AI Daily: OpenAI quietly designs Office, Workspace rival

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

OPENAI: OpenAI has quietly designed a rival to compete with Microsoft Office (MSFT) and Google Workspace (GOOGL), with features that allow people to collaborate on documents and communicate via chat in ChatGPT, The Information’s Amir Efrati and Natasha Mascarenhas AI (AI) announced the appointment of Rob Schilling as executive VP and chief commercial officer, effective June 16. With more than two decades of experience driving enterprise software sales, Schilling will now lead C3 AI’s customer-facing operations. Schilling joins C3 AI from Oracle (ORCL), where he held a senior leadership position focused on growing the company’s cloud enterprise sales applications unit in North America and guiding customers through their digital transformation journeys.

META/RUNWAY: Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed a possible acquisition with video startup Runway AI, but the deal talks never reached a formal offer level where a dollar figure was discussed and discussions are no longer ongoing, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg‘s Anne VanderMey and Sarah Frier. Zuckerberg has been targeting the best minds in AI to create a “superintelligence” team as part of a recruitment push that has involved high salary offers and sometimes M&A talks, the authors noted.

CITI UPS META PT: Citi raised the firm’s price target on Meta Platforms to $803 from $690 and keeps a Buy rating on the shares. Citi also added an “upside 90-day short-term view” on Meta. It believes engagement continues to improve and Meta’s focus on ads innovation s leading to greater overall conversion rates across the platform. After attending the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the firm is “incrementally positive” on the broader online advertising macro environment, artificial intelligence innovation, and key growth drivers of the web. Citi emerged with a positive read through across the sector, and raised projections for Meta Platforms, Alphabet, Reddit (RDDT), and Pinterest (PINS). It sees an Improving digital advertising market, with generative AI user adoption ramping as marketers prep for an agentic world.

BOFA SEES ‘MANY REASONS’ FOR APPLE-PERPLEXITY DEAL: BofA noted that media articles suggest that Apple (AAPL) is looking to buy, or partner with, Perplexity AI, adding that any such deal would likely be positive for shares that are “currently in the penalty box” given Apple is largely viewed as an AI laggard. The firm, which adds that it does not have any direct knowledge of the probability of such a deal, sees “many reasons a deal would make sense,” including access to a high quality AI company with state of the art AI search and answering capability, access to talent and AI expertise, product synergies driven by improving Siri and monetizing hardware and services, and preventing this asset from falling into a competitor’s hands and providing access to the search advertising market as an alternative to Google. BofA maintained a Buy rating and $235 price target on Apple shares.