Plus: Bristol-Myers Squibb is giving more than 30,000 employees access to Anthropic’s Claude. And Alibaba releases powerful new AI chips in a push to rival Nvidia. Danny Lewis hosts.
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[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_02] Many companies are struggling to scale their AI deployments or even move them past the pilot stage. Often the problem isn't technology, but organizational misalignment around goals, processes and incentives. At the break, join Caroline Roach, Senior Partner, IBM Consulting, to learn why.
[00:00:16] [SPEAKER_00] Here's your morning TNB Tech Minute for Wednesday, May 20th. I'm Danny Lewis for The Wall Street Journal. Meta Platforms began laying off thousands of employees today and is reassigning thousands of others to AI-focused roles. That's according to an internal memo and people familiar with the matter. The company's chief people officer told staff last month that Meta planned to lay off about 10% of staff, about 8,000 employees, and that the company would cancel plans to hire for about 6,000 open roles.
[00:00:45] [SPEAKER_00] Meta executives have said the job cuts are meant to offset its increasing spending on AI infrastructure. It plans up to $145 billion in capital expenditures this year, largely to build out AI data centers. We exclusively report that Bristol-Myers Squibb is bringing Anthropics' Claude Chatbot to more than 30,000 of its employees. The deal, which the companies will announce today, deepens the biopharmaceuticals giants' use of AI for functions like research, clinical development, and corporate uses.
[00:01:13] [SPEAKER_00] It also underscores Anthropics' commitment to the life sciences industry as it continues to pursue enterprise clients. Bristol-Myers says it is using Anthropics' Claude Code tool to speed up its software and AI development. And Alibaba is ramping up its efforts to monetize its AI business with a new chip aimed at rivaling NVIDIA's offerings. The Chinese tech company says the next generation of its high-end chip series is three times more powerful than its predecessor, and is, quote,
[00:01:41] [SPEAKER_00] exceptionally suited for complex agentic AI workloads that demand extensive working memory. The chips feature 144 gigabytes of GPU memory, which enables them to process significantly larger data loads. Alibaba also released an update of its flagship large language model that is engineered for more advanced agentic coding and complex reasoning. That's your TNB Tech Minute. Join us again this afternoon for more.
[00:02:06] [SPEAKER_02] Scaling AI successfully requires more than the right technology. Here again is Caroline Roach, senior partner, IBM Consulting.
[00:02:13] [SPEAKER_01] The biggest thing that we were talking about a year ago is what model to use. And the biggest thing that I'm talking about with my clients now is how do I drive change within my organization?
[00:02:25] [SPEAKER_02] Companies able to identify, correct, and then avoid misalignment will be best positioned to deliver meaningful business value from AI.
[00:02:31] [SPEAKER_01] The organizations that are the most successful set very clear targets and have several priorities that are very clear across the enterprise. The technology is really good, but if you're not changing your organizational alignment, not incentivizing your people correctly, not looking at workflows, you're not going to see real value with it.
[00:02:52] [SPEAKER_02] Visit ibm.com slash think slash leadership to learn how building organizational alignment can help deliver AI deployments that scale and drive growth. This content was created by Custom Content from WSJ, a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising Department.