Elon Musk Is Stepping Back From DOGE. Can He Really Stay Away?
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, April 25th. I'm Katie Dayton for The Wall Street Journal. Some companies that let their staff run riots when it comes to artificial intelligence are thinking it might be a good time to rein things back in. We look at the case of Johnson & Johnson, whose employees at one point were working on nearly 900 separate AI projects.

Then, we're back with the final installment in our series on Elon Musk's first 100 days in Washington. Is this really the end of the road for his Doge ambitions? But first, the healthcare company Johnson & Johnson is shifting its strategy when it comes to generative AI. The reason? Its employees have been a little overzealous in their embrace of the new technology. Reporter Isabel Busquets has the story.

So, Isabel, take us back to the beginning here. When AI first broke out onto the scene a few years ago, what did Johnson & Johnson's corporate approach to the technology look like?

Initially, they were just really focused on broad experimentation. They just wanted everyone across the company, no matter what domain they were working in, supply chain, sales, commercial, R&D, to just think about what use cases would make sense in this domain. And then they set up this centralized sort of governance board where anyone could

come to that with ideas. And then if it made sense governance-wise, they could approve it and then just start pursuing their use cases and experimenting. So there were a lot of ideas that came out of that period. They told me like 900 some use cases were brainstormed. So it started off really, really broad, just with a lot of ideas and a lot of experimenting. 900 ideas is insane. That's like doing extra work.

Yeah, it's so crazy. You know, this isn't the only company I've heard talk about that. You know, when companies tell me like, oh, we have hundreds of generative AI use cases, hundreds of GPTs, hundreds of this, hundreds of that. It's really crazy. And you do have to take a step back and wonder.

Do you really need that money? And are they all driving value? And so in your reporting, you know, you say that J&J has since shifted away from that strategy to one that's a little bit more refined when it comes to AI. Why is that? What wasn't working about the old ways of doing things?

They were finding that they were spending a lot of resources pursuing a lot of use cases that some of which they were just not panning out. Maybe it didn't have the right data. Maybe it just wasn't a good use case for generative AI and something else worked better or a lot of them were also duplicative. They told me that this isn't just generative AI, but with all their AI across the company,

just the top 10 to 15% of use cases were driving 80% of the value. And so they really wanted to refocus their resources on just those top value driving use cases.

How did the company go about implementing this new, more rigorous approach to AI? It started with a pause to kind of evaluate, okay, this is what we have 900 use cases. Let's figure out where do we cut and where do we invest? And then they're continuing to pour resources into the sort of the high level use cases that are working. They see a lot of value there.

something that they call rep co-pilot, something that helps their sales reps learn about the different products that they sell, to talk to healthcare professionals about that, like knowledge distribution use cases, if you will. They still see a lot of value in the research drug discovery area. That's an area where people have talked about AI for so many years. It hasn't really totally come to fruition yet, but there's an idea that it can definitely accelerate some parts of the process.

That was our reporter, Isabel Busquets. Coming up, we're nearing the end of Elon Musk's first 100 days in the Trump administration. What kind of power will he wield even once that comes to an end? We find out after the break. ADP imagines a world of work where smart machines become too smart. Copier, I need 15 copies of this. Printing. By the way, irregardless, not a word, Janet. Yeah, I know.

Page six should be regardless of or irrespective of. Just print them, please. If it were a word, Janet, it would mean without irregard, which is... Copier! Switch to silent mode. Let's put a pin in it. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything.

This week, Elon Musk told Tesla investors that he plans to adjust his calendar after nearly three months of balancing, or not balancing, his government work with his responsibilities at the car company. To catch us up on the latest, our columnist Tim Higgins joins us for the latest, and actually the final, installment in our look at Musk's first 100 days in the Trump White House.

So, Tim, this mini series we've been doing is called 100 Days of Musk, and it sounds like we might not be getting any more days out of him in Washington. Can you take us through what happened during Tesla's earnings call this week? You know, it's interesting when we started talking roughly 100 days ago.

The big question in Washington, on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, among Tesla investors, among Elon Musk supporters was just how long was this relationship between Musk and Trump really going to last? And having talked to a lot of people early on, they didn't think it was going to last very long. And in fact, it did continue to go for a while. But it's clear that his day-to-day involvement, this idea of

if not sleeping on the couch at the White House, sleeping nearby, is approaching an end. And Musk told investors of Tesla in this call with analysts that he sees this kind of time commitment relaxing in the next month or so. Maybe he'll be there. Maybe he'll be involved with Doge on a one or two day a week schedule going forward. But this idea of 100 hours a week involved in trying to run the government seems to be coming to an end.

And were you and other Musk watchers surprised by that call? It seemed to be building. There had been signs that Musk's involvement was going to be perhaps tapering off. You have to remember that

But the role that he has at the White House is a special government employee, not to get too tactical and in the weeds, but essentially it means that he can do that job for 130 days. And so either the White House is going to have to do something else or it provided a nice way for him to off ramp. And as we watched Musk in recent weeks, it's clear that he had become at the eye of the storm politically, sometimes helpful politically.

to Trump, deflecting as they attacked political issues, but sometimes perhaps a distraction and becoming a little bit of a weight. A lot of concern coming out of that Wisconsin election where Musk invested a lot of money and even went and campaigned and didn't pull out a victory really set the chattering class off, wondering if maybe Musk's political power is not as inevitable as it

maybe look like after the November election. Got it. And on the other side of the coin, with his other job as the CEO of Tesla, how have his moves affected what's happening at that company? If you're a Tesla investor, you are not new to the idea that Elon Musk is not giving you 100% of his time. Going back to the beginning when he was

Yeah.

of time that he was spending there. This was occupying seemingly all of his attention. And that diversion comes at a very risky and tricky time for Tesla, the car company, a company that is in huge transition, if you will, facing incredible rivalries from electric car companies in China that are really proving to be very agile and very effective in

kind of rolling out vehicles that are threatening the West's hold on the future of the car business. And it also comes at a period of time where Musk had made a strategic decision at Tesla roughly about a year ago that

Tesla was going to focus its attention on robot taxis and humanoid robots, that the future of Tesla was AI, and he essentially was doubling down on that bet. This unnerved some investors and has worried some investors.

So we have Elon saying he will be taking a step back from Doge. It's not like him to give up on something. Where is this pressure coming from? Is it purely from Tesla shareholders or is it from some other source? It's hard for me to believe that Musk is going to give up totally.

totally on the idea of the Trump administration at this point. In fact, he has suggested he'll still be involved. And there is the seeds that he has planted throughout the administration that have yet to blossom into kind of the vines of his influence that we'll all be watching very closely. Doge is not just him, though he's clearly the motor behind it and the one who is

kept it up to speed and got a lot of attention. But it seems as if perhaps as many as 100 people are involved, spread throughout all the different government agencies. He has people that have, at least in the past, been loyal to him and in some key positions. He clearly will continue to have

influence in the Trump administration. To the extent of it will be the big question. That was WSJ columnist Tim Higgins. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host, Katie Dayton. Additional support this week from Ariana Azburu, Pierre Bien-Aimé, and Victoria Craig. Jessica Fenton and Michael Lavelle wrote our theme music. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. It's

Scott Soloway and Chris Inslee are the deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is The Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. We'll be back this afternoon with TMB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.