What's up: What Nvidia is doing with AI; selfies with an AI rock star; highlights from WSJ's Tech Live

Good morning, CIOs. What advice does the CEO of one of the world’s most valuable companies have for chief information officers?  The Wall Street Journal’s Belle Lin caught up with Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang fresh from his onstage appearance at Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo event in Orlando, Fla.

The most important takeaway for CIOs, Huang told the Journal, is to find something effective inside their companies, and ask how AI can transform that work. For Nvidia that means putting AI to work in areas such as designing chips, writing software and managing its supply chain.

These three areas “move the needle most profoundly,” he said. “When it’s our most impactful work, it’s easiest to get energy around it.”

In the long term, Nvidia is creating what Huang calls its own “AI brain.” That’s the idea that knowledge of how a company works, its business processes and customer interactions need to be collected and turned over to AI. The end goal is to turn that information into an AI that CIOs and CEOs “can just talk to,” Huang said.

And finally—does Huang wear his trademark black leather jacket in the swamp heat of central Florida? He sure does. Read the story and more below. 

A visit from an AI rock star. Plus: Overheard at the after-hours party and more.  Following Huang along a short walk to his waiting car, I saw IT leaders at the Gartner IT Symposium mob the Nvidia CEO to get selfies and handshakes before he was quickly escorted away.

It’s a sign of the times: Huang leads a company whose graphics processing units, or GPUs, power the AI revolution that brought many of the over 8,000 attendees to the Gartner event in Orlando this year.

At the conference’s after-hours party, held at Disney’s Epcot theme park on Tuesday evening, I overheard an attendee waiting in line crack a joke about turning a ride’s goal into getting a coveted GPU.

Speaking of GPUs, Nvidia rival AMD was one of the lone hardware vendors showcasing at the IT Expo this year, with staff at the booth taking time to tout the strengths of AMD’s own GPU.

Some IT leaders are still focused on Nvidia, though. Todd James, chief data and technology officer of Kroger data analytics subsidiary 84.51˚, said he could sense the urgency around AI and the rate of change in Huang’s keynote address.

Plus, the advice Huang gave to business technology leaders onstage was actually practical, James added. “There were elements of what he was talking about that were prescriptive for everyone to follow, as opposed to describing something that just he’s doing.”

Joe Beck, CIO of the New Jersey Department of Labor, said last year was when he began to “connect the dots” on where AI was making new inroads. The goal of going to a large IT event like Gartner’s is to connect with state agency peers and understand where they’ve benefited from AI, he said.

At this point, it’s still all about learning AI from industry leaders. “There are just as good of gains when you start to see the niche solutions in different industries,” Beck said.

– Belle Lin

SAP gains over $17 billion in market value. The boost comes after the German business-software company Monday raised its revenue and earnings forecasts for the year amid strong demand for artificial intelligence. 

Anthropic goes agentic. The AI startup behind Claude unveiled a new capability that can autonomously perform computer tasks like entering text, selecting buttons and performing certain tasks. Jared Kaplan, Anthropic co-founder and chief science officer, tells CNBC that the new Computer Use feature available on Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku can “use computers in basically the same way that we do.”

New hires hint at OpenAI's ambitions. The startup has named Scott Schools as its first chief compliance officer. Schools previously was chief ethics and compliance officer at Uber, Bloomberg reports. Also joining OpenAI: Aaron Chatterji, a former chief economist at the Commerce Department, was named chief economist.

Meta bans accounts that track celebrity jet travel. The company said that its decision was in keeping with a recommendation from its Oversight Board, an outside body that reviews Meta's content policies. The accounts on Threads and Instagram tracked the private-jet travel of famous figures including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Kim Kardashian.

New touch technologies open the world of smartphones to the blind. A wave of new digital devices is emerging to access information digitally and display raised Braille text and tactile graphics, refreshing in real time, the WSJ’s Jared S. Hopkins reports.

Tactile displays. South Korea-based Dot created an electromagnetic system that allows thousands of tiny pins to move up and down on the surface of a digital pad as part of a refreshable Braille display. 

Chris Krebs, former top cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, said the real long-term cybersecurity problem is China’s assault on American infrastructure. 

Martin Casado, general partner at venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said the U.S. government’s stance on AI policy is in a “dangerous place” and neither presidential candidate has expressed a vision to improve it.

Collaboration-software company Figma is on a path to an IPO after Adobe called off its $20 billion deal for the company last year, said co-founder Dylan Field.

Kamala Harris’s inability to establish a lead and potential cracks in blue-wall states are stirring fears in a party that remains scarred from its 2016 loss. (WSJ)

McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburgers have been linked to an E. coli outbreak that has sickened at least 49 people and killed one, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (WSJ)

Russia and Iran might seek to stoke violence in the U.S. on and after Election Day, officials said Tuesday, warning that the adversaries want to weaken American democracy and undermine confidence in the outcome of the presidential vote. (WSJ)

North Korea has sent hundreds of special forces to eastern Russia for training in recent weeks, according to South Korea’s main intelligence agency, as Moscow relies on Pyongyang and other partners, including Iran, to support its war effort in Ukraine. (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.