I spent part of the day moderating two panel discussions on topics I find myself writing about week after week—cybersecurity and making data useful for AI—but I also sat in the audience to listen in on the other discussions. One of my favorite moments was during an open forum about adoption of digital tools moderated by my colleague Alex Konrad and featuring panelists Land O’Lakes CTO Teddy Bekele, SolarWinds CISO Tim Brown, and cofounder and managing partner of FPV Ventures Pegah Ebrahimi. The question was about how widespread adoption of AI was impacting what the CIO’s role in a company would be. Bluntly, whether CIO now stood for “chief innovation officer” or “career is over.”

Ebrahimi responded that it actually could be the latter, depending on what a CIO is doing in their role. “As a CIO, you need to be talking to all the business leaders,” she said. “You need to at least have some agenda in the boardroom to say, ‘Okay, on the product we’re doing this, but here’s how we’re enabling on the technology side.’ I think you have to think of yourself as more of a technology leader that is thinking in business ways. And to do that it means having much more relationships on that front.”

Brown added that the CIO’s job has been one directing transitions for the last several years. Before the transition to AI, CIOs were leading the transition to the cloud—and many are still working on that one, he added. Today’s successful CIO needs to be not just enabling tech transitions, but embracing them. “The change brings a lot of opportunity, and those opportunities are generally not necessarily driven by the business. They’re driven by the technologies that make things possible,” he said.

Bekele agreed with his fellow panelists. “We’re driving the change. We’re bringing the technology, and that’s what’s going to empower either existing business models or new business models,” he said.

That empowerment demonstrates both why the CIO’s job is interesting, but also why it continues to be vital. Today’s business world runs on technology, and tech professionals who bring their knowledge and knowhow to the table can make bigger changes to the entire enterprise than most executives.

We’ll be taking a break from publishing Forbes CIO next week for the Thanksgiving holiday, and back in your inboxes on December 5.

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Until next time.

Google responded that forcing it to sell Chrome is “unprecedented government overreach.” In a blog post, Google President for Global Affairs and Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker writes that this move would “push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership. DOJ’s wildly overbroad proposal goes miles beyond the Court’s decision. It would break a range of Google products—even beyond Search—that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives.”

Forbes senior contributor Barry Collins writes that this order would be challenging to enforce. Chrome is built on the open source browser engine Chromium, which is also the basis of Microsoft Edge and Vivaldi. (Though, he points out, Google engineers have been the biggest contributors to the Chromium project, which could be disrupted by a Chrome sale.) What Google would essentially be selling is its user base, a huge commodity with few obvious potential buyers.

What ultimately happens is up to U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who issued the ruling against Google this summer. He will hold a hearing on the request in April, and expects a final ruling by Labor Day 2025. But the Justice Department’s position may change between now and then, as President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. Trump is seen as more tech- and business-friendly—but maybe he won’t be when the company involved is Google.

It happened again after markets closed on Wednesday. Here are the particulars: Nvidia’s quarterly revenues were $35.1 billion, 94% above the same time last year and far ahead of expectations of $33.2 billion. Its revenue estimates for the next quarter are $37.5 billion, above consensus forecasts of $37.09 billion. CFO Collette Kress said there is “staggering” demand for the company’s new Blackwell processing unit. And the stock fell 3% almost immediately.

The reason is likely the overwhelming hype around Nvidia’s GPU business. The company creates much of the hardware that all AI platforms depend on. But some investors may have come to expect consistent exponential growth from Nvidia, and even though the company continues to outperform more grounded investors’ expectations, the future growth isn’t quite as high as it has been. “There is a risk here … that Nvidia’s current overearning will begin to come to an end,” William de Gale, lead portfolio manager of BlueBox Asset Management’s global technology fund, told CNBC. “There’s considerable risk in this name at the moment. But it’s exciting.”

The volatility continued on Thursday. Soon after markets opened, Nvidia’s stock rose to an all-time high of $152.89, but then swooped back down, quickly showing an 8% drop from the high, and recording a net decline of more than 1% by midday.