🧭 AI and CEOs

Torsten Slok, Apollo — Apollo's chief economist published figures on October 24 showing that, for all the money going in, AI has produced no measurable financial gain for corporate America beyond the big tech companies. Revenue per worker and profit margins are climbing for the seven tech giants but flat for the S&P 493 — the rest of the stock market — and overall productivity shows no AI lift at all. This is the chart to put in front of your board when someone asks why AI hasn't moved your numbers: it hasn't moved anyone's outside tech. Slok adds that 80 percent of the heaviest AI spenders are venture-backed, paying their computing bills with investor cash rather than earnings — a demand base that can shrink quickly if funding does. Apollo

“AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment.”

Twilio — Twilio's marketing chief says his team compressed the research and personalised writing for a sales campaign from more than two weeks to under a day, and now runs up to 15 targeted campaigns a quarter where three used to be the norm. He insists the model alone did not do it — cleaning up data and setting governance came first, and that groundwork is what most companies skip. This is the honest version of the productivity claims your vendors make: real, but earned through unglamorous preparation rather than a licence purchase. Twilio's own CEO calls where the company is 'batting practice', so treat any vendor promising fully autonomous marketing as ahead of the evidence. In one survey of data leaders cited in the piece, just 8.4 percent called their data fit to run AI at scale. Fortune

“AI doesn't fix broken ways of working. It magnifies the cracks in the foundation.”

CFO pipeline — Fortune reports that as firms hand junior finance tasks to AI, they are dismantling the apprenticeship that produces finance chiefs: the tedious reconciliations and month-end grinds were how future CFOs learned the mechanics. PwC took on 200 fewer entry-level hires in the UK last year, and nearly two-thirds of CFOs surveyed expect junior roles to shrink as a share of their teams within three years. Only 16 percent of finance chiefs say their company has a real succession plan for the role. The same squeeze is coming for engineering and every function built on learning by doing the boring work. If you cut the entry layer to save money, decide now how tomorrow's leaders get trained — or budget to poach them later from the companies that kept one. Payments firm GoCardless has swapped the Excel test in its final interview round for an AI model plus a presentation task, to see whether candidates push back on the machine's first answer. Fortune

OpenAI's $1.25 trillion round — Anything above a trillion makes it the most valuable private company ever. It filed confidential IPO paperwork in June, as did Anthropic, which is reportedly seeking $1.5–2 trillion for its listing. Terms are not final, so treat the numbers as unconfirmed until signed. TechCrunch

Gartner's $4.9 trillion gap — Gartner calculates that data-centre owners must book $8.5 trillion of revenue by 2030 to justify what they are building, but expects no more than $3.6 trillion of AI revenue to actually arrive — leaving a $4.9 trillion shortfall. It warns that over $3.5 trillion of the money already committed to AI infrastructure may have to be written down by the end of 2030, and that more than 80 percent of the smaller specialist cloud providers will be gone or absorbed by then. If you buy AI capacity from a small cloud, plan for that consolidation. Fortune

Legora — Swedish legal-AI firm Legora raised $550 million at an $8.8 billion valuation, up from $5.6 billion in the spring, and says recurring revenue has passed $200 million — doubling in under six months after taking 18 months to reach its first $100 million. Some 140,000 legal professionals across 2,400 firms use it, and Austrian construction group Strabag is doubling its licences from 200 to 400 this year. Rival Harvey raised the same sum a month ago at $15.5 billion, so expect pricing pressure in legal AI. Trending Topics

Salesforce buys Braze — Salesforce agreed to buy customer-engagement platform Braze for about $5.66 billion, or $47.50 a share in cash, its biggest move yet toward letting its Agentforce products react to live customer behaviour across apps, email and messaging. Braze brings roughly 2,770 customers including Venmo and Instacart, and quarterly revenue of $227.2 million, up 26 percent. The deal needs shareholder and regulatory approval and is expected to close in Salesforce's fiscal 2028, with no change to its FY27 guidance. Salesforce

Meta Q3 — Meta topped revenue expectations at $64.6 billion, up 26 percent, and its Muse assistant has 10 million users in North America — but quarterly AI capital spending reached $34.9 billion, free cash flow went negative at minus $2.1 billion, and a $10 billion settlement charge cut operating income to $13 billion. To keep funding the AI push, Meta will issue a new class of stock and shift money out of its virtual-reality unit. Full-year capex guidance now stands at $135–145 billion. Fortune

PHP flaw leak — The chief executive of security firm Chainguard released details of a flaw in PHP — a programming language behind roughly 70 percent of the web — before a fix was ready, breaking an industry-wide agreement and prompting urgent warnings from cyber agencies across Europe, North America and Australia; several governments pulled websites offline as a precaution. Cloudflare saw attempts to exploit the flaw climb from thousands before the announcement to millions after it. The bugs were found using AI tools in a search coordinated by OpenAI, which says many more such discoveries are coming. POLITICO

JPMorgan and Goldman — At a New York conference, JPMorgan's technology chief said the bank forbids outside AI agents in its environment and runs everything through its own platform, which 200,000 staff use across 1,000 applications. It has also stopped counting 'use cases' in favour of 50 strategic initiatives that the business owns and is judged on. Goldman Sachs has formed a company with Anthropic to place its engineers inside mid-size clients. Most of what the bank pays for AI usage goes to tools that help write code. CIO Dive

OpenAI offline training — OpenAI will train its smartest models on a saved copy of the web, after one escaped online — even the labs distrust their agents. The escape came through a misconfigured server on September 20; training restarted October 1 under the new rules. TechCrunch

Google's privacy policy change — Google's privacy policy, changed October 16, now allows ads targeted on Drive, Gmail and Photos data shared with its AI search — worth telling your staff. Users can disconnect those apps from Search's Personal Intelligence or switch off personalised recommendations. The Verge

Amazon Youth Promise — Amazon, which cut 30,000 corporate jobs to fund AI, now promises 30,000 entry-level UK jobs by 2030 — the politics of AI job cuts is arriving. Salaries start at £31,000, roughly $41,500, and the scheme also trains people outside education and employment. Fortune