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Good morning. “Housing is the gateway for commerce,” says Ken Chenault. He ought to know. As chairman and CEO of American Express from 2001 to 2018, he transformed the brand from being perceived as a credit card for the elite to a closed-loop network that could help small merchants grow their business and deliver personalized offerings to consumers because it handled both sides of a transaction. “People would say American Express was a card company,” he told me earlier this week. “I would say, ‘We’re not just in the payments business. We’re a service platform, and the card is a form factor.’”
That’s what attracted Chenault, now chairman and managing director of the VC firm General Catalyst, to take an interest in Bilt Technologies and founder Ankur Jain, ultimately becoming an investor and chair of its board. Through Bilt Rewards, launched in 2019, Jain enables 5.5 million renters (and now also homeowners) to get loyalty points for processing monthly payments through its platform, expanding to integrate restaurants, retailers, car services, fitness studios, pharmacies and other vendors. With the launch of Bilt Neighborhood Concierge this morning, which Fortune exclusively covered, Bilt will let members reserve, pay, gain points and hop between different services without having to log into other apps.
Jain says the goal is to “turn the home into the hub for everything you do—and buy—around it,” likening the agentic service to being in a hotel. “We can let customers wake up and say ‘Hey, can you pay my rent for me, have eggs delivered to my apartment and make a reservation for dinner?’”
The home is a battleground of commerce that few have yet to master but many increasingly want to own. Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it’s making Alexa+ available to everyone in the U.S., a revamped version of the 11-year-old smart device that can handle multiple queries and act as an agent on your behalf to order repairs or an Uber. Earlier versions of Alexa failed to drive much purchasing, in part because it largely limited people to buying on Amazon.
Chenault’s fascination in home-based commerce goes back decades, saying he became interested in American Express in 1981 when its Warner-Amex joint venture launched a pioneering QUBE service that let people buy through their TV. “The infrastructure that powers Bilt’s platform rewards everywhere you live,” he says. “Housing is the anchor and no one has been able to establish this anchor at scale. The commerce is tied to your residence and, now that concierge connects it all, it’s frictionless. I always saw this as a neighborhood commerce platform.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top leadership news
Nvidia’s blockbuster earnings
The stakes were exceedingly high ahead of Nvidia’s earnings Wednesday night and the chipmaker valued at $4.8 trillion delivered, with eye-popping quarterly revenue and profit growth. “In this new world of AI, compute is revenues,” Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said. “We have now seen the inflection of agentic AI and the usefulness of agents across the world and enterprises everywhere, and you’re seeing incredible compute demand because of it.” Investors still seem wary. Shares fell during the earnings call; they ended the day up 1.44%.
3 common traits of outperforming companies
New McKinsey research studied 61 companies that outperformed their peers from 2019 to 2024, including JPMorgan Chase, the insurance company Progressive and Walmart, and identified the three characteristics common to the winners. No. 1? They fund business growth through good times and bad. “Easy to say, hard to do when money is tight, but these companies gulp hard and do it,” Fortune’s Geoff Colivn reports.
The high stakes of Anthropic’s Pentagon fight
AI company Anthropic is facing a Friday deadline to remove restrictions on how the U.S. Department of War can use its technology or face the possibility that the Pentagon will take action that could cripple its business. The ultimatum constitutes perhaps the biggest crisis in the company’s five-year existence, writes Jeremy Kahn.
The markets
S&P 500 futures are down 0.08% this morning. The last session closed up 0.81%. The STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.03% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.11% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 0.29%. China’s CSI 300 was down 0.19%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down 1.44%. South Korea’s KOSPI was up 3.67%. India’s NIFTY 50 was up 0.10%. Bitcoin was up to $68K.
Around the watercooler
Exclusive: Startup aiming to break Nvidia’s strangehold on AI data center workloads raises $10.25 million by Jeremy Kahn
Jamie Dimon says society should start preparing for AI job displacement: ‘Now’s the time to start thinking about’ it by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
Trump warns countries they could face something ‘far worse’ if they try to renegotiate trade deals. What options do they have? by Nicholas Gordon
Forget job titles when you’re in your 20s—that was the best career advice Barack Obama gave his ex-speechwriter by Orianna Rosa Royle
CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams, Claire Zillman and Lee Clifford.
