WSJ: “The most important job of the board is choosing a new CEO. That might seem simple, but it’s fraught with peril. Sometimes it requires the skills of a master diplomat, when the current CEO, for instance, doesn’t accept that it is time to leave, or isn’t eager to receive feedback…At other times, it involves impossible choices—between, for instance, an internal candidate who knows the company well, and an outside candidate, who can bring the oft-needed fresh perspective. How do you compare the apple to the orange, when billions of dollars are at stake? And inevitably, it leads to mistakes.”
Jesnsen Huang: “For the very first time that we’re building computers, not just for the technology industry, we’re building computers for a new industry called AI. Now, AI is partly technology, but it’s also partly labor and it augments labor as we know, and as we go into robotics it’ll be very, very clear. This new technology called AI actually is a new industry wholly, and this whole industry is going to be powered by factories, which is going to need a lot of computers, and people are just coming to terms with the fact that we are about to go into a future where we’re computing, what people call data centers, but they’re really AI factories, is likely to be quite large.”
WSJ: “To perform complex tasks, like booking a flight, AI agents will need permissions to work on behalf of a person…Getting agents all the necessary tools and access is a significant obstacle. Device manufacturers will likely start integrating AI agents with core applications such as email and calendars, according to Salazar. As agents expand to other services, he said they would work best with companies that have public application programming interfaces, the bits of code that help one application connect to another. Some platforms deliberately limit API access to prevent abuse, and some older systems lack APIs. But that integration of AI agents and apps via existing authorization protocols could also be the last major challenge.”
FT: “Four of Europe’s oldest industrial groups have added more than €150bn to their market caps on the back of soaring demand for data centres driven by the boom in artificial intelligence. European makers of everything from switches to smart meters are providing the servers and infrastructure that power data centres for large language models and cloud computing, with traditional makers of electric equipment such as Legrand doubling their revenues thanks to data centres in recent years. “We’re not putting $70 or $80bn on the table like Microsoft and Meta,” said Franck Lemery, chief financial officer of Legrand. “[But] we [provide] the components and our business is growing relative to that [spending].” “The sexy part of AI is led by American companies,” said Alex Cordovil, an analyst at Dell’Oro. “But, with some exceptions, the nuts and bolts of the infrastructure are dominated by European players.”…Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the market valuations of Schneider Electric, Siemens AG, ABB and Legrand — four of the leading European groups in the sector — have grown a combined €151bn, rising more than 60 per cent in the case of German-listed Siemens AG.”
