As companies seek to close growing gaps in skills and talent,

Deloitte US CEO Jason Garzatus believes it's important for organizations to understand their baseline of skills.

There's so many organizations that can't ask and answer the fundamental questions about how much computer science or data management skills do I have or AI development skills in a given domain?

By performing a skills inventory, leaders can truly understand where their efforts should be focused.

Being blind to those gaps is the real miss.

Visit deloitte.com to learn how your enterprise can help successfully cultivate talent.

Here's your closing bell brief for Thursday, December 18th. I'm Catherine Sullivan for the Wall Street Journal.

U.S. stocks rallied today as investors reacted to a cooling inflation report that helped snap a recent losing streak. The NASDAQ led the gains with a 1.4% climb, while the S&P 500 rose 0.8%, and the Dow

edged up just 0.1%. Sentiment was lifted by the delayed November Consumer Price Report, which

showed annual inflation slowing to 2.7%, a sharper decline than economists had anticipated.

Among individual companies, Trump media shares surged 42 percent after the company announced

an agreement to merge with the fusion power firm TAE Technologies in an all-stock deal valued

at over $6 billion.

Micron Technology stock jumped 10 percent today. The semiconductor maker raised its

outlook for key products and gave revenue guidance well above expectations, citing massive

demand for memory chips from artificial intelligence developers. And Darden Restaurant's shares

ticked up almost 2% after the Olive Garden parent company reported

quarterly results that beat analyst estimates and raised its sales guidance for the year.

Heads up, an artificial intelligence tool helped us make this episode by creating summaries

that were based on WSJ reporting and then reviewed and adapted by an editor.

We'll have a lot more coverage of the

day's news on the WSJ's What's News podcast. You can add it to your playlist on your smart

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