What's up: Big Tech in the courts; marketing onboards AI; what is an AI supercomputer?

Good morning, CIOs. Sooner or later it happens to every company during its generative AI journey. One day, everyone's empowered to experiment. The next, the pros take over. 

Jim Swanson, chief information officer at Johnson & Johnson, talked with the Journal's Isabelle Bousquette about the time the healthcare conglomerate shifted its generative AI strategy away from broad experimentation to a more focused approach.

“That was a pivot we made after about a year of learning,” Swanson said. “Now we’ve moved from the thousand flowers to a really prioritized focus on GenAI.” 

That “thousand flowers” approach involved a number of use-case ideas germinating from across the company. At one point, employees were pursuing nearly 900 individual use cases, he said.

Now J&J is drilling down into high-impact generative AI use cases in areas such as drug discovery and supply chains, as well as an internal chatbot to answer questions on company policy.

“We’re prioritizing, we’re scaling, we’re looking at the things that make the most sense,” he said. “That was part of the maturation process we went through.” Read the story.

Judge rules Google operates illegal ad monopoly. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said Thursday that Google’s monopoly in ad exchanges and server markets violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, harming advertisers and consumers. The company also engaged in unlawful “tying”—conditioning access to one product on paying for the other.

The ruling marked the second time in eight months that a U.S. judge labeled Google an illegal monopolist—and could lead the Justice Department to seek a forced sale of some of the company’s advertising products.

This ad-tech case is one of several pitting Big Tech against federal agencies.

The Federal Trade Commission this week went to trial in its antitrust case against Meta Platforms. An FTC case against Amazon.com is also set to go to trial in September. Meanwhile Apple faces a Justice Department antitrust case over allegations it impedes the ability of outside software to integrate with its devices.

Marketing onboards AI. We’re not yet at the point where AI is developing, producing and approving campaigns with little or no human intervention. But some firms, including Prudential Financial, are knocking on the door, the Journal reports.

The financial and insurance company recently worked with Adobe and AI startup Gradial to create a virtual employee tasked with using behavioral, geolocation and real-time data to generate webpages tailored to the interests of each person who visits its websites.

How Nvidia plays export Whack-a-Mole. On Thursday, Chinese state media reported that Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang met with a Chinese official in Beijing. “The China market is very important to us,” Huang said in a video posted by state media. The visit came the same week the U.S. announced new restrictions on Nvidia chip sales to China.