Businesses' use of AI comes with plenty of stops and starts
Welcome back to our Sunday edition, where we round up some of our top stories and take you inside our newsroom. What would you do to land your dream job? One man was so eager to kick-start his tech career that he lived in his car for three months to take a role at Google. He soon found out he wasn't the only Googler doing it.
On the agenda today:
- America is willing to gamble on anything. These businesses are cashing in.
- Influencers are becoming a double-edged sword for the military.
- America's first-time homebuyers are disappearing. Older "repeat buyers" are taking their place.
- Introducing Goldman's newest crop of MDs.
But first: Getting AI to work for you.
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This week's dispatch
Unpacking AI in the workplace
At the Davos conference in January, Marc Benioff asked a crowd of luminaries whether AI was a basic human right.
Here is another question: Can it make him money?
He gushed about AI agents last year, enthusiasm that helped drive the company's stock to an all-time high in early December. This year, though, Salesforce isn't in the AI darling club. Its shares are down roughly 28%.
Business Insider's Ashley Stewart has been reporting on the company's "Agentforce" project, which represents Salesforce's big bet on AI agents.
"Inside the company, some current and former employees say there's been constant struggle for the teams scrambling to deliver on Benioff's public promises of what their AI products can do," she wrote.
Her in-depth piece showed how hard this evolution can be, even at companies all in on it.
"It's very, very difficult — even for people working on the products — to know the difference between what we say in a demo, what's on a road map, and what's actually in production," one senior employee told Ashley. "It's a full-time job just figuring that out."
Meanwhile, my LinkedIn post on the story generated a pointed discussion.
At Business Insider, we're actively reporting on how AI is and isn't helping people in business. And we're not just looking at big companies.
A new series, Tiny Teams, features entrepreneurs trying to leverage themselves with AI to scurry around incumbents. Our profile of Tim DeSoto, most recently of Walmart, is an example.
DeSoto is launching an AI-driven shopping app he hopes will help customers this holiday season. Reach out to BI's
Then there is Vercel, a ten-year-old tech company that serves developers. It shadowed a top performer in sales for six weeks and then built an agent to mimic that person's process. The result helped take the team from 10 to one human, with the other nine being redeployed, Lakshmi Varanasi reported.
Is AI a human right? The philosophers can debate it.
Business Insider is committed to helping you figure out how to use it. As always, please reach me at
Wanna bet?
After a 2018 ruling burst open the sports-betting floodgates, it didn't take long for gambling to get popular everywhere. Now, the focus is mostly on prediction markets.
These platforms have long been limited in the US, but they're now taking advantage of lax federal regulators and what they say are legal loopholes to offer their services in more and more states.
A reckoning within the ranks
Top military influencers are taking over corners of the internet, and it's opening a can of ethical worms for the Pentagon. Regardless of follower count, these creators operate in a murky space between personal branding and military ethics guidelines.
Across the ranks, the Pentagon's social media policies are vague and unevenly enforced, leaving troops eager to grow their followings but wary of the consequences, according to six military influencers and five public affairs officials.
Read more from BI's military influencer series:
- This soldier built a side hustle on TikTok and Instagram and says it's now paying better than the Army
- The Army is turning to TikTok-famous soldiers to pump up recruiting — but it's hit a snag
An old person's game
A decade ago, Americans typically bought their first home in their early 30s. Now, the average age of a first-time homebuyer is closer to 40.
With younger adults boxed out, the real-estate market has become an old(er) person's game. Silver-haired "repeat buyers," armed with decades of home equity and faced with less competition, are snapping up the supply instead.
The age of the geriatric homebuyer.
Goldman's newest execs
Goldman Sachs announced its newest class of managing directors, the second-highest designation at the bank outside the C-suite.
This class of MDs is 638 people strong, roughly 5% bigger than the last cohort in 2023. The moneymakers were also the ones most heavily rewarded, with 70% of new MDs coming from revenue-generating divisions of the bank.
Also read:
- 5 top Goldman Sachs partners share their best advice to the bank's newest managing directors
- Goldman will soon crown its next generation of managing directors. Here's an inside look at the promotions process.
This week's quote:
"It's all about control. People in leadership positions are feeling like they finally have the upper hand again."
— Jeff LeBlanc, a management lecturer at Bentley University, on the growing trend of companies becoming leaner and eliminating DEI.
Why Nepal grows Japan's cash
Japan utilizes argeli, a low-value crop found in the Himalayas, to produce its physical yen, eventually turning it into a cash crop. What happens to Nepal's big business if Japan goes cashless like the rest of Asia?
More of this week's top reads:
- Exclusive:Walleye's chief strategy officer is leaving, the latest in a string of senior exits at the $9.4 billion hedge fund.
- Disney's villain era: The YouTube TV dispute highlights the challenge to maintain a good-guy image.
- Exclusive: Google is in talks to pour more money into Anthropic, which could push the AI startup's value to $350 billion.
- Here's where the "Trump Trade" scorecard stands one year after his election win.
- Exclusive: Tesla has ramped up work on its long-delayed Roadster. Here's what insiders have seen.
- Warren Buffett is in his final two months as CEO. He's leaving at a tricky time for Berkshire Hathaway.
- Hooters is getting a "re-Hooterization" as its founders retake control of the restaurant chain.
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They got laid off from Corporate America's country club and dumped into a hellish job market.
The BI Today team: Jamie Heller, editor in chief, in New York. Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Akin Oyedele, deputy editor, in New York.Grace Lett, editor, in New York. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York.
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