What's up: Compliance software firms are pushing AI to decode Wall Street jargon; the week of AI pricing tweaks; GM reaches settlement for selling consumer data; AI and headcount: Good news for humans?

Good morning, CIOs. President Biden has issued a flurry of executive orders in his final days of the White House, including some with a direct or indirect impact on tech, tech policy and, by extension, your industry. But will they stick?

As the WSJ reports, some are sure to face challenges in the first days of the Trump administration which kicks off Monday. 

The executive orders

Artificial intelligence. Biden this week issued an order directing agencies to lease federal sites owned by the Energy and Defense departments to companies seeking to build AI data centers. It told agencies to expedite permitting and asked bidding companies to meet high labor standards and use clean energy, two requirements that could be targets for the Trump administration.

Companies are also waiting to see how Trump handles Biden’s 2023 executive order on artificial intelligence, which asks them to notify the government when developing powerful models that could affect national security, the economy or public health.

Some smaller companies and investors said definitions and reporting requirements in the order would be difficult for many startups to meet, limiting innovation.

Cybersecurity. The sweeping order issued Thursday covers topics from securing federal communications against foreign hackers to threats posed by artificial intelligence and quantum computing. For businesses, the order enacts new cyber requirements on companies that are direct vendors with the federal government

Republicans have often spurned cybersecurity requirements, arguing that they can amount to costly regulations that hamstring businesses.

But Michael Bahar, partner and co-lead of global cybersecurity and data privacy at law firm Eversheds Sutherland, tells WSJ Pro Cyber's James Rundle that it is unlikely the content of Biden’s cyber order would disappear.

“As with most things, when you put a stake in the ground, it’s always harder to pull it up,” he said. Read the story.

Note to readers: The Morning Download newsletter won’t be published Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We’ll be back Tuesday.

Can a computer talk trader? Up-and-coming compliance software firms are leaning into artificial intelligence to help crack esoteric trader argot, as Wall Street and London watchdogs increasingly dive into traders’ jargon-loaded and even coded messages to help fight financial crime.

The incentive. U.S. regulators now treat essentially any written communication regarding business as a record. They have levied billions in fines against firms for failing to rein in traders who talked shop on messaging services.

Enter generative AI. New tools can ingest the huge amount of messages that financial firm employees generate and quickly adapt to approaches used by traders to defeat a traditional tool, the WSJ's Richard Vanderford reports.

Ecoding-day all-way eet-stray argon-jay. Global Relay, a compliance firm that serves banks and other financial industry clients, is testing a new AI system that can decipher metaphors, phrases coded with emojis, and even pig Latin.

Traders believed that “if somebody wanted to say something sketchy, they would just make up a funny word or, you know, spell it backward or something,” said Donald McElligott, vice president of compliance supervision at Global Relay. “Now, none of that’s going to work anymore.” 

Microsoft bundles AI, price hike into consumer Microsoft 365 subscriptions. The software company is adding Copilot to its consumer subscription service for software and raising prices by $3 per month. The price hike won’t cover unlimited use of the suite’s AI features, however. For that, users can upgrade to Copilot Pro. Existing subscribers do have the option to opt out, Microsoft said.

A week of pricing tweaks. The move echoes a similar one by Google Wednesday announcing that it would make available AI tools in its Workspace Business and Enterprise plans for an extra $2 a month. Microsoft on Wednesday rolled out a new freemium service, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, that lets business customers create and use agents on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Not done yet. Tech companies are on the hook to find those perfect pricing sweet spots as they continue to invest billions in AI infrastructure and developing AI systems.

French AI startup Mistral signs deal with AFP. As part of the partnership, Mistral’s LeChat chatbot will ingest 2,000 articles from Agence France-Presse daily. FT reports that the two Paris-based entities are describing the deal as a move towards making sure that Mistral’s models are grounded in facts, playing off recent moves by rivals in Silicon Valley.

AI and headcount: Good news for humans? A new Boston Consulting Group survey of some 1,800 C-Level decisionmakers finds some hesitancy equating AI adoption with job cuts. Asked to gauge how their workforces would change with AI automation, just 7% defined change as a decrease in headcount. Sixty-eight percent said headcount would remain the same, while another 8% see a headcount increase.

More interesting. Seventeen percent see neither cuts nor additions, but a restructuring with new roles replacing redundant ones.

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