What's up: Nvidia will invest $5 billion in Intel; Meta unveils new smartglasses; China steps up AI chip efforts.

Good morning. AI agents have been just over the horizon for more than a year. This week, Workday said it was expanding its agents with new offerings in  HR, finance and industry.

It's a signal that AI agents, or artificial intelligence that can take action as well as answer questions or synthesize information, are scaling beyond the pilot stage in a more significant way.

Broadly speaking, it has taken effort to get agents beyond the pilot stage. The challenges have gone well beyond technology. Developers have had to figure out how agents can be integrated into the customer’s business so that they can transform processes and deliver value. That’s often been elusive when it comes to AI.

“If you go and speak to enterprises right now, they’re having a really difficult time justifying or quantifying the costs associated with any of these agents,” Workday Chief Executive Carl Eschenbach told the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Belle Lin. “We’re taking a very targeted approach: We have the cleanest set of data that’s highly curated for HR and finance.” (Read the full story here.)

Workday said it is counting on its 20 years of experience to imbue its agents with data and context, which it views as a foundation for measurable outcomes. The company said AI deployments are too often piecemeal, siloed, and disconnected from the way work gets done. To address those problems, it has embedded its agents directly into HR and finance.

Will those principles win over customers and allow Workday’s agents to scale in a big way? It’s an important test case for enterprise AI itself.

Nvidia to invest $5 billion in Intel

The investment comes as part of a collaboration between the tech giants to jointly develop custom data-center and PC products, the Journal reports.

Intel will build Nvidia-custom x86 CPUs that Nvidia will integrate into its AI infrastructure platforms and will also build chip systems to be used in Nvidia chiplets that power PCs.

Nvidia will buy Intel stock at a purchase price of $23.28 a share.

Trade war between Washington and Beijing further ensnares America’s most valuable company

Beijing continues to push back against Washington’s policy to sell less-advanced Nvidia chips in China as it pushes domestic firms to switch to homegrown hardware.

This week Beijing’s top cybersecurity regulator said that China would blacklist Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D chip. The guidance followed an earlier directive that companies shouldn’t buy Nvidia’s popular AI chip specially designed for the Chinese market, called the H20.

Chief Executive Jensen Huang on Wednesday addressed the larger factors at play. “I’m disappointed with what I see, but they have larger agendas to work out, between China and the United States,” Huang said.

Huawei Technologies announced its chip pipeline on Thursday, giving a rare glimpse into the Chinese company's ambitions to compete with AI chip giant Nvidia. The lineup includes a new generation of its Ascend chips and technology that can bundle thousands of chips, an advance it said could help address a bottleneck in large-scale AI computing infrastructure.

Meta's future is so bright....

Meta Platforms announced a new pair of smartglasses with a small built-in display at the company’s annual hardware and developer conference on Wednesday. The glasses, which can be controlled by small hand movements via a wrist strap called the Neural Band,  go on sale Sept. 30.

The tech giant is also stepping up conversations with media companies about AI content-licensing deals, WSJ reports. In recent months it has held discussions with Axel Springer, Fox Corp. and News Corp.

Inside the room where CEOs say what they really think

Behind closed doors at a CEO gathering in Washington convened by the Yale School of Management, business leaders sounded off on their concerns about tariffs, immigration and what many described as an increasingly chaotic, hard-to-navigate business environment.

Asked if tariffs had been helpful or hurtful to their businesses, 71% of respondents described the levies as harmful, WSJ reports. Another question centered on the legality of tariffs. About three quarters of respondents said courts were correct in saying the tariffs are illegal as executed. 

Not all CEOs in the room criticized the administration, according to attendees. Several who went to the event said they appreciated efforts among Trump officials to correct trade imbalances and reinforce the country’s borders, but said they took issue with the way some policies were being carried out.

Elon Musk’s approach to running companies is complicating his ambitions to build the world’s dominant AI company. The WSJ reports that several executives at xAI have left after clashing with two of Musk’s closest advisers over concern about the startup’s management and financial health. 

Amazon has released a chatbot-style creative assistant designed to help advertisers produce and distribute multimedia ad campaigns almost entirely with artificial intelligence.

Jaguar Land Rover is racing to get production back to normal after a cyberattack discovered late last month prompted the Range Rover maker to power down its operations. The company has also said some data was compromised, having initially said there was no evidence of stolen customer information.

Disney said it is pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show off ABC in the wake of remarks the late-night host made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. (WSJ)

Technology stocks rallied on Thursday after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates for the first time this year and signaled more easing is coming. (WSJ)

With the Federal Reserve in cutting mode, many people expect mortgage rates to fall fast. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. The Fed sets a target for a short-term, overnight interest rate. Lots of other borrowing rates are priced off that baseline. But mortgages aren’t one of them. (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.