TNB Tech Minute: OpenAI’s Second-Quarter Revenue Disappoints Some Investors

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This podcast is sponsored by Comcast Business.

**Amit Verma** (0:03)
So CIO's role has evolved, and they're moving from being a technologist to being the bridge between AI capabilities and human adoption.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
That's Amit Verma, CTO at Comcast Business. He believes that continuous intelligence and operating posture linking people, applications, data and machines is essential for AI at scale. Later, learn why it requires strong executive leadership.

**Julie Chang** (0:31)
Here's your morning TNB Tech Minute for Wednesday, August 19th. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal. We exclusively report that OpenAI told investors its revenue grew by 18% to $6.7 billion in the second quarter. That's up from $5.7 billion in the first quarter. But its operating margin sank further into the red, disappointing some shareholders as it pushed the company farther away from profitability ahead of a much anticipated initial public offering. That's according to people familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, Rival Anthropic more than doubled its revenue to $11.6 billion in the same period, surpassing OpenAI sales for the first time and swinging to a small operating profit. The AI race has shifted drastically this year as OpenAI faces a slowdown in Chachipiti growth combined with the success of Anthropics coding tool, Claude Code. News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI.
Amazon plans to expand its Prime Air drone delivery service to nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of the year. The service, which offers delivery in as little as 30 minutes, will launch in metro areas, including Chicago, Atlanta and Cleveland. The e-commerce giant currently operates in 11 metro areas. Companies from Amazon and Walmart to DoorDash have started aerial deliveries over the past several years, but the rollout has been mostly sporadic and limited regionally due to regulatory hurdles, safety and privacy concerns, and bad weather. On top of that, delivery drones haven't been well received in some places, with noise being a main complaint by residents.
And SK Hynix plans to buy back and cancel more than $28 billion of its shares starting tomorrow through November 19th. The planned repurchase of roughly 24 million shares represents about 3.3 percent of the company's total shares outstanding. The announcement comes after SK Hynix's shares fell over 9.5 percent on Wednesday, tracking an overnight retreat in US chip stocks. The world's second largest memory chip maker also said it plans to increase shareholder returns, including cash dividends, to more than 50 percent of cumulative free cash flow for 2025 through 2027
That's your TNB Tech Minute. Join us again this afternoon for more.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:04)
Amit Verma from Comcast Business explained the key role of CIOs in building systems of continuous intelligence across the organization, which is essential for AI at scale. But responsibility is shared across the C-suite.

**Amit Verma** (3:17)
The CEO and the board owns the business risk and the resilience. It involves your CFO organization for support on the investment.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:27)
The Chief Human Resources Officer steers and shapes AI-driven workforce transformation. The Chief Information Security Officer ensures data safety and compliance. And it goes on. Cross-functional teamwork helps make way for real transformation.

**Amit Verma** (3:40)
Without that partnership and collaboration, Verma says, You are going to develop point solutions that just automate a part of the process and not the end-to-end process. So it limits or reduces the impact of the automation.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:55)
Visit comcastbusiness.com/enterprise to learn how Comcast Business helps enterprises navigate an ever-changing technology landscape.