From the archive
AI business news tracks how companies adopt artificial intelligence and how that changes products, competition and work. Follow enterprise deployments, partnerships, company strategy and the effects of AI on jobs and skills. Our reports separate announced ambitions from demonstrated results, with sources and context to help you judge where adoption is useful, costly or still unproven.
Lead story
Condé Nast says an AI-powered search system built with AWS cut the time its editorial teams spent finding video from an average of 250 minutes to about two minutes per task. The system searches across more than 140,000 videos by what is seen, said and heard, returning relevant…
Read the report & discussion ↗Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft Research has introduced Quine, an experimental AI research system designed to connect biological data, scientific tools, literature and researchers. In work with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Microsoft says Quine helped prioritise compounds for lab testing in pancreatic cancer research, with several highly ranked candidates…
Watch Desk
Investors appear to have priced in a 32.6% lasting productivity boost for software engineering from AI, according to a working paper by economists at UC Berkeley and the London School of Economics. That is a measure of market expectations, not proof that engineers are already getting 32.6% more…
Watch Desk
AI agents can give a factually correct answer and still mislead by crediting the wrong source. Multiverse Computing describes a new verification system that checks both whether a claim is supported and whether it came from the source the agent says it used.
Watch Desk
Oracle is rolling out Fusion Claw, a runtime for AI applications that can plan and carry out complex business work, including acting without further approval when a customer has granted that authority. The key question is not just what the agent can do, but how companies define and…
Watch Desk
Two former leaders of IBM’s X-Force Red team have launched RemoteThreat, an offensive cybersecurity startup backed by $7 million in pre-seed funding. Its platform combines AI models with human operators for cyber operations aimed at vetted enterprise and US government customers, The Register reports.
Watch Desk
EliseAI has raised $350 million at a $4 billion valuation, Fortune reports. The company makes AI tools for housing and healthcare, bringing a large funding round to two industries where back-office work can shape the daily experience of tenants and patients.
Watch Desk
A Berkeley Human Rights Center study argues that large language models can affect rights across law, journalism and education, and calls on developers and deployers to assess those effects. Its researchers interviewed 56 people in 24 countries, bringing evidence from professions and communities often left out of the…
Watch Desk
The US ranks eighth in Coursera’s new measure of how well countries are developing AI skills alongside the human skills needed to use them. The gap is striking: the report ranks the US first for policy, infrastructure and technology readiness, but 27th for learner proficiency and behaviour.
xAI Watch
xAI has launched Team Bots in public beta for its Teams and Enterprise plans, letting colleagues share AI agents equipped with team knowledge and approved tools. The shift is from a bot built around one person to a shared assistant for workplace tasks, with individual conversations said to…
Watch Desk
MIT professor Sherry Turkle argues that chatbots’ simulated empathy can make human relationships feel like hard work by comparison. Her new book examines how people use conversational AI across different stages of life, from children learning what counts as a person to adults seeking advice or companionship.
Watch Desk
Databricks says it gives 14,000 employees access to newly released frontier AI models on day one, then uses benchmarks, staff feedback and cost tracking to assess them. The company says it can gather enough evidence within three days to judge whether a model belongs on its efficiency frontier…
Mistral AI Watch
Mistral has opened a Munich hub for Physics AI and industrial AI, including work with BMW on crash simulations and Siemens Energy on industrial applications. The move gives its European sovereignty pitch a physical base, research partners and named industrial projects, rather than leaving it at the level…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft Research Asia’s Singapore lab says it began nine new projects with the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University in its first year. The work spans healthcare AI, robotics, AI systems and multi-agent systems, offering a concrete snapshot of how Microsoft is building research links across…
Anthropic Watch
A federal appeals court has upheld the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, but a separate California order limiting the government’s ban remains in force for now. The split leaves a major AI-company dispute unresolved on two legal fronts.
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic’s Python SDK 1.9.0 adds support for Claude Sonnet 5.5, a new betweentools thinking type and the option to run tool calls while a reply streams. The release also makes cache diagnostics generally available in the Messages API, giving developers several practical changes in one update.
DeepSeek Watch
DeepSeek Harness has published the first release candidate for version 0.2.0, adding practical fixes for stalled conversations and clearer recovery when a tool’s result is uncertain. The update also lets conversations using DeepSeek account models search the web without an additional API key, alongside a spread of desktop…
AWS AI Watch
AWS, Amazon Music, Shakira’s Fundación Pies Descalzos and Laboratoria are launching free Spanish-language AI and cloud-computing training for women in Latin America, with a target of reaching one million by 2028. The programme begins in Colombia, aiming to connect mothers at schools supported by the foundation with training…
