What's up: Delays to Trump’s U.A.E. chips deal frustrate Nvidia; OpenAI valuation hits $500 billion; cyberattack hits Japan's beer output

Good morning. The head of global tech platforms at Walmart shares insight into how the retailing giant is making use of its AI agents.

Walmart, with more than $648 billion in revenue for its 2024 fiscal year, is large enough to send a meaningful signal about where AI is headed. In August, the company unveiled a “super agent” for engineers called Wibey, which helps unify the more than 200 AI agents Walmart’s tens of thousands developers have built so far.  Chief Executive Doug McMillon said last week that “AI is going to change literally every job.” While some jobs and tasks at Walmart will be eliminated, McMillon said, others will be created.

Agents have an impact. Sravana Karnati, Walmart’s executive vice president of global technology platforms, shared some examples of agents at work with WSJ Leadership Institute’s Belle Lin. Implementing agents poses plenty of challenges, though, which Karnati explains below.

AI agents are automating the process of complying with accessibility requirements. That has helped Walmart’s engineers automatically identify 60% of software bugs in accessibility compliance and automatically fix 95% of them—leading to an eight times improvement in productivity in that area, according to Karnati.

AI is also helping Walmart’s engineers get up to speed and modernize its legacy software code. Before using AI tools, Karnati said developers needed to seek out senior engineers for their expertise in its code base, resulting in a lot of time spent chasing down answers.

In addition to using AI agents, more than 95% of Walmart’s engineers are using AI coding assistant tools like Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot and JetBrains, according to Karnati.

Is such corporate deployment of AI already having an impact on productivity? WSJ Capital Account columnist Greg Ip sees hints of a productivity revival behind job weakness, and asks if AI is the reason.

“Adoption has been remarkably fast: In June, Gallup found that 19% of employees used AI a few times or more a week. Walmart recently said the retailer would keep employment flat in the next three years as AI would transform ‘literally every job,’” Ip writes.

Is AI having an impact on productivity at your company? Use the links at the end of this email and let us know.

WSJLI: You’ve said that the challenge at Walmart isn’t AI agent adoption, but AI agent proliferation. What does that mean?

Karnati: The reason we've done “super agents” is when you have not just developers, but also teams in business, developing agents to carry on their work, you run into the issue of proliferation of agents and figuring out which agent should be used for what, and how do I get this knowledge in the hands of everybody. So what we've done is to reduce the cognitive load with the concept of super agents.

If I have a super agent that actually can reason and plan, then it can invoke the right agents to take actions.

WSJLI: Which AI models power Wibey, the AI “super agent” that you’ve built for developers?

Karnati: Wibey CLI [command line interface] leverages [Anthropic] Claude Code underneath, but it has intelligence to plug into our ecosystem. It understands our configuration systems or secrets management system and deployment environment and all of that. We built it to be somewhat agnostic to the agentic LLM that powers it, so we could easily replace it at some point if needed.

WSJLI: How do you measure how productive your developers are with tools like AI agents and coding assistants?

Karnati: If you talk to developers, you will not get just one metric. You can look at how many JIRA tickets have been closed…But it's still different for different teams. You might have seen the industry talk about 20% to 30% [productivity improvement]. What we’ve seen is the number of JIRA tickets that have been closed on a sprint-by-sprint basis is on the rise.

Delays to Trump’s U.A.E. chips deal frustrate Nvidia. A multibillion-dollar deal to send Nvidia’s artificial-intelligence chips to the United Arab Emirates is stuck in neutral nearly five months after it was signed.

Under the deal, the U.A.E. promised to invest in the U.S. in exchange for up to several hundred thousand Nvidia chips a year. But the investment hasn’t materialized, the WSJ reports.

Behind the slowdown. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has pressed the Emiratis to finalize their U.S. investments before his department authorizes the delivery of the chips, according to people familiar with the matter. Those prolonged conversations have slowed the deal, they said.

Signs of frustration. Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang and various Nvidia executives have complained privately about Lutnick’s tactics and the slow progress to other administration officials, some of the people said. A senior Nvidia executive tells the WSJ that Huang and others haven’t complained and said the company isn’t concerned with how the deal has been handled.

Not a good start to the weekend. Four days after Asahi Group was targeted by a cyberattack, output at many of the brewer’s plants in Japan remains offline. The company isn’t taking new orders and shipments to customers have been delayed.

The future is inference. AI unicorn Groq, which makes chips and software to run AI models—what is known as “inference”—aims to add more than a dozen data centers next year to the 12 it has set up so far this year, CEO Jonathan Ross tells the WSJ.

Data center announcement of the day. Google said it will build a $4 billion data center on more than 1,000 acres in Arkansas, its first facility in the state .

Crowded skies. Two Amazon delivery drones crashed into a construction crane in the Phoenix area Wednesday. The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the incident, CNBC reports.

President Trump has projected unwavering confidence that he is winning the messaging war over the government shutdown. But behind the scenes, his team is increasingly concerned that the issue at the center of the debate will create political vulnerabilities for Republicans. (WSJ)

Economists, investors and policymakers usually spend the first Friday each month poring over the latest government jobs report. Not this one. The federal government shutdown means the Bureau of Labor Statistics isn’t issuing reports, sending anyone eager to learn more about the recently sluggish job market scrambling for alternatives. (WSJ)

Germany’s Munich Airport grounded flights overnight after several drone sightings, the latest in a string of interruptions in European airspace that have spurred NATO members to retune defenses. The airport reopened and flights resumed Friday morning. (WSJ)

President Trump is considering providing $10 billion or more in aid to U.S. farmers as the agriculture sector warns of economic fallout from his far-reaching tariffs, according to people familiar with the discussions. (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.