The Morning Download: Apple's Succession and the CIO Agenda

Good Morning. When leadership succession happens at an organization as large, influential and all-encompassing as Apple, it's only natural to ask, "what does it mean for me?"

The "me" in this case, is CIOs and the CIO agenda. 

As the Journal reported Monday evening, Apple CEO Tim Cook will move to the executive chairman role on September 1, with hardware division chief John Ternus stepping up to chief executive.

Consider: When Cook, a supply-chain expert nonpareil, took the helm in 2011, BYOD was still a hot topic. Today, the Apple ecosystem is more firmly entrenched in the enterprise than ever, an outcome due in part to Ternus's hardware leadership.

According to Wang: "The pick shows that stability will continue, but the need for more innovation remains the question to be answered by John Ternus."

The company’s most successful products since the iPhone are AirPods earbuds and the Apple Watch, big businesses, sure, but hardly CIO agenda-worthy. Apple tried to position the Vision Pro as a tool for the enterprise. But the headset has been a sales dud.

Apple once owned innovation. But after decades defining how people interact with computing devices, Apple has fallen behind rival companies who are leading the next great computing platform with chatbots that converse like humans, the Journal notes.

This matters to CIOs because CIOs care about innovation, and innovation is now synonymous with AI capability.

But Apple isn't out of the race. The company controls 2.5 billion active devices and here's where Ternus's track record becomes crucial: he worked with Apple's in-house silicon team to replace Intel chips with Apple-designed silicon. Mac sales inside and outside the enterprise soared.

That same model—hardware-driven differentiation—could be Apple's path to AI relevance with the CIO agenda.

Again, here's the Journal's Rolfe Winkler.

AI providers who want to reach users of the 2.5 billion active Apple devices in circulation will have to pay Apple handsomely, a likelihood expected to give the company more time to create new AI solutions that can work without the massive computing costs its peers are facing.

Another high-profile business leader, BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink, once called artificial intelligence “the most significant technology since, at least, the computer.”

How has that pronouncement played out within the firm itself? WSJ Leadership Institute's Isabelle Bousquette went to find out, discovering an effort to embed AI into nearly everything, from making investment decisions to how it operates internally.

Now, after building an investment research platform, Asimov, underpinned by hundreds of agents, BlackRock is beginning to roll out a new platform that will make it easier for employees across the company to quickly spin up AI agents for specialized tasks, she reports.

OpenAI is working with consulting firms, including Accenture, Capgemini and PricewaterhouseCoopers, to help sell its artificial-intelligence coding tool Codex to businesses.

OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser tells the WSJ Leadership's Belle Lin that its Codex consulting partners will help OpenAI expand its reach to additional potential enterprise customers than it could alone.

And the ChatGPT maker needs all the help it can get. Rival Anthropic has emerged as a dominant AI provider for businesses due in part to the viral success of its coding and AI agent products. More on Anthropic's latest move in the code wars below.

Anthropic, Amazon tighten bond. Amazon said Monday that it would invest an additional $5 billion in Anthropic, with potential total investment reaching $25 billion, part of a broadening partnership between the two companies. Anthropic, which has increasingly been hampered by a shortage of the computing power needed to serve its AI models, also agreed to purchase more than $100 billion of Amazon’s cloud services. 

The SPAC is back with a new quantum flavor. Also called a blank-check company, a SPAC is a shell firm that lists publicly with the sole intent of merging with a private company to take it public. Such mergers exploded in 2020 and 2021 before turning to a bust in 2022. And now they are back again, as quantum firms are having a moment and SPACs represent a faster vehicle to go public. So far this year quantum companies Infleqtion, Horizon Quantum and Xanadu Quantum Technologies have gone public via a SPAC with Finnish startup IQM on deck for later this year, Barron’s reports.  

Can't beat 'em, make a robot that can. A humanoid robot called Lightning developed by Chinese smartphone maker Honor won Beijing’s half-marathon Sunday with a time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds. The world record is 57 minutes and 20 seconds, set just last month by Jacob Kiplimo from Uganda.

From more than 100,000 parts to fewer than 1,000 bricks. Among the hottest Lego toys is a recreation of an ASML extreme ultraviolet lithography machine and no, you can't have one. The miniature versions are available exclusively to employees with verified ASML email addresses.

The sounds of AI Slop. Music streaming app Deezer said it is receiving almost 75,000 AI-generated music uploads a day. The majority of those uploads are detected and demonetized by the company, according to TechCrunch. Faith in humanity partly restored.

CORRECTION: One thing that Rubik employees repeatedly talk about at the company is "don't micromanage AI," according to Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha. In yesterday's newsletter, Sinha was incorrectly credited with saying "don't macro manage AI."

Wall Street and Washington will be watching Kevin Warsh on Tuesday for any sign he has an understanding with President Trump to cut interest rates if installed as chair of the Federal Reserve. Trump will be watching for any sign he doesn’t. (WSJ)