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
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.
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
Digital tools are increasingly being used to monitor workers, set schedules and inform decisions about pay or discipline, according to a new report from a coalition including the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Its account of algorithmic management and AI-driven productivity analytics makes a practical question hard to dodge:…
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Enterprise AI agents can trigger workflows and act before anyone checks their output, says SAS strategist Marinela Profi. Her practical prescription is to govern the whole action chain: restrict permissions, log tool use and require approval where the consequences warrant it.
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Four Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists have received US Department of Energy Early Career Research Program awards, including funding for machine-learning work in scientific research and AI-guided control of major instruments. The awards put money behind projects aimed at making scientific models more reliable and accelerator systems more…
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AI agents may move more of the industry’s value towards the software that gives models memory, tools and room to act, analysts told the South China Morning Post. Meta’s Muse has helped draw attention to that shift, but downloads are an early sign of interest, not proof of…
Meta AI Watch
Meta has answered criticism of data centres with claims about how its facilities use water, pay for energy infrastructure and employ local workers. The company’s case is relevant to AI because it is discussing the infrastructure behind its AI-optimised data centres, but its examples are not an independent…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft says AI-assisted reporting has cut one internal product team’s monthly report from a task that took weeks to work that can be sent on the first day of the month. The example shows how better planning data, reusable agent skills and human review fit together in the…
Watch Desk
AI is expanding quickly, but the clearest evidence so far may be the contrast between a vast infrastructure boom and less settled signs of everyday adoption and business demand. Derek Thompson’s chart-led review sets out both sides, including estimates of $280 billion in annualised external AI revenue and…
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Synthetic voices can sound polished while stripping away cues that help listeners make sense of speech, argues linguist Celeste Rodriguez Louro. Her point is a useful one for AI voice design: communication depends on the listener as well as the machine doing the talking.
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The Wall Street Journal’s account traces the long-running personal and philosophical conflict between Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman to disagreements over AI safety, leadership and credit. It matters because those arguments now sit behind two companies whose decisions help shape the AI…
Shield AI Watch
Shield AI says a new $150 million US Navy agreement modification, matched by $150 million of its own capital, brings announced public and private commitments to its X-BAT aircraft programme to $400 million. The AI-piloted vertical take-off and landing aircraft is due to begin flight testing later this…
Yoshua Bengio Watch
Yoshua Bengio is urging researchers who put AI safety first to leave frontier AI companies and join organisations working on safer systems. In a personal essay published on 8 October, the AI researcher argues that competition between leading labs is working against their safety efforts, and says researchers…
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Behavox has committed $8 million to secure dedicated GPU capacity from UK cloud provider Civo, for processing regulated customers’ data in the UK. The deal gives financial institutions another option for keeping sensitive data within the country while running AI models, though it is not evidence of a…
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AI can make it easier to send institutions more material than they can assess. New Scientist argues that this pressure is reviving an old, awkward question: when does gatekeeping protect quality, and when does it become exclusion?
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AI agents are moving beyond screens towards factories, power grids and other physical systems, argues Archetype AI co-founder Brandon Barbello. His case is that models able to interpret sensor data could help operators spot equipment problems before production stops, where a digital mistake can be corrected but a…
Astera Labs Watch
Astera Labs has announced a broad PCIe 7 signal-conditioning portfolio for AI infrastructure, spanning copper and optical connections. Its central pitch is flexibility: customers can choose the link technology to suit the reach, power and density they need, with the product family expected to begin sampling to selected…
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AI agents are forcing companies to look beyond documented workflows and examine the judgement employees use when a process reaches an exception. Masa Maruyama, chief executive of Saison Technology International, argues that deciding what an agent should do means deciding which unwritten practices are worth keeping.
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Every co-founder Dan Shipper and head of platform Willie Williams say the company’s workplace AI experiments favoured a shared agent over personal assistants that each employee had to maintain. Their account, drawn from a conversation on the Every podcast, offers a useful counterweight to the idea that every…
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Abu Dhabi has launched AiNative, a programme aiming to train 20,000 government employees in AI by the end of 2026. The practical point is that the training is being tailored to people’s jobs, with guidance on what government information may be entered into AI systems.
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HSBC is adding AI and wealth roles in Singapore while, according to reporting cited by Resultsense, planning substantial cuts in its UK wealth business. The contrast puts the focus on which jobs change, and where, rather than whether AI simply creates or destroys jobs.
