Pierre Bien-Aimé

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Thank you.

I think the potential of agentic is to rethink how work gets done overall.

It challenges all sorts of traditional orthodoxies around how organizations execute the work at hand.

Here's your midday brief for Monday, March 16th.

I'm Pierre Bien-Aimé for The Wall Street Journal.

NVIDIA's annual developers conference, GTC, begins today.

And for the first time this year, the event's focus won't be squarely on GPUs, or graphics processing units.

Those are the kinds of chips NVIDIA built its massive computing empire with, chips optimized for training AI.

Much more of the talk at this year's event will be focused on inference, the type of computing required to run models and allow them to respond to user questions.

That's because the AI industry has moved into a new phase.

NVIDIA's customers are less concerned today with training large AI models and more preoccupied with running them and generating big profits from end users.

That inference requires a different suite of hardware compared with chips optimized for training.

The Italian bank Unicredit has offered to buy all the remaining shares of Germany's Commerzbank.

The bank said its proposal to buy the rest of Commerzbank for around 24 billion euros, or roughly 28 billion dollars, isn't likely to lead to a quick merger.

The German government is a 12% owner of Commerzbank and has resisted letting the bank come under foreign ownership.

And Intuit plans to roughly double its stock buybacks while ending scheduled stock sales by its senior management team to help shore up its stock.

Intuit owns TurboTax, Credit Karma, and QuickBooks.