Good morning. As January comes to a close, there’s plenty of evidence that AI investment by major companies is set to soar this year.
Take for instance tech giant Meta. “This will be a defining year for AI,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg writes in a Facebook post published on Friday. The company is building an AI data center in northeast Louisiana that is “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” according to Zuckerberg. The data center will fuel its newest AI model, Llama 4. Meta is planning on investing $60-$65 billion in capex this year, while significantly growing its AI teams. “This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and businesses, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership,” Zuckerberg writes.
Not every company has plans to build a massive data center, but many do have significant AI investment goals. One in three companies globally is planning to allocate over $25 million to AI, according to a new report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The firm surveyed 1,803 C-level executives across 19 markets and 12 industries. The companies that are leading AI adopters focus on “depth over breadth,” prioritizing an average of 3.5 use cases, compared with 6.1 use cases for other companies. According to BCG, these companies anticipate generating 2.1 times greater ROI on their AI initiatives than their peers.
A philosophy on value creation and AI models
Determining AI development, training, deployment, and use is certainly of importance to CFOs. But that demands critical thinking about the disparate philosophies, according to a new report, “Philosophy Eats AI” published in the MIT Sloan Management Review.
“While ethics and responsible AI currently dominate philosophy’s perceived role in developing and deploying AI solutions—those themes represent a small part of the philosophical perspectives informing and guiding AI’s production, utility, and use,” writes Michael Schrage, a research fellow with the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, and David Kiron is the editorial director of research at MIT Sloan Management Review.
So what helps shape value creation? Philosophical perspectives on what AI models should achieve (teleology), what counts as knowledge (epistemology), and how AI represents reality (ontology), according to the report.
An example? Combining enhanced quantitative capabilities with philosophically framed analyses about what customer loyalty can and should mean.
Starbucks and Amazon developed “novel philosophical perspectives on customer loyalty that guided their development and deployment of AI models,” the researchers write. The companies did not solely deploy AI to improve performance on a given set of metrics.
For example, the Amazon Prime team didn’t deploy AI just to seek greater loyalty from customers; they sought to demonstrate greater loyalty to customers. “Reciprocity was central to Prime’s philosophical stance,” the authors write. Amazon learned how to identify, create, and reward its best customers.
At Starbucks, in 2019, under then-CEO Kevin Johnson’s guidance, the senior team developed the Deep Brew AI platform to “promote what they considered to be the ontological essence of the Starbucks experience: fostering connection among customers and store employees, both in store and online,” according to the report.
The researchers argue that companies will fail to reap “superior returns and competitive advantage” from AI investments without rigorous cultivation of philosophical insight. That makes me think Zuckerberg would probably base Meta’s on Roman philosophy since he’s long been fascinated with Ancient Rome.
There are certainly a lot of variables to consider when creating a sustainable and profitable AI strategy.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
The following sections of CFO Daily were curated by Greg McKenna.
Leaderboard
Steven W. Morris will retire as CFO of Allete (NYSE: ALE), an energy company based in Minnesota that is set to be acquired by Global Infrastructure Partners and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Morris will remain with the company until July. He joined Allete nearly 25 years ago as the manager of financial reporting and budgeting at Minnesota Power, one of the company’s electric utilities. Morris was appointed SVP and CFO in 2021 after serving in several leadership roles. Allete has initiated steps to identify a new CFO and expects to do so later in the first quarter.
Big Deal
Boardrooms are in flux as executives contend with new complexities and increasing responsibilities. To obtain further insight into these changes, a new report from Deloitte examines the C-suite composition of Fortune 500 companies and analyzes 46,000 C-suite job postings between 2018 and 2023.
The results reveal organizations are adding more roles to the C-suite while expanding the mandate of established positions. The report identifies three drivers of this shift, which presents challenges like the need for more coherent collaboration and the prospect of talent shortages for more specialized roles. The report outlines three strategies to help executives successfully respond.
Going deeper
“Trump has promised to ‘knock out’ pharmacy benefit managers. How the drug middlemen became a $557 billion industry that its customers love to hate,” is a new Fortune report from Erika Fry. Condemning PBMs is a rare point where Trump can find common cause with progressive lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren. The firms say they’re saving Americans from spending billions more on prescription drugs, but the heft of the industry’s “Big Three” and a lack of transparency about their business practices has led to increasing blowback.
Overheard
“It’s a bit of a triple threat that we’ve never seen before.”
— Glenn Kelman, CEO of real estate company Redfin, said in an interview with Fortune about how California residents face the combined challenge of rising home prices, high interest rates, and skyrocketing insurance costs, particularly in the wake of the ongoing Los Angeles wildfires.