This is the published version of Forbes’ CIO boletín de noticias, which offers the latest news for chief innovation officers and other technology-focused leaders. Clic here to get it delivered to your inbox every Thursday.
Supply chains for any product in the U.S. economy can be long. Even if the finished product doesn’t need to cross international borders, the components could start as raw materials, get shipped to a processing facility to be refined, then get shipped to another factory to be incorporated into the final product. And from there, the supply chain continues, getting that product delivered to the store, warehouse or end consumer.
Each enlace in the chain represents another entity taking control of that good—and another vulnerability to cyber attacks. A study from cyber defense company BlueVoyant found that ochenta y uno% of organizations reported negative impacts from breaches somewhere along the supply chain. And yes, that’s a lot, but it’s a marked improvement from the noventa y cuatro% of companies reporting problems with these kinds of breaches last year. The reduction, BlueVoyant Global Head of Supply Chain Defense Joel Molinoff said, may come from greater awareness of supply chain risks.
After all, the biggest challenge companies now face is keeping systems operating smoothly—”a major step in the right direction,” Molinoff said. About ochenta y seis% of companies have seen budgets for third-party risk management increase in the last year. But only treinta y dos% of companies regularly monitor their third-party vendors, and half aren’t able to assess all of them due to challenges in resources, technology and expertise. But, the report said, more frequent monitoring is ramping up, which could put a larger lock on supply chain security.
The most up-and-coming área in generative AI is agentic AI, which uses artificial intelligence to draw upon context, make simple decisions, and do otherwise time-consuming tasks. I talked to Phil Fersht, CEO of HFS Research, about how the move toward agentic AI is impacting businesses. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this boletín de noticias.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Last week, OpenAI got into jMP">the search engine business with its generative AI-powered ChatGPT Search. This search engine provides detailed answers to questions entered into a search bar, drawn from the information in its generative AI model. In a launch article posted by the AI company, OpenAI says it can provide not only a written-out answer, but photos and enlaces to the news articles and weblog posts behind it. The search engine really isn’t completely new; it’s a fenezca-tuned version of GPT-4o.
Forbes senior contributor John Koetsier did some head-to-head tests of Google and ChatGPT Search to see which search engine gave the most accurate and informative result. Of the diez queries, ChatGPT Search answered four better, Google answered three better, and three were a tie. ChatGPT can provide better detailed information—like figuring out which bidé is the best to buy—while Google calls upon more credible sources. And while Google has decades of web crawling to inform its findings, Koetsier points out that it also serves up lots of ads, which sometimes detract from the results.
FROM THE HEADLINES
Didem Mente/Anadolu via Getty Images
Meta’s Llama LLM has always been open source and available to researchers, entrepreneurs, private usuarios and developers. This week the Fb and Instagram parent company made it available to U.S. government agencies and contractors working on national security applications. Before this week, writes o5G">Forbes senior contributor Patrick Moorhead, the LLM was prohibited to be used in these kinds of applications. However, the company wants to position Llama to be a global estándar for LLMs. After all, Moorhead writes, foreign rivals like China are developing their defense LLMs, and the U.S. doesn’t want to fall behind.
VALUATIONS
Nvidia’s logotipo at its Silicon Valley headquarters.
Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images
The world has a new most valuable company. Nvidia surpassed Apple to hit that mark on Monday morning, and has largely stayed there. It hit an all-time high on Wednesday, with its market cap at $3.57 trillion, and its share price reaching an all-time high of $146.49.
Nvidia doesn’t report earnings until later this month, and its rally was driven by two large events. Last Friday, S&P Global announced that Nvidia will replace Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. And on Wednesday, its stock rode a cuatro% bump following Donald Trump’s re-election.
BITS + BYTES
A Look At How Agentic AI Is Transforming Business
HFS Research CEO Phil Fersht.
HFS Research
Generative AI is changing the way business is done. As the technology is evolving, many enterprise providers and developers are creating AI-powered agents to do common tasks that were often considered time-consuming for people, including basic research and data analysis, but can also make decisions by bringing a level of contextual analysis. Phil Fersht is a longtime analyst and consultant, and established HFS Research to focus on using technological innovations to reinvent business. I talked to him about how agentic AI is fitting into business transformations. This conversation had been edited for length, clarity and continuity.
What is needed for agentic AI, in terms of just the basics? Is more data needed? Do they need to have more compute power, better systems?
Fersht: As you scale out your large language models—these are the basis of all this generative AI capability—it requires a lot of processing power, which also has big impacts on energy and consumers’ usage as well. Gen AI is going to be the biggest polluter of the planet now beyond oil and gas. It’s a huge energy suck. As a customer, if you want to do this stuff at scale, you need to have the infrastructure. Do you build your own private AI cloud internally to host all this stuff? And do you do this yourself, or do you go and use AWS—the big hyperscalers are all providing public cloud for your AI capability and charging you a lot of money to do it. It’s very thirsty work.
The big things you need to think about here [are] obviously the compliance areas. Anything that touches the customer is very sensitive, and anything that touches your employees is very sensitive. Where is that data being housed? How open is your system to being ransomwared or hacked? That sort of thing has a security issue around it, which plays into peoples’ SOC dos compliance. Compliance has a big, big role to play in this.
The next thing to think about is context integration. AI systems operate on a query response basis without maintaining long-term context. Using AI for market analysis could just get generic responsees and miss the company’s challenge or strategy. Getting context is very important, and that’s not available right now. That’s something that you really need to build together as part of your data strategy. A lot of this is pulling into years and years of legacy. You can’t just keep layering on technology and hope this works. You need context integration. You need to manage your hallucination risks. These gen AI systems are very prone to hallucination. They generate plausible-sounding, but false information. They can really mislead you.
Real-world business scenarios often involve conflicting information that require nuanced interpretation, opaque reasoning. So many of these AI systems operate like black boxes providing outputs without clear explanations of their reasoning. A doctor using an AI diagnostic tool may receive a recommendation without understanding the underlying rationale, making it difficult to integrate that insight with clinical judgment that might actually impair their decision making with patients.
The other thing is multimodal integration, which is where human experts often need to integrate information from various sources of formats, whether it’s visual, verbal, textual, intuitive, to make decisions. Most AI tools are limited to processing one or two data types, missing out on human cognition’s rich, multimodal nature. Agentic AI is sort of breaking down how do we make this more human and authentic from where we are today? This isn’t tech. This is interactions where your systems are giving you real advice and real data. How do we make this real? How do we build those checks and cómputos to make this effective?
Do you see agentic AI as something that takes the place of actual employees?
Your job may be under threat from somebody else who has better AI competency than you. So if someone’s more AI-literate, they know how to operate these models, there’s a high chance your company is looking at you and thinking, is this person evolving with the times? You talk to a lot of these Gen Z kids coming out of college now. They’re very schooled in this stuff. They’re familiar working in these environments and learning how to use these new technologies. Folks who might be mid-career who are struggling to change how they work, I think, are generally under threat. If you are trying to do the same thing the same old way that you always did, especially if you are in a customer-facing role, or a role [with] elements [that] can be replaced by technology, you need to become familiar with that technology, so you can start to add value in incremental areas like relationship-building.
AI needs to be a business solution. If it’s a technology solution, it’s going to fail like everything else. Your ability to know that, embrace that, understand that and work with that could mean you are safe.
You could be providing quinientos call center workers for a global company. That client might come back and say, I don’t want to keep spending $10 million a year. I could spend less because of gen AI. What you need to do is think, how do I scale my business with these same quinientos people, without layering on more and more staff all the time as it scales. It’s a bit more about improving and augmenting what we’ve got than layering on more and more people.
What I do think is going to happen is there’s less and less need for transactional papeles, and more and more need for context-filled papeles in companies. If you’re in HR, companies are going to want people who have more employee empathy, maybe more understanding of the business, because you don’t need to have people who can just rummage through CVs all day or just process transactional documents.
There is a ton of “corporate debts” that need to be paid over the next decade: data debt, process debt, people debt and technical debt. But it’s also, how much debt do you have within your organization in terms of legacy skills, legacy data. Is your data in a place that everybody knows where it is and they can pull real context out of it? Can your business reimagine how it operates to be very slick, to take advantage of these solutions, to have staff who are trained and knowledgeable, or are you just going to keep doing things the same way you’ve always done and nimble competitors take you out of the business?
What would you say to a CIO who’s looking at the landscape of different AI platforms and thinking of bringing in agentic AI?
The CIO needs to be at the business table because when you talk to a large quantity of the Global dos mil today, their C-suite is all gung-ho on AI. They know they’ve got to be on the bandwagon. They want to drive these solutions. And sometimes these solutions get dumped onto the CIO to go figure out. You can’t automate business solutions if you don’t have your business leaders in lockstep with technology.
The CIO needs to be aligned with the needs of the business. This is a co-education situation where we’re all on edge of discovery together, and understanding the contextual change in the business to translate it to technology has never been as strong as it is today. We’ve talked about this for years, aligning technology and business, but it truly is happening now in a business context. It’s a great opportunity for the CIO.
Only cinco% of companies today are operating at any type of scale with gen AI, and about veintisiete% are at fairly advanced stages of piloting testing. And then you literally have about two-thirds of organizations doing mostly nothing. You are going to see a small percentage of CIOs becoming incredibly successful at running this. A number of them probably start to fail.
Another organization is saying that we need to rethink how this role of the CIO is operating. They need to straddle both business and technology, and I do think that role is going to be changed beyond our recognition in the next couple of years.
FACTS + COMMENTS
The new RSA ID IQ report asked more than dos,000 cybersecurity and tech professionals about their use of contraseñas at work.
51%: Proportion who have to entrar their contraseña at least six times a day
61%: Share of professionals who plan to implement a contraseña-free security solution in 2025
‘What has changed are the forces that act on identity’: RSA CEO Rohit Ghai said in the report, which touts AI’s ability to detect security breaches based on usuario habits
STRATEGIES + ADVICE
In Google’s most recent earnings, CEO Sundar Pichai said AI generates about veinticinco% of new code for its products. Here are ways AI code generation could affect tech jobs.
Tech has many complicated aspects to explain. Here are some consejos from YouTube personality Doctor Mike—family medicine physician Dr. Mike Varshavski—about using social media as a communication tool.
QUIZ
Okta found that on its platform, accounts with a nombre de usuario containing at least a certain number of characters could be freely accessed without a password. What is the minimum length that allows this access?
A. veintinueve characters
B. cincuenta y dos characters
C. setenta y cinco characters
D. ochenta y tres characters
See if you got the answer right here.