Good morning, CIOs. What advice does the CEO of one of the world’s most valuable companies have for chief information officers? The Wall Street Journal’s Belle Lin caught up with Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang fresh from his onstage appearance at Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo event in Orlando, Fla.

The most important takeaway for CIOs, Huang told the Journal, is to find something effective inside their companies, and ask how AI can transform that work. For Nvidia that means putting AI to work in areas such as designing chips, writing software and managing its supply chain.

These three areas “move the needle most profoundly,” he said. “When it’s our most impactful work, it’s easiest to get energy around it.”

In the long term, Nvidia is creating what Huang calls its own “AI brain.” That’s the idea that knowledge of how a company works, its business processes and customer interactions need to be collected and turned over to AI. The end goal is to turn that information into an AI that CIOs and CEOs “can just talk to,” Huang said.

And finally—does Huang wear his trademark black leather jacket in the swamp heat of central Florida? He sure does.

A visit from an AI rock star. Plus: Overheard at the after-hours party and more. Following Huang along a short walk to his waiting car, I saw IT leaders at the Gartner IT Symposium mob the Nvidia CEO to get selfies and handshakes before he was quickly escorted away.

It’s a sign of the times: Huang leads a company whose graphics processing units, or GPUs, power the AI revolution that brought many of the over 8,000 attendees to the Gartner event in Orlando this year.

At the conference’s after-hours party, held at Disney’s Epcot theme park on Tuesday evening, I overheard an attendee waiting in line crack a joke about turning a ride’s goal into getting a coveted GPU.

Speaking of GPUs, Nvidia rival AMD was one of the lone hardware vendors showcasing at the IT Expo this year, with staff at the booth taking time to tout the strengths of AMD’s own GPU.

Some IT leaders are still focused on Nvidia, though. Todd James, chief data and technology officer of Kroger data analytics subsidiary 84.51˚, said he could sense the urgency around AI and the rate of change in Huang’s keynote address.

Plus, the advice Huang gave to business technology leaders onstage was actually practical, James added. “There were elements of what he was talking about that were prescriptive for everyone to follow, as opposed to describing something that just he’s doing.”

Full article