Good morning. The pace of innovation or investor appetite for AI companies certainly didn’t cool off this year.
Fortune released its second annual Fortune 50 AI Innovators list on Wednesday. It highlights the AI companies that are leading in this new phase of the technology’s adoption. Fortune cast a wide net, looking at companies of all sizes, from all over the world.
Leading AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, which saw their valuations surge this year, earned a spot on the list. Some of the Big Tech companies on the list include Microsoft, Salesforce, Google Deep Mind, Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba, as well as Adobe. And Nvidia—whose chips provide the AI horsepower for many of these giant projects—likewise earned a spot.
Speaking of the chipmaker, it reported on Wednesday that for the third quarter ending Oct. 27, its revenue was $35.1 billion, up 17% from the previous quarter—and up 94% from a year ago. “AI is transforming every industry, company and country; enterprises are adopting agentic AI to revolutionize workflows,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia said in the earnings statement.
This past quarter, Nvidia celebrated the 25th anniversary of its GeForce 256, the world’s first graphics processing unit (GPU), Nvidia CFO Colette M. Kress said on the earnings call. “Nvidia’s GPUs have been the driving force behind some of the most consequential technologies of our time,” Kress said.
On the Fortune 50 AI Innovators list, there’s also representation from startups such as voice cloning tech company ElevenLabs, French AI chatbot upstart Mistral, China-based AI company ModelBest, and biotechnology company Xaira Therapeutics—all of which are less than three years old.
“2023 was really a year of industry and businesses wrapping their heads around AI,” James Dyett, head of platform sales of OpenAI, told Fortune’s John Kell in an interview. “2024 is the year we’re starting to see real-scale deployments of our technology,” Dyett said.
In his latest piece, Kell notes that corporate partnerships between AI vendors and corporate customers have exploded this year, such as OpenAI’s pacts with biotechnology company Moderna and financial giant Morgan Stanley. “Similar deals have helped to lift OpenAI’s valuation to $157 billion, most recently raising $6.6 billion in a huge funding round in October, nearly doubling the company’s valuation from nine months earlier,” he writes.
One of the health care companies on the list is Insilico Medicine. This comes as the health care sector is positioned to benefit from AI in areas such as tackling high costs, administrative complexity, staffing shortages and ultimately clinician burnout. As Kell notes, research shows that “AI could create $370 billion in value for health care by accelerating drug discovery and development and more accurately matching patients with potential treatments.”
You can read more about the new phase of AI here. View the complete Fortune 50 AI Innovators list here.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
The following sections of CFO Daily were curated by Greg McKenna.
Leaderboard
Glenn Eisenberg will retire as CFO of the Labcorp (NYSE: LH), a laboratory services company, effective Dec. 2. After spending 10 years in the role, he remain at the company as a special advisor to the CEO through April 2025 to assist with the transition. He will be succeeded by Julia Wang, who will also serve as an executive vice president. She most recently served as CFO of global oncology company BeiGene, now known as BeOne Mediciones.
Steve Rasche will step down as EVP and CFO of natural gas company Spire (NYSE: SR), effective Jan. 1. Rasche, who joined the company in 2009 and became CFO in 2013, will continue to serve as a senior advisor until his retirement on April 1. He will be succeeded by Adam Woodard, who has held the roles of VP and treasurer at the company since 2018 and also became CFO of Spire’s utility business a year later.
Big Deal
CFOs consider AI adoption to be a much higher priority next year than finance transformation, according to a new survey of 251 finance chiefs conducted by research and consulting firm Gartner. Those polled identified metrics, analytics, and reporting as their top focus area for 2025, while other pressing matters included managing talent and expanding the leadership profile of the CFO role.
The survey showed the most CFOs since 2014 prioritizing enterprise growth,” said Dennis Gannon, vice president of research in the Gartner finance practice. “The marked return of growth and cost pressures mean that many CFOs are planning to be ruthless in delegating finance transformation.”
Going deeper
“Arnold Schwarzenegger is joining a Fortune 500 company to solve a great problem of his generation,” a new Fortune article by Lindsey Leake. It discusses how the actor and former governor of California is back with a new directive—joining the C-suite of a medtech firm that uses AI and robotics and has completed the world’s first robotic-assisted shoulder replacement surgery.
Overheard
“[It] shows just how much momentum and appreciation folks have for the brand, and how well our cuisine and our value proposition is resonating and meeting the moment for the modern consumer.”
— Brett Schulman, CEO of Cava, told Fortune in an interview about why the “Mediterrean Chipotle” and other fast-casual chains have been among Wall Street’s hottest stocks this year.
