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 afternoon, TNB Tech Minute, for Monday, December 22nd. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal.

Google Parent Alphabet has agreed to acquire Intersect, which builds renewable energy plants for $4.75 billion.

The deal is intended to help meet the energy demands of artificial intelligence.

Alphabet's purchase includes

Intersects data center projects, multiple gigawatts of energy, and the Intersect team. The acquisition

is set to close in the first half of next year. And another deal, Coinbase is pushing deeper into

the prediction market space by buying the San Francisco startup, The Clearing Company.

Just last week, Coinbase rolled out prediction markets to its users, which allows them to

bet on yes or no questions regarding the outcomes of everything, ranging from sports games to

elections. Coinbase said it's expanding outside of crypto to become a, quote, everything

exchange, or a one-stop

shop that offers a wide array of financial services and products. And Apple has been fined roughly

$15 million in Italy. The country's competition watchdog says Apple abused its dominance in the

digital economy through its app tracking transparency policy.

The regulator claims Apple essentially forces app developers to seek consent twice to collect

and use data for advertising, harming Apple's commercial partners. Apple says its policy lets users

easily decide whether apps can track their online activity and that it'll continue to defend the system.

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