What's up: OpenAI backs AI-made feature film; '90s-era tech companies are playing defense; the tech jobs market is still shrinking.

Good morning. Yes, it’s Monday, but cast your mind back to those heady days after OpenAI’s ChatGPT debut, when every enterprise worth its salt had dozens of AI pilots in play. The future was exciting, but also unknown, a perfect set of circumstances for the consulting industry, which made billion-dollar commitments on the bet that it could act as the digital sherpas for a revolutionary new age in IT.

Nearly three years later, not everyone is buying their pitch, an occurrence that has as much to do with the ongoing, lightning-fast advances in AI and the evolution of enterprise IT as it does with the consulting business itself.

Consultants vs. the ‘kid in college.’ “When you think about something that’s just so new, you can’t really buy that experience,” Greg Meyers, chief digital and technology officer at Bristol-Myers Squibb, tells WSJ Leadership Institute’s Isabelle Bousquette.

“If I were to go hire a consultant to help me figure out how to use Gemini CLI or Claude Code, you’re going to find a partner at one of the Big Four has no more or less experience than a kid in college who tried to use it,” he said.

The challenge to consultant expertise lies not only in the fact that AI continues to advance so fast. Enterprises are also much more digitally and technically savvy than in the past.

“Healthcare is a very complex environment…and we found that our internal team is best equipped to come up with those use cases,” said Tilak Mandadi, CVS Health executive vice president of ventures and chief experience and technology. “Our approach was not, let’s go hire a bunch of consultants to tell us what to do with the GenAI.”

To be sure, corporate executives and their outside advisers generally agree that with or without consultants, businesses haven’t fully transformed with generative AI. No one holds the answer. More on that below.

Consultants are knowledge workers, and like their peers in media, law, accounting and programming, they are finding the skills they bring threatened by the very tech they are promoting. 

WSJ columnist Greg Ip looks at the end game, asking what happens when AI models dominate the business of answering questions?

Consider the case of Stack Overflow, a website where software developers ask and answer questions, becoming both a wellspring and repository for knowledge.

But before it chokes supply, it must consume. It can seem like LLMs models have not met a Wikipedia post, a Reddit thread or a pallet of books that it did not injest. Not everyone is happy about that.

Anthropic agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit over its use of pirated books to train its AI models. WSJ reports that the settlement could influence the outcome of pending litigation between other media companies and AI firms, which have long claimed that they don't need to pay for content because they aren't reproducing the work. 

Is AI also eating into IT jobs? The answer is complicated. IT unemployment fell in August, but so did the size of the tech jobs market. Credit the latter to AI and automation, but also sluggish hiring among small and medium-size businesses, Victor Janulaitis, CEO of consulting firm Janco Associates, tells WSJLI's Belle Lin. 

There were 446,763 active job postings for technology positions in August, down 2.6% from July, according to IT trade group CompTIA. The trade group also found that active listings for AI skills increased last month, with an increase of 94% in August compared with the same period last year.

Hurray for DALL-E-wood. OpenAI is lending its tools and computing resources to the creation of “Critterz,” a feature-length animated movie made largely with AI that is expected to be released in theaters next year. The film is the brainchild of a creative specialist at OpenAI who started sketching out characters three years ago while trying to make a short film with what was then OpenAI’s new DALL-E image-generation tool.

The WSJ's Daniel Michaels reports how legacy tech companies from the 1990s, including Nokia, Ericsson, Oracle and Dell, are finding a new life in defense tech, boosted by their decades of experience in civilian technology as well as the understanding that advantage lies in the army that crunches data fastest.

OpenAI is working with Broadcom to develop custom artificial-intelligence chips. A person close to OpenAI tells WSJ that the Broadcom chip isn’t designed to challenge AI chip leader Nvidia, but rather to plug the gaps in OpenAI’s hardware needs.

Qualcomm Chief Executive Cristiano Amon tells Bloomberg that the chip designer will stick with Samsung Electronics and TSMC to produce its chips, saying Intel technology is not good enough. “We would like Intel to be an option,” he said. 

Hundreds of South Korean citizens detained in an immigration raid at a Hyundai Motor plant in Georgia are expected to return home on a voluntary basis and avoid deportation, Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said Monday. (WSJ)

Investors hiked expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates after non-farm payrolls data last week showed slow jobs growth in August, with some analysts raising the prospect of a bigger cut or another cut before year-end. (WSJ)

Two years after New York City cracked down on Airbnb and other short-term rentals, it is harder than ever to find an apartment to rent in the city. (WSJ)

This September, The WSJ Technology Council will convene senior technology leaders to examine how AI is reshaping organizations—redefining teams and workflows, elevating technology’s role in business strategy, and transforming products and services. Conversations will also delve into AI’s evolving security risks and other fast-emerging trends shaping the future.

Select speakers include:

Carolina Dybeck Happe, COO, Microsoft
Severin Hacker, CTO, Duolingo
Yang Lu, CIO, Tapestry
Tilak Mandadi, CTO, CVS Health
Helen Riley, CFO, X, Google's Moonshot Factory

September 15-16 | New York, NY
Request an invitation | Participants and program

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.