GenAI/AI News Jul 18, 25: OpenAI Goes Agentic, Big Banks Reinvent Their Cores with AI & Accenture Goes TikTok!
As we predicted in our HBR article from September 2023, those industries and tasks that are already digitized and have high WINS intensity are transforming...
Alright, I admit it. I love it when I’m right. Back in September of 2023, my colleagues and I wrote an HBR article, Where Should Your Company Start with Generative AI? in which we introduced the WINS framework — see below.
According to this framework, all banks are “in the crucible” — that is, they need to reinvent themselves in the next 3-5 years. We can see in the article about BoA, Wells Fargo, BNY Mellon that we were right. WINS intensive firms and tasks are completely changed as is evidenced by the strong adoption of GenAI in software development, marketing, customer service, etc. Accenture is reinventing short form video with AI making the editing choices best matched to each and every individual. And our last essential article concerns Stanford University’s Marin foundation which is doing great new work on making AI open for everyone.
If you want to hear more about how GenAI/AI is changing competition, plan to come to our GAI World event, in Boston September 29 & 30 at the Hynes Convention Center — on the top floor, which has amazing views of the city. Back to our regularly scheduled programming (is that an artifact of the past or what?).
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Today there were 3 Essential, 1 Important, and 2 Optional articles.
Bank of America touts AI gains amid industrywide adoption push
Rating: Essential
Rationale:
Bank of America reported reducing headcount from 300K to 212K while expanding deposits from $400B to $900B over 15 years, underscoring AI-driven productivity gains across major financial institutions. Our analysts noted that BofA dedicates ~25% of its $13B tech budget to AI and ML—sending a strong message to enterprise leaders to invest boldly in AI over the long term.
OpenAI launches a general purpose agent in ChatGPT
Rating: Essential
Rationale: OpenAI has introduced the new “ChatGPT Agent,” a model combining browsing, research, and code tools into a unified, autonomous assistant capable of handling complex tasks like booking plans and creating presentations on its own. Our analysts highlighted its significance as an incremental leap—scoring ~42% on Humanity’s Last Exam and demonstrating serious agent-level capability under the hood (PowerPoint editing, terminal use), making it essential for AI leaders to follow closely.
Accenture scales video analysis with Amazon Nova and Amazon Bedrock Agents
Rating: Essential
Rationale: Accenture’s AI system uses multiple agents to process and extract highlights from large video footage, reflecting a broader shift toward short‑form video as a "post‑text" language for knowledge workers. Our analysts emphasized its importance in democratizing video content creation, meeting professional demand for automated editing and curation—raising it from interesting demo to essential trend for enterprises.
Stanford’s Marin foundation model: The first fully open model developed using JAX
Rating: Important
Rationale: The Marin model is fully open—from code to weights to data—complemented by a clear taxonomy (open development, open weights, etc.), setting a new benchmark in open‑source AI. Our analysts described its transparency as a “Ben Franklin moment,” enabling AI leaders to differentiate true openness from marketing and encouraging scrutiny of vendor claims.
Agentic‑R1: Distilled Dual‑Strategy Reasoning
Rating: Optional
Rationale: CMU’s research introduces a dual‑teacher distilled model that dynamically chooses between tool‑use and reasoning—pushing frontier research on model “test‑time intelligence.” It’s fascinating from a technical standpoint, but our analysts agreed it’s more of academic interest and not yet directly actionable for enterprise deployment.
Claude Code revenue jumps 5.5x as Anthropic launches analytics dashboard
Rating: Optional
Rationale: Anthropic’s Claude Code now offers an analytics dashboard, enabling developers and managers to monitor code usage, costs, and ROI—a significant step in mainstreaming AI through measurable impact. Our analysts agreed that while 5× revenue growth isn’t surprising for code AI and embedding usage analytics is becoming a norm in enterprise accountability and investment justification.
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Enjoy, John Sviokla, Paul Baier and our analysts Adam Rappaport and our Guest Analyst today, Kevin Petrie. Thank you for joining, Kevin!