Businesses are facing an influx of new artificial-intelligence tools, many of which overlap and cause confusion for employees, as corporate-technology sellers race to capitalise on the generative AI trend.

“Since the ChatGPT excitement, I must have had at least 20 to 25 vendors in my portfolio reach out to me saying, ‘Hey, let us tell you about our generative AI co-pilot strategy,’” said Milind Wagle, chief information officer at Equinix, one of the world’s biggest data-centre landlords.

Generative AI features, which can respond to user prompts by generating images or text, often come in the forms of co-pilots, or virtual assistants that work in tandem with an IT seller’s offerings, sometimes automating certain tasks within that platform. Wagle said Equinix is drowning in a flood of co-pilots—and he is trying to figure out how, if at all, they should coexist.

“I feel like there’s a co-pilot war that needs to sort of happen,” he said, adding that to humanize AI in a meaningful way, there needs to be more coherence in how these tools are deployed.

The co-pilot proliferation is leading to confusion for employees who are looking for a single common interface to accomplish certain tasks, Wagle said. It can also create potential governance risks if there is a possibility that private data from a company that interacts with the co-pilots could make its way into public training models for generative AI tools.

Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran said IT sellers are feeling pressure to move into the generative AI space or risk falling behind, meaning some half-baked features will be rushed out without the proper privacy and security guardrails in place. Established IT sellers also need to consider security concerns, including whether a customer’s data can be fed back to train the model, because this is uncharted territory, he added.

Chandrasekaran estimates that a fifth of independent software vendors have stepped into the generative AI space since ChatGPT was launched about seven months ago—a huge amount of growth in a short time, he said.

“I don’t think I’ve had a partner or vendor meeting this year where I wasn’t pitched a generative AI play,” said Brian Woodring, CIO of Rocket Mortgage, a nonbank mortgage provider.

Sometimes the co-pilots appear in system updates as a freebie, and sometimes they cost extra, Woodring said. He added that in some cases, the generative AI features are tacked on, despite not being compelling additions or the best tool for the job.

“Everyone’s trying to fit it in everywhere,” he said, adding, “It’s not something you can just spread around like peanut butter. It’s not a coat of paint you put on your product afterwards and say, now it’s AI.”

In other instances, the features are things that Rocket Mortgage could confidently and more cheaply build in house, Woodring said. For example, a number of tools on the market pull and analyse data from phone calls, a feature that Rocket Mortgage was able to build itself, he said.

Tech executives said they are looking critically at new generative AI tools to distinguish between the truly compelling ones and the ones that are just paying lip service to the hype. How well the tools will be able to integrate with each other is another consideration.

“We want clarity on how we can connect every single one,” said Noé Angel, CIO at agriculture company NatureSweet. When tools are too fragmented, it ends up creating more work for those who have to manage them, he said.

Jim Stratton, chief technology officer of Workday, a provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, said that longer term, he expects consolidation and clearer winners to emerge when it comes to certain AI capabilities, which could simplify things for companies.

But nearer term, navigating the complexity of the landscape remains a challenge. “There’s still a lot of noise at the moment,” he said.

Green skills in the U.S. aren’t growing as fast as green jobs, pressuring companies to get creative to find the workers they need to carry out the energy transition and take advantage of the historic amount of money pouring into climate technology.

Generous incentives in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act have prompted billions of dollars in clean-energy investment announcements that are forecast to create millions of U.S. jobs. But recent data shows strong growth in demand for green skills exacerbating an already tight market where demand outstrips supply.

In 2022, the number of U.S. LinkedIn profiles with at least one green skill grew around 8.4%, compared with a 20% rise in green job postings on the platform, according to data from LinkedIn provided to The Wall Street Journal. The online professional network defines green skills as those that make economic activities more environmentally sustainable, such as carbon accounting, hydrogen engineering and battery manufacturing. It considers green jobs to be ones which include climate action objectives such as removing pollution and preserving natural resources.

Likewise, more than 114,000 U.S. clean-energy jobs were created in 2022, according to last week’s annual employment report from the U.S. Department of Energy. Every state recorded an increase in these jobs and the rise outpaced employment growth in both the wider economy and the overall energy sector. More than 40% of all U.S. energy jobs last year were in clean energy, defined as ones that include technologies aligned with a net-zero future such as electric vehicles, renewables or hydrogen.

“We need this concentration of workers with green skills to be higher,” said Sue Duke, head of global public policy at LinkedIn.

The IRA earmarked around $369 billion of government incentives for energy and climate-related programs over 10 years. The legislation was predicted to create more than nine million clean-energy and climate-related jobs over the next decade, according to the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The utility-scale clean energy industry has announced more than $150 billion of investment as well as 18,000 new manufacturing jobs associated with new or expanded facilities since the IRA was passed in August 2022, the American Clean Power Association, an industry group for wind, solar and battery storage, said in April.

“The transition to a cleaner economy, as envisioned by many policy makers, will involve building a vast amount of infrastructure,” said Kenneth Gillingham, economics professor at the Yale School of the Environment.

“There has certainly been an uptick in hiring,” Gillingham said. “But much of the building of infrastructure and clean energy is yet to come if the goals of the IRA come to pass.”

The current green skills supply shortage has raised concerns about how U.S. companies will find the workers they need as the IRA-related projects are built and eventually start operating. However, there are some mitigating factors.

“Today’s workforce is not ready for such a scaling up, but the skills needed are not always specific to green technology,” Gillingham said. There are also plenty of traditional economy roles that can quite easily transition to green jobs, such as from construction, electrical work and engineering, he said.

To help close the green skills gap, companies are getting creative. For newer, fast-growing roles such as sustainability manager and energy auditor, some businesses have recruited workers without prior green job experience, according to LinkedIn. It also said around half of the solar consultants and waste managers hired in the U.S. had no prior experience.

Businesses are also upskilling current workers and hiring people from areas of the economy that are shrinking. For example, Gillingham said coal-power plant workers are being trained to run renewable-energy farms, operate electric-vehicle charging networks or expand transmission lines.

Universities are also stepping up to help close the green skills gap. For example, the Yale School of the Environment has begun a “major push” into certification programs to train professionals with new greenskills that they can quickly bring into their companies, said Sara Smiley Smith, associate dean at the school.

Yale offers two online certification programs, each taking roughly 11 months to complete. One is on financing and deploying clean energy, while the other concerns restoring, conserving and sustainably using tropical forests. It is developing three more certifications and experimenting with the Coursera learning platform.

“The applications to the master’s program I run here have doubled in the last three years,” said Steven Cohen, director of Columbia University’s Master of Science in Sustainability Management. Cohen added: “The growth of programs to educate people to play sustainability roles in private corporations is exploding.”

The need for green skills varies across industries: The green shift in the energy and transport workforces are quite pronounced as they develop lower-carbon energy sources and electric vehicles, respectively.

More than 84% of net new electric power generation jobs last year were in clean energy such as renewables, geothermal and nuclear, although oil and gas jobs grew too, with only coal jobs falling, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. However, LinkedIn data shows that even within the U.S. oil-and-gas industry there has been a steady increase in the share of its workforce acquiring green skills, which has risen to 22%, well above the average across U.S.industries, at around 12%.

Likewise, there were more than 200,000 jobs added last year in the clean energy vehicle sector, reflecting year-over-year growth of more than 20%, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.As of 2023, nearly 11% of U.S. transport workers, such as employees of carmakers, have green skills, according to LinkedIn. The U.S.’s share of auto workers with electric vehicle-related skills rose by 68% between 2018 and 2023.

In contrast, the U.S. finance industry is lagging behind the national average despite many businesses talking up how they are increasingly basing their investments on environmental, social and governance criteria. The proportion of U.S. financial workers with green skills reached 8% in 2023, but is growing faster than most industries with a 14.8% year-over-year increase.

—Rochelle Toplensky contributed to this article.

Corrections & Amplifications
Yale School of the Environment offers two online certification programs to train professionals on new green skills, both taking roughly 11 months. A previous version of this article incorrectly said Yale’s course on financing and deploying clean energy was 10 months and a second course on restoring, conserving and sustainably using tropical forests was eight weeks. (Corrected on July 7)

When inflation took off in 2021 in the U.S., so did corporate profits, leading to accusations of “greedflation” and calls in some corners for price controls. This year, Europe is going through the same debate amid soaring food prices.

Judging by recent developments, inflation driven by corporations flexing their power to jack up prices more than costs—greedflation, as some called it—is on its way out. Pretax margins, which widened sharply in 2021 and 2022, were roughly back to pre pandemic levels in the first quarter of 2023, according to revised government data released last week. Margins in six of the S&P 500’s 11 sectors were lower in the second quarter than four years earlier, according to FactSet.

Narrowing profit margins, though, doesn’t necessarily mean an end to inflation. Wages are now growing faster than prices. While that doesn’t provoke the same outrage as soaring profits, it’s just as problematic for getting inflation down.

The circumstances of 2021 and 2022 made for a seller’s paradise. As the economy reopened, newly vaccinated consumers rushed to spend pent-up savings and stimulus cash. That demand collided with supply held down by pandemic disruptions and the inability of meeting so much demand with existing capacity.

The result: pretax margins shot from 15.6% in the fourth quarter of 2019 to 17.9% in the second quarter of 2021. That’s based on the Commerce Department’s measure of total value added by corporate businesses. This measure separates total costs into labor, profits, and non labour costs such as depreciation, interest and excise taxes, while excluding inputs, such as energy.

In the year through the second quarter of 2021, those companies’ prices rose 4.3%. At the same time, the cost of labour per unit of output fell 2.3%, because though wages were rising in that time, output per worker (productivity) was rising faster. Profit per unit of output rose a whopping 40%.

Greedflation is a catchy phrase, but not of much analytical value. Businesses always set prices to maximise profits. Raising them too much risks competitors ramping up supply to take market share.

But in 2021 and most of 2022 many companies couldn’t expand supply because of shortages of materials, labour or transport capacity. In the past when demand for vehicles rose, manufacturers effortlessly boosted output. This time, a shortage of semiconductors curtailed production and manufacturers responded to strong demand by slashing incentives and raising prices. General Motors sold fewer vehicles in both 2021 and 2022 than in 2019 but in both years made about 50% more profit. Companies weren’t the only beneficiaries: so was anyone with a used car to sell.

While greed is timeless, companies conceivably may have more power to translate greed into prices because of declining competition. The Biden administration, for example, blamed soaring meat prices in part on consolidation among meatpackers. But that wouldn’t have translated into such high prices without so much demand from locked-down consumers and the industry enduring production interruptions and labour shortages due to Covid-19, drought, avian flu and shrunken herds.

In recent quarters demand has softened. Adjusted for inflation, consumer spending was flat in three of the past four months. Tyson Foods lost money in the second quarter as soft demand pulled down prices for pork and beef while feed and labour expenses rose.

Supply, meanwhile, seems to be improving, at least for goods. In a report this week, economists at Goldman Sachs said global shipments of automotive semiconductor chips and U.S. auto production in the past few months are finally above pre pandemic levels. As a result, automotive inventories and incentives are both on the rise. In May the average new car buyer paid $410 below sticker price, compared with $637 above a year earlier, according to Cox Automotive.

Demand for services is holding up better than for goods, and services supply is still constrained, in particular by labour shortages. One reason air travel is so expensive is that airline capacity this year is about 14% below pre pandemic trend levels, Delta Air Lines recently told shareholders.

As airlines add flights they stretch staff, aircraft and air-traffic controllers to capacity, leaving them vulnerable to the slightest disruption. After thunderstorms triggered hundreds of flight cancellations in recent weeks, United Airlines said it might reduce flights out of its Newark, N.J. hub to create a buffer.

Airlines also reflect a broader reality: Whatever pricing power business still commands is increasingly eaten up by labor costs. Pilot shortages caused by pandemic retirements have given unions bargaining leverage, with many seeking to replicate a 34%, four-year increase Delta gave its pilots this year.

Workers are slowly recapturing more of the economic pie. In the first quarter of 2023, wages and salaries rose to 49.3% of corporate value added, higher than in 2019. Labor costs per unit of sales rose 6% in the year through the first quarter, ahead of prices, which were up 5.3% in the same period. Profits per unit of output rose just 1.6%.

The trend of wages rising faster than prices has continued in recent months. That’s welcome relief for workers but poses a set of difficult tradeoffs: Either profit margins will have to narrow further, which businesses will resist; high inflation will have to continue, which the Federal Reserve is fighting; or productivity will have to boom, of which there is no sign yet. If none of those things happen, then wageflation, like greedflation, will have to go away.

The highest-paid CEOs aren’t always the ones running the biggest companies.

The chief executives of Hertz, Peloton and Pinterest all earned more than $100 million in 2022, topping almost every CEO in the S&P 500 including Apple’s Tim Cook, who made $99 million. Also on that list: The man who runs CS Disco, a cloud-services provider that caters to attorneys and has a market capitalisation of about $500 million.

Six of the 10 highest-paid CEOs last year ran companies that weren’t in the S&P 500, according to C-Suite Comp, an executive-pay-data and analytics company. The S&P 500 comprises most of the biggest U.S. publicly traded companies.

Stephen Schwarzman of private-equity giant Blackstone earned the biggest pay package overall, at $253 million. Blackstone, larger than many S&P 500 companies at a market capitalisation of more than $100 billion, has a corporate structure similar to dual share-class setups that until recentlyhave kept other companies out of the index.

Schwarzman edged out Sundar Pichai, who runs Google parent Alphabet and received a pay package of $226 million—a total that put Pichai atop The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO pay survey earlier this year. Pichai was followed in the earlier survey by Live Nation’s Michael Rapino, at $139 million.

Some executives in C-Suite Comp’s top-paid list, such as the leaders of Pinterest and Hertz, wouldn’t make the Journal’s annual pay ranking because those CEOs started during the year. The Journal’s analysis only ranks CEOs who served the full year.

Median pay for CEOs of S&P 500 companies slipped to $14.5 million last year, from $14.7 million the year before.

More broadly, nine CEOs made more than $100 million in 2022, of nearly 4,000 publicly traded U.S. companies in C-Suite Comp’s analysis. That is down from more than 20 a year earlier, as equity awards slimmed down, the firm said.

The bulk of CEO pay usually consists of restricted stock or options, the value of which can fluctuate. Many equity awards often only vest—becoming fully the executive’s property—if certain performance targets are met, or if the executive remains employed for a specified period.

For Schwarzman, Blackstone’s co-founder, about $190 million of his pay came in the form of carried interest and incentive-fee allocations. Carried interest refers to a cut of profit above a target that some investment managers receive. A further $58.8 million consisted of shares in real-estate investment trusts that Blackstone manages.

Schwarzman’s total pay was more than 50% larger than his 2021 package of $160 million. Total return for Blackstone shares, including the company’s dividend, was minus 40% last year, compared with minus 18% for the S&P 500. Through late June this year, Blackstone’s total return was 22%, compared with about 14% for the index.

Schwarzman owns almost 20% of Blackstone, a stake qualifying for dividends of about $1 billion in 2022.

A Blackstone spokesman said nearly 30% of Schwarzman’s 2022 pay reflects investment performance in 2021, in a period when the company’s share price also doubled. “Virtually all his compensation is carried interest and incentive fees—which are only paid when we deliver for our customers,” the spokesman said. He declined to say how much of Schwarzman’s pay was in cash.

At Hertz, Stephen Scherr’s total pay of $182 million included $3.4 million in salary and bonus. A further $178 million in restricted stock is structured to vest through 2026, much of it only if the company’s shares reach 90-day average price targets ranging up to nearly double its current share price.

In its annual proxy statement, Hertz said two price targets had already been met, meaning about $50 million in shares at recent prices stand to vest if Scherr stays employed through 2026, in addition to roughly $20 million that vested on Dec. 31.

Scherr, who earlier worked as Goldman Sachs Group’s chief financial officer, took Hertz’s top job in February 2022, about seven months after the rental-car chain emerged from bankruptcy-court protection.

Hertz shares fell 22% during Scherr’s tenure last year, while the S&P 500 fell 16%. The company valued Scherr’s equity award at roughly $128 million at year-end, securities filings show. Hertz shares were up about 20% this year through June 30.

A Hertz spokesman declined to comment beyond company disclosures.

Peloton’s Barry McCarthy started as CEO in February 2022, after stints as chief financial officer at Spotify and Netflix. His $168 million pay package at Peloton was almost entirely in stock options, which vest monthly over four years.

With Peloton trading near $7.50 in recent days, those eight million options are underwater, meaning they would cost more to exercise than the underlying shares are worth.

Peloton shares have fallen about 3% this year through June 30, and fell 79% in 2022 as declining demand left the company with a glut of the exercise bikes it sells.

Peloton representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Of the $123 million Pinterest awarded Bill Ready last year, nearly $101 million came in stock options and $21.5 million in restricted stock made up most of the rest. Both were awarded in connection with his hiring as CEO in late June 2022.

The equity awards vest quarterly over four years if Ready remains employed. By year-end, Ready’s 2022 stock and option awards had increased in value to $153.6 million, Pinterest said in its securities filings.

Pinterest shares rose just over 20% last year. So far this year, Pinterest shares have risen about 13% through June 30.

A Pinterest spokeswoman said Ready isn’t expected to receive additional equity during his first four years, and the company sees his 2022 equity awards as the equivalent of about $30 million a year over that time. Ready also had to buy and hold $5 million in shares.

“If the company performs well, then Bill’s options have value,” the spokeswoman said. “If the company doesn’t perform well, then Bill’s compensation is going to be impacted.”

CS Disco, a 10-year-old Austin, Texas, company that sells online services to law firms, attorneys and legal-services companies, is the smallest company in the top-paid set. CEO Kiwi Camara, a co-founder, received $500,000 in salary plus stock options valued at $109 million, an award shareholders approved in a vote last year.

Camara’s options vest only if the company’s 90-day average share price reaches any of six targets through 2032, or if the company is acquired or Camara loses his job under certain circumstances.

Camara earned just under $1 million total in 2021, the year the company went public in late July. Its shares closed at $8.22 on Friday, up 30% for the year so far but down more than 75% from the company’s share price at the start of 2022.

CS Disco didn’t respond to requests for comment.