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
AI is helping some workers get more done, but McKinsey North America chair Eric Kutcher says the gains have yet to translate into broad productivity growth for companies. The gap matters: giving people AI tools is not the same as redesigning work around them.
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
Thread AI has agreed to work with the US Army on AI reasoning tools for research into Fire Control Systems, using the company’s Lemma platform. The project will help defence personnel search dense technical records, with the Army’s Armaments Center and Thread AI aiming to make answers traceable…
AWS AI Watch
UOB and Amazon Web Services have signed a memorandum of understanding to explore hybrid cloud and AI projects for banking across five ASEAN markets. The plan puts data residency and regulatory controls alongside customer-facing ideas such as conversational banking, but it is an exploration, not a confirmed rollout.
Anthropic Watch
An astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins used Anthropic’s Claude Science to assemble a full-sky ultraviolet map, filling gaps that had left earlier surveys incomplete. About a third of the map is estimated rather than directly observed, and the team tested those predictions against hidden data before filling the real…
Watch Desk
China’s leading AI models have narrowed their reported performance gap with US rivals to about 3%, while several Chinese models are now appearing near the top of global rankings. The shift is not just about DeepSeek: Alibaba, Moonshot AI and Z.ai are also gaining visibility, and DeepSeek V4.1…
Sakana AI Watch
Sakana AI says its Japanese-focused Namazu model has been adopted by Evidence Finder, a medical literature search service for doctors in Japan. The pairing puts the model into a workflow that retrieves research, cites sources and checks that cited papers exist, while a reported medical-exam score offers a…
Watch Desk
Kawasaki Heavy Industries is developing Home LEO, a quadruped social robot intended to support older adults at home, with a commercial launch targeted for fiscal 2028. The significant step is the move from care robots in facilities towards a system designed for private homes, where companionship, monitoring and…
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic is setting up a programme to brief presidential candidates from both parties on AI policy ahead of the 2028 election, while building an in-house team to steer the company’s political work. It is a notable expansion of how a frontier AI company plans to engage with the…
SoftBank Watch
SoftBank, Grab and Sarawak state-owned energy company PETROS have signed an agreement to explore an AI and digital infrastructure platform in Sarawak, Malaysia. The announcement is a partnership to develop a roadmap, not a commitment to build a data centre or a guarantee that a project will proceed.
Watch Desk
MIT professor Sasha Rakhlin argues that universities should rethink how they train and credit researchers as AI takes on more academic work. His proposals range from teaching students to audit AI-generated results to building shared research infrastructure that records failures as well as successes.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft president Brad Smith says governments should prepare for AI-related job losses and require stronger safety measures for advanced systems. His proposals range from support for workers to independent testing and an emergency switch-off mechanism, making this a substantial intervention in the debate over who should set the…
NVIDIA Watch
Nvidia says it will put $1bn towards US scientific research over the next five years, including work involving AI in quantum computing, healthcare and energy security. The pledge gives the Genesis Mission a major new industry commitment, though the practical details of how the money will be spent…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft says changes to its employee support agent helped raise the share of staff starting their support journey with it from 27% to 50%, while IT support tickets fell by 30%. The company’s account makes a useful case that an AI help desk needs more than accurate answers:…
Cohere Watch
Cohere has published an open dataset mapping nearly 694,411 public MCP tools across 178 occupations, offering a supply-side view of which kinds of work developers are making available to AI agents. Its key finding is a mismatch: only 2.6% of tools cleanly match a complete recorded occupational task.
SAP Watch
SAP is expanding its Joule AI assistants and adding specialist agents for supply-chain tasks, with the new capabilities planned for general availability in Q4 2026. The practical shift is from spotting problems to helping teams act on them across connected business processes, while keeping people involved in decisions.
Databricks Watch
Medical imaging AI may be held back less by a shortage of clever models than by patient data trapped in systems that are hard to search, de-identify and link. Databricks argues that making images usable across research and clinical data is the more fundamental job, and sets out…
Watch Desk
Gremlin is adding Foresight AI to its chaos-engineering service, using AI to automate parts of tests that deliberately disrupt working systems. The practical promise is quicker testing and troubleshooting, but letting software break infrastructure makes the limits on its authority rather important.
Watch Desk
AI may weaken the old signals of workplace power, such as job titles and reporting lines. A Forbes contributor offers workers a six-part framework for asking who controls the actual terms of their work.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft is adding 30 pre-built sales, service and marketing skills to Copilot, alongside new ways to bring Dynamics 365 customer records into Teams. The bigger shift is from AI that answers questions to agents that can move customer work along, with people still reviewing some actions.
