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AI is transforming industries, but the data centers powering it require more energy and water than ever. At the break, join Christophe Beck, chairman and CEO of Ecolab, for insights on using water effectively while safeguarding this critical resource for future generations.
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Welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Tuesday, January 6th, 2026. I'm Patrick Coffey for the Wall Street Journal. It's the beginning of a new year and according to Pew Research center, nearly of US Adults will make a New Year's resolution about health, diet or exercise. We at Tech News Briefing promise not to judge you for falling off that fitness wagon. But could an AI coach help make your resolution stick? Then how would you like to use one app for literally everything? And what if that app just happens to be chatgpt? OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hopes that will be the case. We're diving into Altman's long shot bid to make an app store to rival Apple's. But first, it's early January and your fitness resolutions seem totally realistic for now. But by the end of the month, those plans to work out for an hour a day, five days a week may look a bit more daunting. So you could probably use a little extra kick in the butt from your friendly neighborhood large language model. But can robots really help you get stronger at your convenience without costing you a small fortune or landing you in the doctor's office? Journal columnist Nicole Nguyen tested three AI driven fitness tools to see how effective they were at helping a busy professional parent with healthy aspirations stay on track. Nicole how specific and helpful were the apps in terms of telling you what you need to do to meet your goals and with correcting your form, things like that.
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So I'll start with Fitbit's new Personal Health Coach, which is an experimental feature that's powered by Gemini. Fitbit is owned by Google and Gemini is powered by Google and so it's a natural integration. When you open the Fitbit app, there's this new bubble called Ask Coach and you can talk to coach about anything. When you first onboard, it asks you what your goals are. And no goal is too specific or too niche. So it can be like I'm training for a open water swim on a lake, but I usually train in the ocean, which is salt water. Can you help me through that? And it'll spit out a weekly plan for you with the number of workouts and the length of workout that you have time for. And it'll give you really easy to follow videos based on that plan. And it can also adjust based on your needs so I told it like, I really don't feel like working out today. And it nudged me like, do you have 30 seconds? Can you pinch your shoulder blades together to improve your posture? And I was like, okay, I'll do that. It, like other AI chatbots, though, does hallucinate sometimes. And so it would say would make an adjustment and didn't make it. But I in general liked where it was going. It can make accommodations if you need it. Another tech I tried is from Peloton. It's a new computer vision equipped camera that's integrated in its new cardio machines. And it works by watching you as you work out. And it's designed for strength training workouts so you can swivel the screen from the bike or the treadmill or the row machine onto the floor where it outlines your body in this little moving box. And it tracks you as you go from standing bicep curls to seated crunches. And it can actually track your reps, but you have to do the full range of motion before it tracks your reps. This other one from Apple that is pretty basic from the outset, it's called Workout Buddy and it's a AI generated voice on your Apple watch that for certain exercises can pepper your workout with different stats and motivational cues. I started a run and it was like, way to start working out. Like, good job just getting here. That's half the battle. When I finished the workout, it said, way to work towards your goals. And it was like, okay, maybe I will put my running shoes on again tomorrow.
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Through your reporting, did you get any sense of whether these companies are seeking specific business gains from the products? Is it just kind of like broadening their suite of offerings?
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Definitely. A huge issue with hardware wearables in particular, is that people buy the wearable and that's the revenue revenue stream for the company. And Fitbit has really turned its business into a subscription model. So Fitbit Premium, which is a $10 a month service that you can buy on top of your Fitbit wearable, is a subscription that they keep needing to add value to. And Health Coach does require a Fitbit Premium subscription. So yes. And Peloton. Also, sales in the at home gym space have largely stalled. Even though Peloton is a winner in that space, it's not growing as much as it did during Pandemic. So by broadening its breadth from cardio to now a strength training focus, it's hoping to get more subscribers, more people buying its hardware.
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That was personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen. Have you used an AI trainer? If You're a listener on Spotify. Let us know in this episode's poll or leave us a comment. Coming up, it seems like AI can do almost anything these days, but can it take on the company that created the app economy itself? OpenAI hopes so. That's after the break.
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How can enabling Smarter Water Management help AI scale responsibly? Here's Christophe Beck, chairman and CEO of Ecolab.
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All water of the earth that we can drink is 35 miles wide. That's all we've got for the whole planet. So we'd better find ways to reuse water. That's especially true for AI. But here's the good news. With technology that can reuse water in that process of the chips manufacturing and the technology that we bring is ultimately at every step of the process in the chip manufacturing to reuse it.
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Sam Altman of OpenAI is the latest tech guru who hopes he can make one app to rule them all. And he's taking on Apple's App Store in the process. Imagine all the apps you use each day working seamlessly within ordering groceries, making a playlist, planning a road trip, all without ever leaving the Chatbot. News corps, owner of the Journal, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI and a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services. But early tests by the Wall street journal indicate OpenAI's app strategy has a long way to go. Journal reporter Rolf Winkler has more on the latest leg of the AI race. So Rolf Sam Altman wants OpenAI to replace or compete more directly with the Apple App Store. How exactly does he see OpenAI doing that?
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By connecting apps to ChatGPT. Sam Altman, in a media interview last month, he told a group of editors that gathered to talk to him that Apple was the real long term foe. And you look at his strategy and some of the pieces he's putting together. Number one, ChatGPT is becoming an operating system. Number two, he's working with Jony I've device designer extraordinaire from Apple to make AI native devices that they have said they want to replace the smartphone and now third, they want apps, right? And you take those three things together and it looks an awful lot like this impregnable walled garden that Apple has built.
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So in a practical sense, let's say I want to get groceries or dinner delivered. How would that work through OpenAI?
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So what they did was in the fall they launched something called their Apps SDK, their Apps software development kit that app developers can create apps that would open up inside ChatGPT. So for instance one I tried that works really well is Instacart and I say nstacart in chatgpt. Nstacart make me a vegetarian menu for a family of four for five days and fill a Costco grocery cart with all the ingredients and it will do that, it will create the menu, all of these dishes with recipes and I will have a pre populated shopping cart inside instacart that I can then click check out and it will open up the Instacart website basically inside ChatGPT and I can check out and get all those things delivered.
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As a member of a family of four, this is appealing to me, but to some degree ChatGPT users have already been able to do that right since OpenAI launched its app strategy in the fall. So how's it working out so far?
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With the exception of Instacart, I would say most of the apps I tried out just aren't really ready for primetime. For instance, the uber app inside ChatGPT, all it can do is like ride price estimates for you. So you can say Uber, I'm at SFO the San Francisco airport, get me a car going to downtown San Francisco right now and here's the address and then it will give you estimates. But then you'd have to click request ride which will take you to the Uber website to request the ride. But then I have to re enter my pickup and drop off locations, effectively starting over. And that was true for a bunch of the apps that I tried.
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What did OpenAI and Uber say in response to that?
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OpenAI said their app experiences aren't perfect at this stage, but they're not the kind of company that's going to wait for perfection in order to release something. They really want to get new things out the door, new products out the door, so that consumers can learn how they work and developers can start building for them and that they can rapidly iterate. The Uber spokeswoman I spoke to, she described what they're working on as a pilot. They want to have something out there for their consumers who are inside ChatGPT to experience the Uber app inside ChatGPT and the initial one that they have out there is something that they hope to build on.
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So suspending our disbelief for a moment, if the model that Altman has in mind does work, and if it does work at scale, will apps as we know them on our smartphones today no longer exist?
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Most of the people I talked to said no. When you talk to the developers, they all said, this is a new surface that we sort of have to build for. We got to meet our consumers where they are and they happen to be in these chatbots. There are 800 million plus users of ChatGPT, so we got to be there. But it's not enough to just be there to actually start the app experience inside a chatbot. You really got to give people a reason to want to use the app. And right now it's sort of this surface level capability where people say, but it's not really going to replace the app because, you know, the app is where I, for instance, upsell people. That's where I make my money.
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That was WSJ reporter Rolf Winkler. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to take this episode's poll or leave us a comment. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Katie Ferguson. I'm Patrick Coffey for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.
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How are data center operators working to improve sustainability and water savings at every stage of the data center lifecycle? Here's Ecolabs Christoph Beck with some thought.
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The Mach 7 or the Mach 4 are the ones who are really so focused on high tech, are the most forward looking. They have the means, they have the mindset, they have the passion for innovation and they're really open to try new things as well because everything is new with AI and with that technology as well. I think even if we're not where we wanted to be with that industry right now, we will be ahead in the next few years because innovation that's coming up right now is working much better than we thought. And it's really thinking in circular ways, being in a data center or in a microchip manufacturing plant.
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Learn more about ecolab@ecolab.com Custom content from.
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WSJ is a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising Department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.