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How AI-Era Pricing Is Reshaping Finance Operations
Usage-based and hybrid pricing models are changing how B2B companies generate revenue — and creating new headaches for the finance teams behind them.
Tabs co-founder Rebecca Schwartz and PwC Partner Amit Dhir sat down to unpack exactly what that means in practice: how pricing model decisions ripple into revenue recognition, forecasting, and financial ops — and what it takes to scale without piling on manual work.
Watch the on-demand recording to get practical frameworks, real-world examples, and a clear path to operationalizing usage-based revenue — including a forward-looking take on how AI will reshape financial workflows. If your team is navigating pricing complexity heading into the back half of the year, this is worth an hour.
Beginners in AI
Good morning and thank you for joining us again!
Nvidia's chips run most of the AI you use, and the man who led the company for 33 years walked out on Thursday. Today's lead covers what happened, who's in charge now, and why it can touch your retirement account even if you've never bought a share. As always, every story here is human picked and edited.
THE FRONT PAGE
Nvidia's CEO Quit After a $430 Billion Slide, and Your Index Fund Felt It
TLDR: Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and ran it for 33 years, resigned as CEO effective immediately, and CFO Colette Kress is running the AI chip giant for now.
The Story:
Nvidia announced Thursday that Huang stepped down as president, CEO and board member. It gave no reason and thanked him for his "immeasurable contributions." Kress, CFO since 2013, takes over as interim CEO while keeping her old job, and former Synopsys CEO Harvey Jones becomes the board's first-ever chair. The board says it will look inside and outside the company for a permanent pick.
The exit capped a brutal week. Four days earlier, Huang told staff he'd been unfaithful to his wife, after The New York Times reported a relationship with an executive U.S. officials reportedly believe is a Chinese intelligence asset (China denies it). A second reported relationship, with an Nvidia vice president who reports to him, followed on Wednesday. Nvidia lost about $430 billion in market value in two days, and shares fell another 7.7% Thursday morning, per Decrypt.
Its Significance:
Most of today's big AI models are trained and run on Nvidia chips, so a sudden hole at the top matters to the whole industry. Huang had about 60 people reporting straight to him and has said he didn't believe in succession planning, which is why investors are jumpy. It also reaches people who never bought a share: Nvidia is one of the biggest holdings in most S&P 500 index funds, and plenty of 401(k)s hold those. Watch Tuesday's earnings report, the first with Kress in charge. If you've wondered why AI needs so many of these chips, our plain-English guide to machine learning vs deep learning explains the math that keeps them busy.
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Learn AI With Us
Most people try AI once, get a so-so answer, and quit. Our 14-day challenge gets you past that point, one short lesson a day.
Week one, AI starts working for you. It drafts a real email for you, flags which messages in your inbox need a reply, and turns messy notes into next steps. You also learn to catch its mistakes. By day 7 you have a weekly AI routine you'll want to keep.
Week two, you build something of your own. You find a skill people will pay for and turn it into an offer, with a one-page pitch, a short video and your first client emails, all drafted with AI and ready to test. Day 14 hands you a 30-day plan.
10 to 15 minutes a day. No tech background needed. We just released one for older adults, with a gentler progression in the lessons.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Google says its glasses with Warby Parker (from $395) and Gentle Monster (from $449) hit stores Dec. 10 in the U.S. and South Korea. Say "Hey Gemini" and they explain what you're looking at, translate conversations in over 70 languages and read out Maps directions, with up to 9 hours of battery.
Your takeaway: Google describes a camera and open-ear speakers, not a screen, and they pair with a Pixel 7 or newer, recent Galaxy phones, or an iPhone 13 Pro or newer. Google says bystanders' faces are blurred before Gemini sees them and a light shows when you record, but try a pair in a store before you spend $400.
The story: Google says Hydrogen finishes tasks about 2.5 times faster than Gemini 3.8 Flash and scored 51 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, one point above its bigger Argon model. It's rolling out in Google Search for everyone and sits in the Gemini app's model menu.
Your takeaway: Free users get it whenever Gemini's auto-select picks it, so you may already be using it. Try a messy, typo-filled, multi-part question in Search, which is where Google says it does better, and keep in mind every score here is Google's own.
The story: United said Wednesday it's restricting "unauthorized third-party AI agents" from its own site and from reaching it through travel sites, citing exposed logins, purchases you didn't mean to make and miles spent by accident. CEO Scott Kirby told The Wall Street Journal, "I don't want to create another middleman."
Your takeaway: If you ask a chatbot to plan a trip, expect to finish the United booking yourself. It's part of a bigger fight over who sits between you and the store, after Amazon blocked Meta's Muse agent from shopping its site.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🌍 Microsoft Translator Free: Translates text, speech and live conversations in 130+ languages, a free way to try what today's Gemini glasses promise.
💰 Actual Budget Free and Open Source: A private envelope budgeting app, a free swap for YNAB that can import your YNAB history.
♟️ Lichess Free and Open Source: Play, learn and solve chess puzzles with no ads or paywalls, a free swap for Chess.com's paid tiers.
🧘 Medito Free and Open Source: Guided meditations from a nonprofit with no ads, sign-up or fees, a free swap for Headspace or Calm.
📊 Datawrapper Freemium: Turns spreadsheet data into charts, maps and tables you can embed, free with a small Datawrapper credit line.
☁️ Proton Drive Freemium: Encrypted cloud storage for files and photos, a private Google Drive swap with 5 GB free.
🤝 Attio Freemium: A flexible CRM for tracking clients and deals, a Salesforce swap that's free for up to three people.
TRENDING
Sen. Josh Hawley Wants a Nationwide Pause on New AI Data Centers. The Missouri Republican says the freeze should last until Congress guarantees households no electricity rate hikes, though he hasn't released a bill. Pew found 60% of Americans don't want a data center nearby, while a bipartisan bill that advanced 73-25 on Monday would make operators pay the extra grid costs instead.
Anthropic Launches Claude for Manufacturing, With 17 Ready-Made Skills. The plugin for Claude enterprise plans helps factory teams quote jobs, dig into failed inspections and find backup suppliers, and connects to Autodesk Fusion, Infor, Microsoft 365 and Oracle NetSuite. Anthropic says a person signs off on every draft it produces.
CoreWeave Now Asks AI Customers to Pay Up Front. The company that rents out AI chips grew revenue 168% to $3.66 billion last quarter but lost $709 million, and it expects about $9 billion in prepayments over the next three months. Short-term chip capacity now sells for over $40 million per megawatt a year, a sign of how tight AI computing still is.
Britain's Fractile Raises $720 Million to Build Chips That Run AI. Thrive Capital and Founders Fund are among the backers, and the FT and Reuters put the valuation at about $7 billion. Fractile stacks common DRAM memory right on top of its chips and plans to ship its first systems in 2027, one more challenger circling Nvidia this week.
Runway Gives Away an AI Model That Drives Robots. Praxis-1, free to download under the Apache 2.0 license, predicts both video and robot movements and was tested on a humanoid, a factory arm and a warehouse robot. Runway says it scored 46.2% on Nvidia's RoboLab-120 test, the top result on that leaderboard.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🔎 Fund Peek: See how much of your index fund rides on one company
Build a single-file HTML app called Fund Peek in vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No API key needed. I type a fund I own (like VOO or a 401(k) target-date fund), a company to check (Nvidia by default), and, if I want, how much I have in it.
The app calls the Anthropic Messages API with the web_search tool to find the fund's latest top 10 holdings, their percent weights, and how much of the fund that one company makes up. It must never invent numbers. If it can't find a figure, it says unknown. It gives no advice or predictions.
Show a big card with the company's percent, what that means for every $100 I put in, and my own dollar amount in that company. Add a bar chart of the top 10 holdings with my company in a second color, the top 10's share of the whole fund, the data date, and source links.
Style: near-black background, lime and rose accents, Space Grotesk and Newsreader fonts.What this does: Nvidia lost about $430 billion in value in two days, and plenty of people who never bought Nvidia stock still own some through an index fund or a 401(k). Fund Peek looks up your fund's latest holdings and shows how big a piece of your money sits in one company, with sources and a date on every number.
The holiday streaming season is almost here
Are you ready? As revealed in our holiday playbook, Roku Ads Manager lets you easily set up, measure and optimize your self-serve holiday ad campaign. You can even create a shoppable ad unit that lets streamers buy directly from their remote.
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Describe what you're looking at and translate a conversation in over 70 languages through a pair of 41-gram glasses.
❌ Still Can't: Stand in for a guide. Google says its Guided Vision feature for blind and low-vision users isn't a medical device or mobility aid, and it only works with Android phones at launch.
✅ AI Can Now: Run a fast model that Google says finishes coding and research tasks about 2.5 times faster than its last quick one.
❌ Still Can't: Do it all in one model. Google still sends long, deep problems to its bigger Carbon and Argon models, and switches between them mid-task in its coding tool.
FROM THE WEB
Just because you can make a video doesn't mean you should make a video 🙄
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal's 2023 episode explains how ChatGPT's arrival turned Nvidia from a gaming-chip company into the company the whole AI boom runs on. It's long, but it's the clearest walk-through I know of why Nvidia's chips are so hard to replace. Listen to it after today's lead and the stakes of Huang's exit will make a lot more sense.
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-James
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