Latest news with #AllenAndCompany
Wall Street Journal
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
The Fashion Must-Have at ‘Billionaire Summer Camp': A Humble Baseball Cap
How do you show your personality in a room full of billionaires, each of whom can afford as much designer fashion as they care to buy? Try a baseball cap. This week, members of the tech and media elite gathered in Sun Valley, Idaho, for the annual conference thrown by the investment bank Allen & Company, colloquially known as 'billionaire summer camp.' Most attendees dressed in the off-duty CEO uniform—lightweight down vests and quarter-zip sweaters, sometimes paired together.
Forbes
5 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
ServiceNow Stock Up 4% After Guidance Raise On Agentic AI Growth
Agentic AI drove up ServiceNow's guidance and the stock rose 4.8% in July 24 morning trade. SUN VALLEY, IDAHO - JULY 08: ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott arrives at the Sun Valley Lodge for the ... More Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2025 in Sun Valley, Idaho. Every year, some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful figures from the media, finance, technology, and political spheres converge at the Sun Valley Resort for the exclusive week-long conference hosted by boutique investment bank Allen & Co. (Photo by) Getty Images Key Facts ServiceNow's second quarter revenue: $3.22 billion — 23% more than last year and $100 million ahead of the London Stock Exchange Group consensus, noted CNBC . ServiceNow's Q2 adjusted earnings per share: $4.09 — 63 cents above LSEG view, CNBC reported. ServiceNow's Q2 continuing remaining performance obligations: $10.92 billion — up 25%, according to CNBC . 2025 subscription revenue guidance: $12.79 billion — $10 million more than analysts' estimate and $150 million more than ServiceNow's previous estimate, noted Yahoo! Finance . ServiceNow — whose shares are down 5% in 2025 — beat second quarter growth expectations and raised guidance due to 'artificial intelligence adoption,' reported CNBC. Should you buy the stock? The answer is yes — only if this pattern of beating and raising continues. Despite a potential 2% hit due to tariffs and government budget cuts, according to CNBC , here's why ServiceNow stock could rise: Companies are adopting agentic AI which contributed to ServiceNow's boost to guidance, about which I wrote in my book, Brain Rush . . ServiceNow is embedding agentic AI into new business processed — notably customer service, field service and supply chain management — which provides new growth opportunities, noted Investor's Business Daily . My July 24 interviews with ServiceNow President of Global Customer Operations, Paul Fipps, and President and Chief Financial Officer, Gina Mastantuono reveal the company could achieve expectations-beating growth as the company's agentic AI enables customers to boost productivity in employeee and customer service and demand soars in India and the Middle East. ServiceNow exceeded investor expectations for growth and profitability and raised its guidance for 2025. 'Every business process in every industry is being refactored for agentic AI,' ServiceNow chair and CEO Bill McDermott in a release. The company also disclosed growth glitches. Seasonality and more customers renewing contracts in the final quarter will reduce third quarter CRPO by 2 percentage points, the company said. Moreover, U.S. government agency budget changes could affect results 'While federal business is a bit uncertain today versus a year ago, we're navigating it well, and we feel confident that our guidance reflects any potential changes that we're seeing,' Mastantuono told CNBC . This is a change from ServiceNow's view of the future in April. A few weeks after President Donald Trump launched government job cuts and promulgated tariff confusion, ServiceNow saw opportunity. As companies aim to "optimize their supply chains amid recent tariff announcements and federal clients aim to boost efficiency amid government spending cuts, the platform is operating in a best-case-scenario environment,' McDermott said according to my April Forbes post. How Agentic Ai Demand Is Boosting Servicenow's Growth ServiceNow was enjoying growth from AI last April and sees that growth is continuing. "Our AI business quadrupled year over year and our average deal size increased by a third.' Mastantuono told me in April. ServiceNow remains optimistic about growth due to enterprise AI spending. "We are rocking,' ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott told Yahoo! Finance. In pursuit of margin-boosting cost savings, ' AI spending will be up significantly into year-end," he added. ServiceNow says it does a better job of making agentic AI — prompting an AI chatbot to, say, plan, book and pay for a vacation to Paris and letting the AI agent pick the best hotels, restaurants, and visits — payoff. 'We improve productivity in a range of 50% to 85%,' Fipps told me. 'Our AI platform for business transformation completes work in the workflow. We manage the complexity of enterprise architecture — bringing data from enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and other systems into the cloud and using NowAssist to deliver intelligent workflow.' For instance, ServiceNow saves time and reduces the cost of fulfilling employee software purchase requests. One of ServiceNow's largest brand customers receives between 2,000 and 4,000 employee requests for software each month. 'Using our AI agents, the customer matches the software purchase to the individual employee's needs and fulfills the order within two to four hours,' Fipps explained. 'This is a big improvement from a process that formerly took two to four days to complete and over provisioned because it did not know each employee's needs,' he added. ServiceNow sees big growth opportunities in CRM and in the Indian market. 'Sales order management — front to back end — is a fast growing business,' Fipps said. 'We already get $1.4 billion from our CRM business and after acquiring for configuring, pricing, and quoting we got nine deals in June. It is a huge growth factor,' he concluded. ServiceNow expects explosive growth over the next three years from India. Between 2024 and 2027, ServiceNow forecasts 115% growth from $130 million in 2024 annual contract value to about $280 million in 2027 ACV, according to a July 24 email from a company spokesperson. Customers in the Indian banking, manufacturing, and telecommunications industries are 'pulling us in,' said Fipps. 'Our brand is becoming much more relevant across the globe. Customers are realizing the ServiceNow platform can revamp the employee experience and CRM,' he concluded. What Cfo And Analysts Are Saying About Servicenow's Growth ServiceNow's CFO expressed optimism for the company's performance and prospects. 'Q2 was a spectacular quarter across the board, as we significantly beat the high end of our guidance across all topline and profitability metrics,' Mastantuono said according to a company statement. 'Now Assist continued to surpass net new ACV expectations, fueled by an increase in both deal volume and size quarter‑over‑quarter, putting us firmly on track to hit our $1 billion ACV target by 2026. With a robust pipeline and expanding market opportunities, including strong momentum in CRM, we are well‑positioned for the second half of the year,' she added. Analysts — with an average price target of $1,096 — see 10% upside in the stock, noted TipRanks . Here are two analysts who share her optimism: "We expect NOW to trade up given the solid Q2 beat against a pretty low bar with investor sentiment extremely cautious on application software and NOW's high Federal exposure," Citi analyst Tyler Radke told Yahoo! Finance . . "ServiceNow delivered a solid quarter and outlook, surpassing what was a high bar of investor expectations in our view for Q2," said RBC Capital analyst Matthew Hedberg in a report feature by IBD . ServiceNow's CFO highlighted three significant growth opportunities. 'AI plus data plus workflows is a game changer for the enterprise because it produces real business outcomes at scale,' she told me. '18 of our top 20 deals came from NowAssist — which includes all our AI stock keeping units. We had 50% growth in deal volume and we won our biggest NowAssist deal — of more than $20 million,' added Mastantuono. 'We had remarkable customer transformations with Starbucks, ExxonMobil, Intuit, and Nvidia — which is using our product to personalize employee support with voice response in seconds. Front office transformation — fully integrated selling, fulfillment and service is a huge total addressable market. So is governance, security and risk management,' she concluded.
New York Times
11-07-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Skydance Is in Early Talks to Acquire The Free Press
David Ellison, the chief executive of the media company Skydance, has recently held early discussions about acquiring The Free Press, the online publication co-founded by Bari Weiss, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. Ms. Weiss, who started The Free Press in 2021 with her wife, Nellie Bowles, and her sister, Suzy Weiss, has positioned the company as a brash alternative to traditional media organizations. Mr. Ellison is trying to close Skydance's merger with Paramount, the parent company of CBS News. A deal between Skydance and The Free Press is far from certain. Ms. Weiss, a former opinion writer for The New York Times, has expressed a desire to run the site as a stand-alone company for the foreseeable future. Mr. Ellison's attention has been focused on closing the deal with Paramount. This week, the two are attending the annual Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, which has historically been a deal-making hotbed. Allen & Company an investment firm, is a shareholder in The Free Press, alongside the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, and the former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz. The company has more than 30 investors, who own relatively small stakes in the company. Other investors include Yael Aflalo, the founder of Reformation, and Bobby Kotick, the former chief executive of Activision Blizzard. Terms of any potential deal under discussion could not be learned. In recent months, a handful of media owners have reached out to Ms. Weiss for advice on ways to improve their media properties, and some of that outreach has led to discussions about acquiring The Free Press, one of the people said. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
WIRED
11-07-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Microsoft and OpenAI's AGI Fight Is Bigger Than a Contract
Jul 11, 2025 8:11 AM A key clause in Microsoft and OpenAI's deal embodies the raging divide between AGI true believers and those who think it's still a long ways off. CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman speaks to members of the media as he arrives at the Sun Valley lodge for the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2025, in Sun Valley, Idaho. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph:I first learned about The Clause from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. During an interview with him in May 2023, I asked about the deal between Microsoft and OpenAI that granted his company exclusive access to the startup's groundbreaking AI technology. I knew the contract had set a cap on how much profit Microsoft could make from the arrangement, and I asked him what would happen if and when that point was reached. The answer was a bit puzzling. 'Fundamentally, their long-term idea is we get to superintelligence,' he told me. 'If that happens, I think all bets are off, right?' He seemed almost jaunty about the possibility, leading me to wonder how seriously he took it. 'If this is the last invention of humankind, then all bets are off,' he continued. 'Different people will have different judgments on what that is, and when that is.' I didn't realize how important that determination would be until a few weeks later. Working on a feature about OpenAI, I learned that the contract basically declared that if OpenAI's models achieved artificial general intelligence, Microsoft would no longer have access to its new models. The terms of the contract, which otherwise would have extended until 2030, would be void. Though I wrote about it in my story, and The Clause has never really been a state secret, it didn't generate much discussion. This is an essay from the latest edition of Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter. SIGN UP for Plaintext to read the whole thing, and tap Steven's unique insights and unmatched contacts for the long view on tech. That's no longer the case. The Clause has been at the center of the increasingly frayed relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI and is under renegotiation. It has been the subject of investigative stores by The Information, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and, yes, WIRED. But the significance of The Clause goes beyond the fates of the two companies that agreed to it. The tenuous conditions of that contract go to the heart of a raging debate about just how world-changing—and lucrative—AGI might be if realized, and what it would mean for a profit-driven company to control a technology that makes Sauron's Ring of Power look like a dime-store plastic doodad. If you want to understand what's happening in AI, pretty much everything can be explained by The Clause. Let's dig into the details. Though the precise language hasn't been made public, sources with knowledge of the contract confirm that The Clause has three parts, each with its own implications. There are two conditions that must be satisfied for OpenAI to deny its technology to Microsoft. First, the OpenAI board would determine that its new models have achieved AGI, which is defined in OpenAI's charter as 'a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.' Fuzzy enough for you? No wonder Microsoft is worried that OpenAI will make that determination prematurely. Its only way to object to the OpenAI board's declaration would be to sue. But that's not all. The OpenAI board would also be required to determine whether the new models have achieved 'sufficient AGI.' This is defined as a model capable of generating profits sufficient to reward Microsoft and OpenAI's other investors, a figure upwards of $100 billion. OpenAI doesn't have to actually make those profits, just provide evidence that its new models will generate that bounty. Unlike the first determination, Microsoft has to agree that OpenAI meets that standard, but can't unreasonably dispute it. (Again, in case of a dispute a court may ultimately decide.) Altman himself admitted to me in 2023 that the standards are vague. 'It gives our board a lot of control to decide what happens when we get there,' he said. In any case, if OpenAI decides it has reached sufficient AGI, it doesn't have to share those models with Microsoft, which will be stuck with the now outdated earlier versions. It won't even have to use Microsoft's cloud servers; currently Microsoft has the right of first refusal for the work. The third part of The Clause is that for the length of the contract, Microsoft can't develop AGI on its own. That might explain why, despite the original lovefest between the companies edging toward Hatfield and McCoy territory, Microsoft insists it is not developing its own frontier AI models, which presumably would strive for AGI-itude. Why did Microsoft agree to this? It turns out that The Clause embodies the raging divide between those who think that AGI is just a kiss away and those who think it's a pipe dream in the near- and even mid-term. As best I can tell, OpenAI insisted on The Clause when the partnership was formalized because Altman and company are true believers. Microsoft went along with the concept with a massive eyeroll because Nadella and his team didn't believe that AGI was anywhere close to being realized—certainly not before 2030, when the contract expires. They still don't! So Microsoft felt that its lawyers sufficiently protected it in the contract language. That was then. But in 2025, you have Sam Altman saying that we could be getting to AGI this year . Meanwhile you've got an insane arms race where companies, notably Meta, are offering AI researchers Ohtani-esque compensation to chase superintelligence, which is basically AGI when the training wheels go off. What a disaster it would be for Microsoft if OpenAI withheld its wondrous new models. Microsoft would have to start from scratch because it has not been free to work on AGI and has instead just focused on commercial products. But Microsoft now has a way to escape the headache from The Clause. OpenAI, for reasons harkening back to its board's temporary dismissal of Altman in November 2023, is now attempting to alter its current structure (a nonprofit overseeing a for-profit company) into a somewhat different form of governance which involves the for-profit wing becoming a 'public benefit corporation.' The process is geared to help OpenAI grow by removing current caps on profit and allowing investors and employees to hold equity directly. This requires a Microsoft sign-off, thus giving it leverage to renegotiate The Clause, among other concessions. Neither party is sharing the terms of negotiation, but at least one report says that Microsoft might be asking for the total elimination of The Clause. There's also some speculation that OpenAI might no longer care so much. After all, its original impulse was that AGI shouldn't be dominated by for-profit tech giants. OpenAI, valued at $300 billion, is now reorganizing as a commercial profit-maker, albeit for 'public benefit.' It would be a shame, though, to bid goodbye to The Clause. Even though it is just a bunch of sentences couched in legalese, The Clause demands a useful definition of a benchmark to determine whether AI has reached the point where it truly shakes our world. Its deletion would be a premature death of at least one canary in the AI coal mine. Don't miss future subscriber-only editions of this column. Subscribe to WIRED (50% off for Plaintext readers) today.
Daily Mail
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Sex And The City star looks UNRECOGNIZABLE as she attends Sun Valley 'billionaires' summer camp'
A beloved star of Sex And The City looked unrecognizable as she attended the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference - which has been dubbed as the 'summer camp for billionaires - this week. The actress joined other celebrities at the exclusive event as well as those involved in the media and business sector, such as Disney CEO Bob Iger and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. The 79-yearold was seen arriving to the venue on Wednesday while being escorted on a golf cart. The Hollywood icon - who is also known for her leading role in the series Murphy Brown - kept it casual in a pair of denim jeans as well as a black jacket. Can you guess who she is? She is Candice Bergen. The Hollywood veteran completed the look for the day by slipping into a pair of comfy sneakers and sported fashionable shades. Bergen's blonde locks were parted to the side and flowed down past her shoulders in light waves. Candice is no stranger to the annual media finance conference which takes place in the resort city of Sun Valley in Idaho. The conference is held each year during the month of July - and was first launched back in 1983. The actress has previously made appearances at the star-studded event, such as last year in 2024. Others that were seen on Wednesday included Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Bergen was born to parents who were also heavily involved in the media industry - with her late father Edgar a comedian and ventriloquist and mother Frances an actress. While talking to Interview Magazine back in 2015, the star reflected on her childhood and recalled celebrities often visiting her parents at home while growing up. 'It was completely normal,' she said at the time. 'Walt Disney was a friend of the family, and he had, I remember, a miniature train set built in his garden...' Bergen later added, 'My parents would have a party...I remember Rex Harrison singing at the piano, Fred Astaire dancing with all the ladies. 'The Reagans were very old and close friends. It was a great community then because it was very relaxed, and people really had fun. Nobody took it seriously the way they take it now.' Candice followed in her parents' footsteps and kicked off her own acting career in the late 60s, such as starring in the epic war film The Sand Pebbles (1966). She continued to make a number of appearance in projects throughout the 70s, and took on a role in the movie Starting Over (1979) - which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Beginning in 1988, Bergen portrayed the titular character in the series Murphy Brown which also earned the actress five Emmys and two Golden Globe Awards. During an interview with Glamour, she talked about how she had declined to be nominated for another Emmy after her fifth win for her role on the show. 'Yeah. I could feel it in the house when I won for the fifth time. I could feel the audience going...I sort of felt them pulling back and I thought, "This is enough."' Candice returned to the television screen with a guest role in the hit series Sex And The City where she played Vogue editor Enid Frick. While also talking to the outlet, the star admitted that she never watched an episode of the HBO show - even the episodes that she appeared in. Candice returned to the television screen with a guest role in the hit series Sex And The City where she played Vogue editor Enid Frick 'I've never watched one,' Candice revealed, and when asked to confirm if that was true, she simply added, 'Yeah.' She also starred in another show called Boston Legal while taking on roles in films including Miss Congeniality, Sweet Home Alabama, Bride Wars and Book Club. Earlier this year in February, Candice's husband Marshall Rose passed away at the age of 88 due to complications from Parkinson's disease. She tied the knot with the real estate magnate in 2000 during a ceremony in the state of New York. He 'died peacefully at home in the early hours of February 15, surrounded by loved ones,' according to a New York Times obituary. The obit also read, 'His family carries on his legacy of fierce compassion, stubborn persistence, and commitment to cheering on the Knicks. 'His wisdom, strength and generosity of spirit will be remembered by the countless people whose lives he touched.' During her past conversation with Interview Magazine, she offered insight into her marriage with Rose. 'I'm not that ambitious. I'm always grateful when I get offered something that engages me, it's for the right amount of time, and I don't have to leave my husband for more than a week or two. That's really all I ask.' Bergen was also married to French film director Louis Malle from 1980 until his death at age 63 in 1995 following a battle with cancer. The pair welcomed a daughter named Chloe in 1985.
