The latest must-have tech isn’t just AI. It’s AI agents. And while it sounds great in principle to have AI automate routine tasks, many companies are stuck on what that actually looks like. It’s far too powerful a technology to be used for sending personalized emails on your day off, but it’s probably not going to replace swaths of your employees on its own.

Agentic AI as a technology is becoming more formalized—the National Institute of Standards and Technology has even started drafting standards to govern its use—and it’s time for companies to formalize how they use it. I spoke with David Brudenell, co-CEO and executive director of global agentic AI firm Decidr, about how a CIO can move AI agents from the testing stage to driving efficiency at scale. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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The announcement that the tech world has been buzzing about for some time officially came this week: Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO and will become its executive chairman on September 1. Apple’s next CEO will be John Ternus, who has been the company’s senior vice president of hardware engineering since 2013. Ternus joined Apple in 2001, and the company said he was instrumental in several of Apple’s signature products, including the iPad, AirPods, several iPhone models and the company’s new MacBook Neo.

Cook, who was personally recruited by Steve Jobs, has led Apple for 15 years and is best known for turning the company into a global business juggernaut. Under Cook, Apple’s market cap skyrocketed above $4 trillion—a 1,932% stock value increase, notes Forbes senior contributor Peter Cohan—and it’s currently the world’s third-largest company. Cook oversaw releases of new devices that people were excited about, as well as the move to make Apple a successful media company through streaming and news services, writes Forbes senior contributor Andy Meek.

But Ternus has a big challenge in front of him as he takes the helm of Apple: AI. Forbes senior contributor Rachel Wells writes that the company’s more measured approach to consumer AI puts it at risk of losing relevance in tomorrow’s tech sphere. And Ternus is a hardware-and-product leader, which gives him grounding in some areas Apple could focus on to outpace competitors. But the big question is how well Ternus can drive the kind of groundbreaking innovation for which Apple has been known.

However, Forbes contributor Sandy Carter writes that Apple is far ahead in one area of AI development: it builds its own chips and owns its compute space, unlike every other frontier AI company. So while it doesn’t have the applications just yet, Apple controls its own silicon—and is not competing with other companies for bandwidth or chips. That capability, Carter writes, was largely built by Johny........

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