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.”

“Instacart’s pricing experiments raise serious concerns about its use of algorithmic pricing, and I will not hesitate to take action to enforce our laws and protect consumers,” James said.

Fears of personalized pricing have grown in step with data-driven marketing, e-commerce and electronic shelf labels, going back at least to Dana Mattioli’s 2012 Wall Street Journal report that Orbitz sometimes showed Mac users more expensive offers than travelers using Windows, although executives said they didn’t price identical rooms differently for different people.

Wendy’s suffered a backlash in 2024 after its then-CEO said the chain would test dynamic pricing using AI-enabled digital menu boards. It said its plans had been misconstrued and wouldn’t mean higher prices at busy times, just possibly discounts during lulls.

But the surge pricing you see at airlines and Uber seems more in play than individualized prices, which brands fear would kill consumer loyalty.

Instacart has denied that it was ever engaged in dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing, saying that prices didn’t change in real-time or in response to personal, demographic, or behavioral data.

Elon Musk’s xAI has restricted Grok image-generation and editing tools to paying subscribers after users flooded X with nonconsensual sexualized images, including of children.

The move follows Musk’s promise last week that anyone using Grok’s new photo editing feature to make illegal content would “suffer the same consequences” as if they uploaded illegal content.

The company has also been facing growing calls for enforcement around the world and in the U.S. 

Here’s the Journal’s Georgia Wells:

Wells also reports that the company has noticed a benefit to Musk’s effort to create an anti-“woke” bot:

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Our AI future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed, Christopher Mims writes. [WSJ] 

Walmart has launched Better Care Services, a digital network of healthcare providers, and cut prices on some wellness-related products. [WSJ] 

Starbucks is bringing in new outside brands including Khloé Kardashian’s Khloud popcorn and Ellenos Greek yogurt to lure protein-obsessed customers. [Modern Retail] 

How RFK Jr. won over his skeptics and overhauled federal food guidelines. [WSJ] 

Roblox will soon widely offer a prominent ad unit on the homepage of its app after a closed test with Sam’s Club, Universal Pictures and e.l.f. Beauty. [Tubefilter]

Kim Farrell, TikTok's global head of creators, is leaving the company amid a broader reorganization uniting the creator and publisher teams. [BI]

Five trends dominated talk about the ad business at the Consumer Electronics Show this year. [Adweek]

Bruce Crawford, the former Omnicom and BBDO chief executive who also became general manager of the Metropolitan Opera and chairman of Lincoln Center, died on Dec. 28 at age 96. [NYT]