Category: 3. Business

  • Gold falls 1% as investors book profits, Treasury yields rise – Reuters

    1. Gold falls 1% as investors book profits, Treasury yields rise  Reuters
    2. Gold prices ease on firmer Treasury yields, US data in focus  Business Recorder
    3. Gold touches six-week high as rate cut bets weigh on dollar; silver hits record high  CNBC
    4. Gold price: Positive prospects driven by geopolitics and Fed expectations  KITCO
    5. Gold Retreats from 6-Week High on Profit Taking  TradingView

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  • ‘The biggest decision yet’: Jared Kaplan on allowing AI to train itself | Technology

    ‘The biggest decision yet’: Jared Kaplan on allowing AI to train itself | Technology

    Humanity will have to decide by 2030 whether to take the “ultimate risk” of letting artificial intelligence systems train themselves to become more powerful, one of the world’s leading AI scientists has said.

    Jared Kaplan, the chief scientist and co-owner of the $180bn (£135bn) US startup Anthropic, said a choice was looming about how much autonomy the systems should be given to evolve.

    The move could trigger a beneficial “intelligence explosion” – or be the moment humans end up losing control.

    In an interview about the intensely competitive race to reach artificial general intelligence (AGI) – sometimes called superintelligence – Kaplan urged international governments and society to engage in what he called “the biggest decision”.

    Anthropic is part of a pack of frontier AI companies including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, Meta and Chinese rivals led by DeepSeek, racing for AI dominance. Its widely used AI assistant, Claude, has become particularly popular among business customers.

    The decision to ‘let go’ of the reins on AI is likely to come between 2027 and 2030, Kaplan says. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

    Kaplan said that while efforts to align the rapidly advancing technology to human interests had to date been successful, freeing it to recursively self-improve “is in some ways the ultimate risk, because it’s kind of like letting AI kind of go”. The decision could come between 2027 and 2030, he said.

    Photograph: Cayce Clifford/The Guardian

    “If you imagine you create this process where you have an AI that is smarter than you, or about as smart as you, it’s [then] making an AI that’s much smarter.”

    Photograph: Cayce Clifford/The Guardian

    “It sounds like a kind of scary process. You don’t know where you end up.”

    Kaplan has gone from being a theoretical physicist scientist to an AI billionaire in seven years working in the field. In a wide-ranging interview, he also said:

    • AI systems will be capable of doing “most white-collar work” in two to three years.

    • That his six-year-old son will never be better than an AI at academic work such as writing an essay or doing a maths exam.

    • That it was right to worry about humans losing control of the technology if AIs start to improve themselves.

    • The stakes in the race to AGI feel “daunting”.

    • The best-case scenario could enable AI to accelerate biomedical research, improve health and cybersecurity, boost productivity, give people more free time and help humans flourish.

    Kaplan met the Guardian at Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco, where the interior of knitted rugs and upbeat jazz music belies the existential concerns about the technology being developed.

    San Francisco has become the epicentre of AI startups and investment. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

    Kaplan is a Stanford-and Harvard-educated professor of physics who researched at Johns Hopkins University and at Cern in Switzerland before joining OpenAI in 2019 and co-founding Anthropic in 2021.

    He is not alone at Anthropic in voicing concerns. One of his co-founders, Jack Clark, said in October he was both an optimist and “deeply afraid” about the trajectory of AI, which he called “a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine”.

    Kaplan said he was very optimistic about the alignment of AI systems with the interests of humanity up to the level of human intelligence, but was concerned about the consequences if and when they exceed that threshold.

    He said: “If you imagine you create this process where you have an AI that is smarter than you, or about as smart as you, it’s [then] making an AI that’s much smarter. It’s going to enlist that AI help to make an AI smarter than that. It sounds like a kind of scary process. You don’t know where you end up.”

    Doubt has been cast on the gains made from deploying AIs in the economy. Outside Anthropic’s headquarters, a billboard for another tech company pointedly asked “All that AI and no ROI?”, a reference to return on investment. A Harvard Business Review study in September said AI “workslop” – substandard AI enabled-work that humans have to fix – was reducing productivity.

    Some of the clearest gains have been in using AIs to write computer code. In September, Anthropic revealed its cutting-edge AI, Claude Sonnet 4.5, a model for computer coding that can build AI agents and autonomously use computers.

    Attackers used the Claude Code tool to target various organisations. Photograph: Anthropic

    It maintained focus on complex multistep coding tasks for 30 hours unbroken, and Kaplan said that in some cases using AI was doubling the speed with which his firm’s programmers were able to work.

    But in November Anthropic said it believed a Chinese state-sponsored group had manipulated its Claude Code tool – not only to help humans launch a cyber-attack but to execute about 30 attacks itself, some of which were successful. Kaplan said allowing AIs to train the next AIs was “an extremely high-stakes decision to make”.

    “That’s the thing that we view as maybe the biggest decision or scariest thing to do … once no one’s involved in the process, you don’t really know. You can start a process and say, ‘Oh, it’s going very well. It’s exactly what we expected. It’s very safe.’ But you don’t know – it’s a dynamic process. Where does that lead?”

    He said if recursive self-improvement, as this process is sometimes known, was allowed in an uncontrolled way there were two risks.

    “One is do you lose control over it? Do you even know what the AIs are doing? The main question there is: are the AIs good for humanity? Are they helpful? Are they going to be harmless? Do they understand people? Are they going to allow people to continue to have agency over their lives and over the world?”

    Photograph: Cayce Clifford/The Guardian

    “I think preventing power grabs, preventing misuse of the technology, is also very important.”

    Photograph: Cayce Clifford/The Guardian

    “It seems very dangerous for it to fall into the wrong hands”

    The second risk is to security resulting from the self-taught AIs exceeding the human capabilities at scientific research and technological development.

    “It seems very dangerous for it to fall into the wrong hands,” he said. “You can imagine some person [deciding]: ‘I want this AI to just be my slave. I want it to enact my will.’ I think preventing power grabs – preventing misuse of the technology – is also very important.”

    Independent research into frontier AI models, including ChatGPT, shows the length of tasks AIs can do has been doubling every seven months.

    The future of AI

    The rivals racing to create super-intelligence. This was put together in
    collaboration with the Editorial Design team. Read more from the series.

    Words

    Nick Hopkins, Rob Booth, Amy Hawkins, Dara Kerr, Dan Milmo

    Design and Development

    Rich Cousins, Harry Fischer, Pip Lev, Alessia Amitrano

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    Fiona Shields, Jim Hedge, Gail Fletcher

    Kaplan said he was concerned that the speed of progress meant humanity at large had not been able to get used to the technology before it leaped forward again.

    “I am worried about that … people like me could all be crazy, and it could all plateau,” he said. “Maybe the best AI ever is the AI that we have right now. But we really don’t think that’s the case. We think it’s going to keep getting better.”

    He added: “It’s something where it’s moving very quickly and people don’t necessarily have time to absorb it or figure out what to do.”

    Anthropic is racing with OpenAI, Google DeepMind and xAI to develop ever more advanced AI systems in the push to AGI. Kaplan described the atmosphere in the Bay Area as “definitely very intense, both from the stakes of AI and from the competitiveness viewpoint”.

    “The way that we think about it is [that] everything is on this exponential trend in terms of investment, revenue, capabilities of AI, how complex the tasks [are that] AI can do,” he said.

    The speed of progress means the risk of one of the racers slipping up and falling behind is great. “The stakes are high for staying on the frontier, in the sense that you fall off the exponential [curve] and very quickly you could be very far behind at least in terms of resources.”

    By 2030, datacentres are projected to require $6.7tn worldwide to keep pace with the demand for compute power, McKinsey has estimated. Investors want to back the companies closest to the front of the pack.

    Some of the biggest gains have been in using AIs to write computer code. Photograph: Cheng Xin/Getty Images

    At the same time, Anthropic is known for encouraging regulation of AI. Its statement of purpose includes a section headlined: “We build safer systems.”

    “We don’t really want it to be a Sputnik-like situation where the government suddenly wakes up and is like, ‘Oh, wow, AI is a big deal’ … We want policymakers to be as informed as possible along the trajectory so they can take it into account.”

    In October, Anthropic’s position triggered a put-down from Donald Trump’s White House. David Sacks, the US president’s AI adviser, accused Anthropic of “fearmongering” to encourage state-by-state regulation that would benefit its position and damage startups.

    After Sacks claimed it had positioned itself as “a foe” of the Trump administration, Dario Amodei, Kaplan’s co-founder and Anthropic’s chief executive, hit back by saying the company had publicly praised Trump’s AI action plan, worked with Republicans and that, like the White House, it wanted to maintain the US’s lead in AI.

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  • Tesla’s China-made EV sales rise 9.9% in November

    Tesla’s China-made EV sales rise 9.9% in November

    BEIJING, Dec 2 (Reuters) – Tesla’s (TSLA.O), opens new tab China-made electric vehicle sales rose 9.9% in November from a year earlier, as the U.S. automaker grapples with intense competition in China and Europe.

    Sales of Model 3 and Model Y vehicles made at Tesla’s Shanghai factory, including exports to Europe and other markets, were up 41.0% from October, data from the China Passenger Car Association showed on Tuesday.

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    The sales jump came as the EV specialist introduced a longer-range rear-wheel-drive variant of its best-selling Model Y in China last month, following the earlier launches of a longer-range Model 3 version and the six-seat Model Y L in the market.

    The annual rise in November was the steepest in 14 months.

    Tesla’s main business has been under pressure, notably from Chinese rivals, while Elon Musk shifts his focus to self-driving robotaxis and humanoid robotics.
    EV newcomer Xiaomi (1810.HK), opens new tab has swiftly emerged as a Tesla challenger in China with the SU7 sedan and YU7 SUV, having exceeded its sales target of 350,000 vehicles for this year.
    Tesla’s biggest Chinese rival BYD (002594.SZ), opens new tab, saw overseas shipments soar to a record high of over 130,000 vehicles last month. It has continued to outsell Tesla in Europe in recent months.
    Locked in an intensifying battle in the domestic budget segment with rivals Geely (0175.HK), opens new tab and Leapmotor (9863.HK), opens new tab and others who kept hitting new sales records, BYD reported a drop in global sales for a third straight month in November.

    Reporting by Qiaoyi Li, Zhang Yan and Brenda Goh; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Tomasz Janowski

    Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

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  • Data Centers Unlocked: What’s New and What Matters | Insight

    Data Centers Unlocked: What’s New and What Matters | Insight

    Data centers have emerged as the foundational infrastructure powering artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing and enterprise technology and are now essential to national digital strategies and private sector innovation. The AI boom has triggered an extraordinary surge in global data center development and is driving a fundamental redesign of facility architecture, site selection and investment strategy.

    Despite ample opportunity in this space, the business environment for data center development is complex and dynamic, encompassing a range of legal considerations and requiring a holistic approach around strategic transactions, regulatory compliance and innovative solutions, with sustainability also a key theme.

    Whether a developer, investor or operator, overview the current data center landscape and deep-dive into key issues covering:

    • The evolving financing and investment landscape
    • Tax considerations across the data center life cycle
    • Design and build as the cornerstone of data center development
    • Power as a critical input and strategic driver in data center planning
    • Data center operations, including managing customer contracts while addressing AI, data and cybersecurity risks, and trade and export control restrictions


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  • Exclusive: Airbus CEO studying December impact of latest problem after 'weak' November – Reuters

    1. Exclusive: Airbus CEO studying December impact of latest problem after ‘weak’ November  Reuters
    2. Bit flips: How cosmic rays grounded a fleet of aircraft  BBC
    3. Exclusive: Airbus hit by new A320 quality problem after software recall  Reuters
    4. Airbus faces ‘new quality problem’ on dozens of A320 jets  Dawn
    5. Airbus finds another issue affecting its best-selling A320 passenger planes  CNN

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  • Tech stocks linked to Bitcoin take battering as Strategy nears danger threshold

    Tech stocks linked to Bitcoin take battering as Strategy nears danger threshold

    Tech stocks linked to Bitcoin staged a modest comeback in overnight trading, although it wasn’t enough to wipe away the losses they suffered yesterday. The market remains on edge as Bitcoin has lost 21% over the last month. In recent days, it has stabilized at around $87K per coin and was up 0.72% today. Crypto trading platform Coinbase was down 4.76% yesterday but was up 1.37% in overnight trading, while Robinhood was down 4.09% yesterday and then crept up 0.63% this morning, premarket. 

    But the elephant in the digital asset room is Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the leading Bitcoin treasury company, whose stock market cap is now worth less than the Bitcoin it holds. It dropped 3.25% yesterday but was up 0.45% before the bell.

    Strategy’s market cap was $50.6 billion at the time of writing and its 650,000 Bitcoins were worth $56.7 billion. The key metric for Strategy, however is its “mNAV” (multiple to net asset value), which is a ratio describing the company’s theoretical enterprise value (currently $65.2 billion) to its Bitcoin holdings. That ratio was 1.15 this morning, meaning its enterprise value is worth 15% more than its Bitcoin.

    However, if the mNAV falls below 1, then Strategy faces a crisis: the reason for holding the stock vanishes, and no one will be likely to provide the company with more capital—a period of fierce selling could ensue.

    The situation was made more tense after Strategy CEO Phong Le said on a podcast that the company would be willing to sell some of its Bitcoin in order to meet the dividend commitments on its debt and preferred shares. “Now, as we are looking at Bitcoin winter, as we see our mNAV compressing, my hope is our mNAV doesn’t go below one,” he said. “But if we do and we didn’t have other access to capital, we would sell Bitcoin.” 

    That statement was extraordinary because Saylor, the founder, has repeatedly said he would never sell. Strategy currently holds just over 3% of all Bitcoin. If it was forced to sell in order to raise cash, that too would likely start an avalanche. (The company did not immediately respond when contacted for comment.)

    Traders betting on leveraged plays against Strategy have already been wiped out. Two exchange-traded funds, MSTX and MSTU, which offered double the returns of the underlying Strategy stock, have lost more than 80% of their value, according to Bloomberg. Together with a third, MSTP, they have lost $1.5 billion in value over the last month.

    Strategy shares declined Tuesday after the company said it had created a a $1.44 billion “U.S. dollar reserve” to fund its dividends, and had enough cash to survive the next 12-24 months, according to the Financial Times.

    Some crypto investment experts have a negative outlook. Patrick Horsman, chief investment officer at BNB Plus, another crypto treasury company, told the Wall Street Journal, “I think we could see Bitcoin get all the way back to $60,000 … We don’t think the pain is over.”

    Here’s a snapshot of the markets ahead of the opening bell in New York this morning:

    • S&P 500 futures were up 0.24% this morning. The last session closed down 0.53%. 
    • STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.35% in early trading. 
    • The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.38% in early trading. 
    • Japan’s Nikkei 225 was flat.
    • China’s CSI 300 was down 0.48%.
    • The South Korea KOSPI was up 1.9%. 
    • India’s NIFTY 50 is down 0.55%. 
    • Bitcoin was at $87K.

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  • Nvidia-backed startup Luma AI announces major London expansion

    Nvidia-backed startup Luma AI announces major London expansion

    Nvidia-backed video generation startup Luma AI is joining a growing wave of U.S. tech companies launching operations in the U.K., with major plans for a London expansion revealed on Tuesday.

    The Palo Alto-headquartered startup will look to hire around 200 employees — making up around 40% of its workforce — at its new London base by early 2027, across research, engineering, partnerships and strategic development. 

    The expansion comes two weeks on from Luma announcing a $900 million funding round led by Saudi Public Investment Fund-owned AI company Humain, which saw it hit a valuation upwards of $4 billion. The startup previously received backing from Nvidia. 

    Luma is building “world models,” a class of AI models that are able to learn from video, audio and images, alongside text, and which large language models (LLMs) like those powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini use. 

    The startup is currently targeting marketing, advertising, media and entertainment sectors with its video models, which it sells via an application programming interface (API) and as part of a content creation suite.

    “With this Series C raise and the upcoming build-out of global compute infrastructure, we have the capital and capacity to bring world-scale AI to creatives everywhere,” said Amit Jain, CEO and co-founder of Luma AI. “Launching across Europe and the Middle East is the logical next step in putting this power directly in the hands of storytellers, agencies and brands globally.”

    The U.K. is the starting point of the expansion because of its access to talent, Jain told CNBC.

    “London has some of the best people when it comes to research, given the universities here and institutions like DeepMind,” he said. “We also consider London to be the entry point to the European market.”

    AI generated image created by Luma’s Ray3 model (Luma AI)

    Luma AI

    Luma is the latest in a wave of North American AI labs doubling down on the U.K. and Europe as they look to take advantage of talent pools and revenue opportunities.

    In November, San Francisco-based Anthropic announced plans to open offices in Paris and Munich, months on from kicking off a hiring spree in London and Dublin. Canadian AI startup Cohere said it would open a Paris office to become its EMEA headquarters in September and OpenAI announced a new office in Munich in February.

    While world models may not yet be as developed as LLMs, some researchers say they are as, if not more, crucial in the pursuit of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI).

    “These kinds of visual models are about a year to a year-and-a-half behind language models right now,” said Jain. 

    But world models will become the “natural interface” for AI for most day-to-day use in time, he predicted, pointing to the amount of time people spend watching video content each day. 

    Tech giants including Google, Meta and Nvidia are all developing world models for a range of use cases.

    Luma released its latest model, Ray3, in September, which Jain told CNBC benchmarks higher than OpenAI’s Sora and at similar levels to Google’s Veo 3.

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  • HPE expands Nvidia AI portfolio

    HPE expands Nvidia AI portfolio

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has expanded its Nvidia AI Computing by HPE portfolio with new offerings designed to enable secure, scalable AI factories and advanced data centre networking.

    The expansion includes the opening of an AI Factory Lab in Grenoble, France. This facility is intended to allow enterprises to test and validate workloads on a sovereign, air-cooled infrastructure operating entirely within the European Union (EU).

    The lab supports compliance with EU data sovereignty requirements and is available for global customers seeking to evaluate their AI deployments in a regionally compliant setting.

    The Grenoble lab is equipped with HPE servers, HPE Juniper Networking PTX and MX Series routers, Nvidia accelerated computing hardware, Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, HPE Alletra storage, and the government-ready version of Nvidia AI Enterprise software.

    This allows customers to assess performance on EU-based infrastructure, addressing regulatory compliance for distributed AI workloads.

    The Grenoble-based AI Factory Lab is scheduled to open in the second quarter of 2026.

    HPE also announced its collaboration with Carbon3.ai to establish the Private AI Lab in London.

    This environment uses the HPE Private Cloud AI platform, the Nvidia AI Enterprise suite, and Nvidia hardware to support enterprise adoption of AI applications in the UK.

    Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said: “We’re transforming the data centre into an AI factory — a manufacturing plant for the new industrial revolution — and by deploying the full stack of NVIDIA accelerated computing and Spectrum-X Ethernet networking with HPE, we’re creating the template for sovereign AI.

    “The new AI Factory Lab provides a foundry where customers can turn data into value, securely and at scale.”

    In response to requirements around operational sovereignty in Europe, HPE Private Cloud AI now offers additional graphics processing unit (GPU) configurations using NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition and Hopper GPUs.

    Integration of STIG-hardened and FIPS-enabled Nvidia AI Enterprise in isolated environments supports security for compliance-driven workflows.

    The platform adopts Nvidia Multi-instance GPU (MIG) technology to provide fractionalisation capabilities aimed at optimising resource utilisation.

    New Datacenter Ops Agents from World Wide Technology (WWT), Nvidia, and HPE are being introduced to automate management tasks across agentic AI and hybrid cloud environments.

    HPE’s sovereign AI factory solutions are now delivered with system architectures designed for country-specific regulatory compliance. These reference designs incorporate security controls necessary for audit support and regulated industry alignment.

    For datacentre networking, HPE has integrated the Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet platform with BlueField-3 data processing units (DPUs), extending high-performance connectivity both within and between datacentres and clouds.

    These networking capabilities are further expanded using HPE Juniper Networking’s MX and PTX routing platforms for low-latency connections across geographically distributed clusters.

    On the storage side, HPE will deliver the Alletra Storage MP X10000 Data Intelligence Nodes as of January 2026.

    This storage architecture introduces inline analytics by embedding Nvidia accelerated computing directly within the data path.

    Running the Nvidia AI Enterprise stack according to the reference design for the Nvidia AI Data Platform, these nodes analyse incoming data in real time to support automated pattern inference for downstream AI pipelines.

    HPE has introduced the Nvidia GB200 NVL4, now available for enterprise deployment. Each system integrates two Grace CPUs and four Blackwell GPUs per node, supporting up to 136 GPUs per rack.

    On security integration, CrowdStrike has been named the endpoint protection provider for HPE Private Cloud AI deployments across hybrid environments.

    This builds on CrowdStrike’s existing partnerships with both HPE and Nvidia around securing accelerated large language model applications.

    HPE president and CEO Antonio Neri said: “HPE and Nvidia continue to provide the foundation for secure AI factories at any scale, with new innovations that deliver a greater range of performance for more diverse workloads than ever before.”

    Fortanix technology will also be applied alongside Nvidia Confidential Computing on HPE Private Cloud AI platforms to secure agentic workloads in highly regulated or sovereign use cases.

    Sovereign AI factory architectures are also available now, while orders for the Alletra Storage MP X10000 Data Intelligence Nodes will begin in January 2026.

    “HPE expands Nvidia AI portfolio” was originally created and published by Verdict, a GlobalData owned brand.

     


    The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.

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  • 2026 will be the year of AI monetization, says Wedbush’s Dan Ives

    2026 will be the year of AI monetization, says Wedbush’s Dan Ives

    Good morning. Enterprise and global AI spending is widely expected to climb in 2026, driven by expanding AI infrastructure and the broader adoption of AI software and devices. Rather than being concentrated only among top tech giants, investment is increasingly coming from a wider base of enterprises.

    Gartner forecasts global AI spending to exceed $2 trillion in 2026, led by the integration of AI into products such as smartphones, PCs, and other underlying infrastructure. Regional economic conditions, regulatory environments, and access to skilled talent will influence how quickly individual companies scale their initiatives. Not every company will commit to large hardware upgrades or wide deployment at the same pace.

    To understand how the market is shaping up, I asked Dan Ives, a managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities, for his view. “We believe 2026 will be the year of AI monetization as the infrastructure leads to the use cases for enterprises and consumers,” Ives told me. “This is just the beginning, and we expect a bullish 2026 for tech and the AI Revolution.”

    Wedbush analysts wrote in a Monday morning note that they are seeing AI-related business ramp up faster recently, and that this momentum should carry into 2026 as end-user enterprises fast-track deployments. The analysts also reject the idea that the market is showing signs of an AI bubble, emphasizing instead that adoption remains in the very early stages as CIOs and business leaders determine where AI can deliver meaningful value in their organizations.

    Deloitte’s recent report similarly anticipates continued and rising AI spending in sectors such as tech, media, and telecom, but emphasizes that the focus will shift from experimentation to execution. “New foundational models, or even shiny new enterprise agentic applications, continue to impress—but translating those beyond pilots and trials requires work that’s typically considered less exciting, like data hygiene, integration into existing workflows, governance, new pricing models, and regulatory compliance,” according to the report. 

    These forecasts point to a common inflection point: 2026 will be less about dazzling new AI models and more about turning existing capabilities into measurable business results. 

    SherylEstrada
    sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

    Leaderboard

    Fortune 500 Power Moves

    Amanda Brimmer was appointed CFO of leasing advisory and head of corporate development at JLL (No. 188), a global commercial real estate and investment management company. Reporting to JLL CFO Kelly Howe, Brimmer will partner with business leaders globally to drive financial growth and performance. Brimmer brings more than two decades of experience from Boston Consulting Group, where she most recently served as managing director and senior partner.

    Galagher Jeff was appointed EVP and CFO of ARKO Corp. (No. 488), one of the largest convenience store operators and fuel wholesalers in the U.S., effective Dec. 1. Jeff most recently served as EVP and CFO for Murphy USA, Inc. Before that, he spent nearly 15 years in senior and executive finance roles with retailers, including Dollar Tree Stores, Inc., Advance Auto Parts, Inc. and Walmart Stores, Inc., in addition to a decade-long career in finance and strategy consulting at organizations including KPMG and Ernst & Young. 

    Every Friday morning, the weekly Fortune 500 Power Moves column tracks Fortune 500 company C-suite shifts—see the most recent edition

    More notable moves

    Nick Tressler was appointed CFO of Vistagen (Nasdaq: VTGN), a late clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, effective Dec. 1. Tressler brings over 20 years of financial leadership experience. Most recently, he served as CFO of DYNEX Technologies, and before that, he was the CFO at American Gene Technologies, International, and Senseonics Holdings, Inc. Tressler has also held senior finance roles at several biopharmaceutical companies.

    Charlie Dowling was appointed CFO of Revive Infrastructure Group, a utility infrastructure services provider. Dowling brings to the company more than 30 years of experience. He began his career in public accounting with Arthur Andersen, and later advanced through senior financial leadership roles across the construction, manufacturing, and industrial sectors.

    Big Deal

    E*TRADE from Morgan Stanley’s monthly analysis found that in November the firm’s clients were net buyers in 10 of 11 S&P 500 sectors—and all signs pointed to them buying the tech dip, especially in some of the market’s megacap AI leaders, according to Chris Larkin, managing director of trading and investing. The top-three sectors for net buying activity were consumer discretionary (+13.41%), utilities (+7.35%), and communication services (+4.9%). Tech was close behind at +4.65%.

    “A good deal of the activity in the utilities sector again appeared to be driven by ‘risk-on’ buying in the alt-energy space rather than defensive purchases of traditional utility stocks,” Larkin noted. “And for the second month in a row, clients rotated away from strength in the health care sector.”

    Courtesy of E*TRADE

    Going deeper

    “How AI’s persuasion style mirrors humans” is the latest episode of Wharton’s Ripple Effect podcast. Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick discusses how AI systems respond to Robert Cialdini’s principles of persuasion, such as authority, reciprocity, and commitment. The episode explores why certain nudges make guardrails more flexible, how larger models show stronger resistance to influence, and how insights from social psychology reveal the emerging “para-human” nature of AI.

    Overheard

    “My belief in the power of connection has shaped much of my personal life and professional career.”

    DavidRisher, chief executive officer of Lyft, writes in a Fortune opinion piece titled, “Lyft CEO: This Giving Tuesday, I’m matching every rider’s donation.”

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  • UK Black Friday weekend online sales hit $5 billion, Adobe Analytics says – Reuters

    1. UK Black Friday weekend online sales hit $5 billion, Adobe Analytics says  Reuters
    2. The shocking amount shoppers are expected to spend this Black Friday and Cyber Monday  The Independent
    3. Black Friday 2025: the rise of the cautious consumer  Retail Times
    4. Households issued £299 alert ahead of Black Friday  Daily Express
    5. Landsec eyes £95m in Black Friday sales at shopping centres including Bluewater and Liverpool ONE  Retail Technology Innovation Hub

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