Making AI actually work day to day is becoming its own job.

On July 16, hear from three people doing it: Simone Santiago Broad (Yoco), Yelva Espinoza (Zumba Fitness), and Fin’s Dave Lynch. They’ll share what the role really looks like, how it came to exist, the skills worth hiring for, and the challenges they’re tackling right now. Bring your questions, since the best moments happen live.

Register to save your spot.

Perplexity to join the AI coding wars

Perplexity could be the latest entrant to the red-hot AI coding wars. The San Francisco-based AI search startup has built an internal AI coding tool that it may launch publicly later down the line, a person familiar with the matter said. For now, Perplexity has codenamed the tool “Teammate,” and its engineers have been using it since May, according to screenshots obtained by Business Insider.

It’s unclear exactly if or when Perplexity, which was valued at $20 billion in a funding round last year, will launch the product. If it does, it would put Perplexity — originally focused on an AI-powered search engine that competes with Google — much closer to vying for supremacy with Cursor, Anthropic, and OpenAI, all of which have built widely-used AI coding products.

Teammate is meant to oversee software projects from start to finish, according to an internal announcement seen by Business Insider. “It’s built for long-horizon engineering work: owning projects, investigating issues, and monitoring services,” the announcement reads. A Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment. The AI tool is model-agnostic, meaning that it’s not built on any particular chatbot, the person familiar with the matter said....

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AI millionaires rewrite the luxury playbook

Sitting on roughly $3.5 million in SpaceX shares, Chip, a former data scientist at Elon Musk’s aerospace behemoth, has recently bought meteorites worth $10,000 and a $5,000 fire truck. The 50-year-old space enthusiast is not sure how he will use the truck - maybe as an attraction for his 3-year-old kid’s birthday party. But his new wealth tied to SpaceX’s initial public offering in June has given him the freedom to buy “silly” things, he told Reuters. Despite the excitement, the jury is still out on whether an estimated 440,000 U.S. millionaires minted by stock market gains last year and, more recently, AI companies’ public listings, will translate into a new golden era for the global luxury goods sector.

As they try to sell to new tech millionaires, brands have to reckon with their unique taste and competing interests that deflect attention from traditional luxury items. “I played volleyball in high school and college,” said AI strategist Zack Kass, who led ChatGPT creator OpenAI’s go-to-market unit until 2023 and owns an undisclosed stake in SpaceX. “I literally took my OpenAI winnings and bought a professional sports team,” he said, referring to a volleyball team.

The newly wealthy spend about one-third less on smart outfits and leather goods compared to those with generational wealth, said Filippo Bianchi, who leads the global luxury team at BCG. Instead, their top spending priority is durable assets....

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AI giants are handing out tons of free computing

Hans Ibarra, a founder building an AI-voice startup, has found himself on the receiving end of a big opportunity: Top artificial-intelligence companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and others desperate to win his business are ramping up discounts. Across Silicon Valley, startup founders like Ibarra are enjoying a wave of computing credits and fielding competing offers from AI-model makers racing to land new enterprise customers. Cursor, the AI-coding company bought by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, offered a 75% discount.

The offers from growing AI-sales armies at companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are so rich that some early-stage startup founders say they won’t need to raise money as soon as they expected, and others have been able to play AI companies off one another. Startups have received offers that in some cases amounted to more than $3 million in credits from multiple companies for cloud computing and tokens, the central units used to measure and charge for AI usage, founders say.

Alphabet’s Google Cloud is giving some startups up to $500,000 in cloud credits and early access to Gemini models. Microsoft and Amazon Web Services also offer startups special perks. The pitched battle for business users comes as AI companies seek lasting streams of revenue. They hope that by winning startups as customers early in the life of new companies, their tools will become integral to the venture’s growth over time….

Continue reading

Making AI actually work day to day is becoming its own job.

On July 16, hear from three people doing it: Simone Santiago Broad (Yoco), Yelva Espinoza (Zumba Fitness), and Fin’s Dave Lynch. They’ll share what the role really looks like, how it came to exist, the skills worth hiring for, and the challenges they’re tackling right now. Bring your questions, since the best moments happen live.

Register to save your spot.

Apple sues OpenAI, alleging stolen trade secrets

Tech giant Apple sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI on Friday, alleging the artificial intelligence company stole its trade secrets as part of efforts to build out a competing hardware business. “This case is about Apple’s former employees stealing Apple’s trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI. Apple brings this suit to put a stop to it,” Apple’s lawyers said in a complaint filed in federal court in the Northern District of California. The complaint alleges that OpenAI leaders asked Apple employees to share information, including showcasing parts of new devices, during hiring interviews. OpenAI’s head of hardware, former Apple vice president....

What every angry CEO is thinking about AI

Alex Karp—describing himself as a “madman”—has brought the simmering tension between fast-rising AI giants and established tech players to a boil. In both nuanced and dramatic fashion, the Palantir Technologies chief executive is drawing attention to concerns over the power and insight AI labs derive from their business customers’ data and decision-making—the magic sauce behind what makes a company successful. Karp’s more emotional TV appearance the week before, when he declared that “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and their customers. Speaking at a frenetic pace, the tech company boss rattled on....

In AI, nothing ever happens. Wait, it’s happening!

Here’s a brief and partial timeline of narrative oscillations. In 2022, ChatGPT arrives and sets the cycle in motion. It’s happening. By early 2023, AI researchers are quitting tech companies and advocating for pauses. Microsoft and OpenAI publish a paper called “Sparks of AGI,” arguing that the upcoming GPT-4 is “an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence system,” thrusting the term into mainstream use. It’s so happening. Later that year, after millions of people have used ChatGPT, and competitors start showing up, the mood changes. There are whispers of a plateau, and people start talking about practicality and open source. There’s early talk of a bubble from insiders. Nothing ever happens. But within a few months, Sam Altman is briefly fired by his safety-aware board, sparking rumors of something big coming. It’s 2024. AI video generation gets much better, which is aesthetically shocking, and a former OpenAI employee publishes an influential AGI-is-near paper. It’s happening. But wait….

Microsoft’s bets on becoming the Swiss Army knife of enterprise AI

The tech giant announced on Thursday that it is investing $2.5 billion in a new business unit, Microsoft Frontier, aimed at getting customers to better use its AI to transform their businesses and to address an area where many companies are struggling: delivering measurable outcomes and demonstrating a return on their AI investments. The unit will consist of 6,000 so-called forward-deployed engineers, or industry experts who will work directly with customers. Amazon, Anthropic and OpenAI have all announced groups for AI deployments this year….

Microsoft Frontier Co

Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, said the Forward Deployed Engineers effort stems from the realization that “customers are in very different places right now, and trying to really figure out AI.” Althoff credits data analytics software vendor Palantir with popularizing the FDE job title. The U.S. military, which keeps forward deployed forces abroad, has long relied on Palantir software, and the company sent FDEs to U.S. bases in Afghanistan, according to the prospectus for its 2020 direct listing….

Microsoft launches firm to help companies adopt AI

Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business, said the new firm was born partly out of Microsoft’s own experience when models such as China’s DeepSeek and Google’s Gemini began to catch up to OpenAI. “Three years ago, when we built Copilot, we made a mistake by binding it to OpenAI models only,” Althoff told Reuters. “You wanted models to amplify your intelligence and be able to have that sort of swappability for state-of-the-art and fine-tuning.” The combination of data and the models mattered more….

Your AI Agent Just Made a Deal. Can You Enforce It?

AI agents are negotiating agreements, executing services, and moving money autonomously. But when something goes wrong – who authorized the transaction? Under what terms? A new paper from AAA® President & CEO Bridget McCormack and Integra Ledger CEO David Fisher outlines a framework for trusted agentic commerce.

Read the full report

American Arbitration Association

Your AI Agent Just Made a Deal. Can You Enforce It?

AI agents are negotiating agreements, executing services, and moving money autonomously. But when something goes wrong – who authorized the transaction? Under what terms? A new paper from AAA® President & CEO Bridget McCormack and Integra Ledger CEO David Fisher outlines a framework for trusted agentic commerce.

Read the full report

American Arbitration Association

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AI and the nature of work

Six months ago, the AI sector was looking pretty bubbly. Companies were plowing hundreds of billions of dollars, much of it borrowed, into building new data centers, but had no clear path to profitability. Experts and journalists, myself included, were comparing the AI build-out to the railroad bubble of the 1800s and the dot-com bubble of the ’90s, in which speculation led to overinvestment that eventually crashed the stock market. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman voiced public doubts. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI?” he said last year. “My opinion is yes.” Today, however, we’re in a very different world. Software developers are adopting AI tools en masse and reporting astronomical productivity benefits.

This is where a debate superficially about finance turns out to hinge on deeper philosophical questions about the nature of human work. A separate school of thought holds that most knowledge-work tasks share the same basic structure, and thus can be automated. As a group of analysts at SemiAnalysis recently argued, all knowledge work, including coding, is made up of four basic components: consuming information (“Read”), applying existing knowledge (“Think”), producing a structured output (“Write”), and checking that output against some standard (“Verify”). Coding might have certain qualities that make it easier for AI to perform this basic four-step process—such as more data to read and objective standards to verify an output—but that doesn’t make the field unique.

For instance, even if no objective standard for a “good” academic paper or legal brief exists, experts in those fields tend to have a clear sense of better or worse. Perhaps AI systems could develop such a sense if given enough high-quality examples to learn from. “There’s clearly a spectrum here, with coding on one end and things with really hard-to-judge outputs, like short-form fiction writing, on the other,” Mollick, the University of Pennsylvania professor, told me. “But a lot of knowledge work—law, finance, consulting, marketing—falls somewhere in the middle. And many of the tasks in those jobs are probably closer to the coding side of things.”

AI companies are investing even more money into chips and infrastructure in anticipation of even more demand. But if the current boom turns out to be limited to coding, then by the time the new data centers are built, there won’t be enough customers to pay for them. Instead of turning a profit, the AI companies—not to mention the chipmakers, data-center builders, and cloud providers—will be stuck with huge losses on their books.

The next wave of AI

Here’s a real-life small business AI application with a high ROI: a showroom assistant. Picture a salesperson in a showroom walking around with a customer. But instead of taking notes, the salesperson has an app running on their phone that’s listening - and transcribing - the entire back-and-forth conversation. At the end of the visit, the application takes all that it’s learned and – acting as a layer on top of the company’s ERP and quoting system - generates a quote. It’s more accurate and significantly less time-consuming for the salesperson. But more importantly it frees up the salesperson to do what they were hired to do: generate more sales.

This is actually happening. This is just one of the AI applications being developed by Canals, an AI software development firm. It’s not replacing a company’s existing ERP system. It’s making these systems better.

“Many companies are still burdened by highly manual processes, particularly in sales order entry, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and warehouse operations,” said Michael Delgado, CEO of Canals. “Many salespeople spend most of their day re-keying customer information rather than serving customers or solving problems.” AI isn’t replacing ERP systems. It’s becoming a productivity layer that sits on top of them. Canals - and a growing number of other software companies - are developing applications that are using AI to automate all the manual process that come with customer emails, supplier information, sales orders, invoices, remittance notices, packing slips and all the other documents that employees are manually entering into their ERP system like Epicor, Infor and SAP. Serving approximately 100 distributors, Delgado says that the company’s aim is not to substitute as an ERP system but to help employees use these systems more efficiently.

For AI to prove its value, there has to be quantifiable ROI. There must be a measurable level of speed and accuracy that’s driving results. But for Delgado, the ROI isn’t labor savings, it’s increased sales. For him, the faster that quotes turnaround, the more business can be won. He references one customer of theirs that saw their win rate on quotes tripling because of their automation. Most AI vendors talk about cost reduction efficiency headcount. Delgado is talking about revenue. “It’s sales first,” he said. “You get a sales lift due to speed and accuracy.”.

Founder went from pressure washing to AI

The 24 year-old spent six summers pressure washing houses in upstate New York with his dad. Now he has a Wharton degree, and just raised $40 million from two of the most competitive names in venture capital to fix blue-collar and home services problems at scale. Probook, his New York-based startup.

The pitch starts with a grievance. Over the last few years, home service operators were sold an explosion of AI tools—voice agents, chat widgets, follow-up bots. They ended up with five vendors and bills growing faster than the revenue those tools promised. According to Eliadis, none of these products were built for dispatch—the part of the business where an operator decides which of 40 technicians goes to which of 150 jobs, in what order, with what expected ticket size.

“Dispatch is the brain of every home service business,” he told Fortune. “That’s where customer experience is made or broken.” So Probook built the scheduling brain first, then layered on everything else—answering calls, cleaning up job data, sending customer updates—in one connected system. The early numbers are promising: an Indiana customer with 14 locations and 260 technicians booked 2,542 jobs in its first month without a single human touching the booking. A Florida operator cut its dispatchers from 22 to 10. A Kansas shop did the same and grew its average job revenue by 20%. Probook’s sweetest customer right now is the private equity-backed home services rollup—think investment firms that have been quietly buying up local HVAC and plumbing shops across the country, bundling them under one roof, and squeezing out efficiencies. That acquisition pace hit 88% growth year-over-year through mid-2025. And Probook sells directly to owners who are laser-focused on profit margins.

The harder question is what happens with ServiceTitan. The $6.3 billion publicly traded company is the dominant software platform for home service businesses—and it already has its own AI scheduling product. For now, Probook is listed as a ServiceTitan partner, meaning the two technically work together rather than against each other. Eliadis calls them complementary. A16z GP David Haber called it “a years-old structural moat,” in a written statement. Still, ServiceTitan has $960 million in revenue and its own engineers. Eliadis was the company’s only salesperson until February of this year. He’s been to customers’ weddings. He’s slept on their couches.

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SpaceX’s huge AI IPO

Americans are growing worried about what artificial intelligence portends for their futures. Eight in 10 Americans report concern over AI, compared with a third who report being excited, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll. More than half think it will do more harm than good in their daily lives. Seven out of 10 think it will reduce the number of available jobs. Skeptical though they may be, they are about to get more AI rammed down their throats and stuck into their pension plans and their investment portfolios, whether they want it or not – binding their futures ever more tightly to the frenzied, risky, multibillion-dollar dash by technology moguls to develop machines capable of mimicking human thought processes to take over cognitive tasks.

First up is this week’s massive $75bn initial public offering (IPO) for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the largest ever, which at $135 a share will value the company at a cool $1.77tn, among the 10 largest companies in the world by market capitalization. While the company makes most of its money these days selling internet access, it largely needs the money to finance Musk’s vast AI ambitions, which include blasting datacenters into orbit.

The offering is just the first in a series: both Anthropic and OpenAI have already filed paperwork for their own IPOs later in the year, which will add two multitrillion-dollar artificial intelligence behemoths to the US’s main stock indices. Even investors who don’t care to buy their stock will end up owning a bunch, either in their 401(k) retirement plans or among their holdings of market index funds – supposedly safer investments for non-professional investors, built to reflect the entire market – which are forced to buy AI shares in proportion to their weighting in stock indices like the Nasdaq and the S&P. This may not happen right away, but it will happen. Musk has been lobbying for SpaceX to be quickly invited....

Read on The Guardian

SpaceX’s $60 billion Cursor takeover days after IPO

Technically, SpaceX had 30 days following its record-shattering public debut to decide on a $60 billion takeover of the AI coding startup Cursor. In the end, all it took was two trading days. Early Tuesday, SpaceX formally agreed to buy Cursor in a deal that will entitle the startup’s investors to SpaceX stock. In doing so, Elon Musk is signaling his desire for SpaceX’s xAI to rapidly rebuild and catch up to rivals including Anthropic PBC and OpenAI that have capitalized on demand for artificial intelligence-powered coding tools in a way that his AI business hasn’t.

It’s a shortcoming that Musk has personally acknowledged and had been trying to remedy long before Tuesday’s announcement: xAI employees had already been working for weeks alongside Cursor staff ahead of the potential acquisition. Cursor employees were, in fact, at xAI’s offices and collaborating on projects as part of a preexisting partnership.

Cursor now has more than 3,000 customers paying at least $100,000 each for its software on an annualized basis. In late April, the company’s annualized revenue hit $3 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, signaling that demand for the company’s AI coding software continues to grow.

Yet, Cursor has also faced heightened competition from the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, which have made meaningful strides improving their own AI coding tools. Cursor supports a wide range of models, including those from OpenAI and Anthropic, but has also been working to develop its own technology. For Cursor, the tie-up with SpaceX provides it with ample computing resources necessary to build and support AI coding tools, thanks to the Musk-led firm’s considerable stockpile of chips....

Read on Bloomberg

Inside the 24 hours that led the US to slap export controls on Anthropic

The Trump administration’s decision to impose sweeping export controls on Anthropic followed a frantic 24-hour effort by senior officials to convince the company to voluntarily pull a newly released artificial intelligence model that officials believed posed security risks, according to two administration officials and a senior White House official, who like others in this story were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the episode.

The move, which followed multiple tense calls between Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, underscores how the White House is wrestling in real-time with regulating fast-moving and potentially dangerous AI models.

The administration’s imposition of export controls forced Anthropic to pull its new AI model, Fable, just days after it was released to the public. Anthropic had given assurances that it was safe but soon after its release, top administration officials developed fresh doubts that the AI’s guardrails were as secure as the company had suggested.

On Thursday, two days after the model’s public release, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns to the White House about the ability to bypass the model’s guardrails, according to the two administration officials and the senior White House official. (Amazon, which is an investor in Anthropic, was responding to an administration request for feedback, said a person familiar with Amazon’s discussions.)

By Friday morning, the issue had reached the highest levels of the White House. Bessent, Cairncross, chief of staff Susie Wiles and other senior officials met to discuss the model and the administration’s response, according to the administration official and the senior White House official. Bessent joined remotely while traveling to Houston for a previously scheduled public event, one of them said. Following the meeting, the administration attempted to reach Amodei but was told he was unavailable because he was attending a wellness retreat, one of the administration officials and the senior White House official said. A spokesperson for Anthropic rejected the claim that he was at a wellness retreat, saying, “this is absolutely false.” A person close to Anthropic said Amodei was first requested around noon and was on the phone with senior officials within an hour and 15 minutes. While he was out of pocket, Anthropic offered other senior leaders in his place, the person said. When the administration finally reached Amodei, he participated in three calls with a combination of roughly half a dozen senior administration officials, including Cairncross, Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to the senior White House official and one of the administration officials.

Other senior White House staff and administration officials including Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security Jeffrey Kessler, White House staff secretary Will Scharf, White House deputy chief of staff Richard Walters, and assistant to the president for policy Walker Barrett also participated in some of the calls, according to the senior White House official. During the calls, Amodei tried to clear up what he assumed was a misunderstanding. He pushed back on the administration’s concerns, defended the guardrails and argued that the type of bypass that occurred, which he believed to be specific, did not pose the same risk as a broader “jailbreak” that would allow it to be used without any of the guardrails put in place by Anthropic….

Read on Politico

AI & LEADERSHIP

84% of SMBs use AI. Here’s what the smartest ones do differently.

AI adoption is happening fast and mostly from the bottom up. Employees are using ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and dozens of task-specific tools simultaneously, with no consistent guidelines, no approved platforms, and no security policy. That is not a strategy. That is organized chaos with occasional highlights.

Vistage’s research report, Provide and Protect: Gen AI Governance for CEOs, gives business leaders a practical framework for deploying AI with confidence so you can capture the upside without exposing your business to unnecessary risk.

WHY VISTAGE

Don’t let isolation stall you. Grow faster and outlast the competition with Vistage.

The higher you climb, the fewer people truly understand the weight of your decisions. Internal teams are too close to daily operations to see the blind spots. Advisors have their own agendas. And going it alone is the most expensive habit a CEO can have.

Vistage brings you into a confidential group of experienced CEOs and a dedicated executive coach. Together you pressure-test strategies, challenge assumptions, and hold each other accountable. No politics. No agendas. Just the perspectives you actually need.

✓ One-on-one coaching from an accomplished executive Chair

✓ CEO peer groups designed to sharpen strategy and eliminate blind spots

✓ Strategic planning support grounded in real-world experience

✓ Access to a global network of 45,000 business leaders

AI & LEADERSHIP

84% of SMBs use AI. Here’s what the smartest ones do differently.

AI adoption is happening fast and mostly from the bottom up. Employees are using ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and dozens of task-specific tools simultaneously, with no consistent guidelines, no approved platforms, and no security policy. That is not a strategy. That is organized chaos with occasional highlights.

Vistage’s research report, Provide and Protect: Gen AI Governance for CEOs, gives business leaders a practical framework for deploying AI with confidence so you can capture the upside without exposing your business to unnecessary risk.

WHY VISTAGE

Don’t let isolation stall you. Grow faster and outlast the competition with Vistage.

The higher you climb, the fewer people truly understand the weight of your decisions. Internal teams are too close to daily operations to see the blind spots. Advisors have their own agendas. And going it alone is the most expensive habit a CEO can have.

Vistage brings you into a confidential group of experienced CEOs and a dedicated executive coach. Together you pressure-test strategies, challenge assumptions, and hold each other accountable. No politics. No agendas. Just the perspectives you actually need.

✓ One-on-one coaching from an accomplished executive Chair

✓ CEO peer groups designed to sharpen strategy and eliminate blind spots

✓ Strategic planning support grounded in real-world experience

✓ Access to a global network of 45,000 business leaders

APPOINTIBLE: THE BOOKING SYSTEM BUILT FOR SERVICE BUSINESS OWNERS

Every service business owner deserves scheduling software that works for them, not the other way around.

The use case: Appointible is booking software built for owners who run their business on appointments. You get online booking, automated SMS reminders, team calendars, and a real person on the phone to help you move your data over, so you can get your evenings back. No setup fees. No credit card to start. Just bookings that fit how you work.

Step-by-step:

1. Appointible is free to start today, with up to 4 users and 200 appointments a month, forever. When you’re ready for more, upgrade to Pro at $5 per user a month billed yearly, and use code ALLEY20 for 20% off your order, which brings it down to just $4 per user a month.

1. Everything runs from one place: online booking, automated reminders, room scheduling, a simple CRM, and automatic review requests after every visit.

2. Open Appointible and add your services, hours, and team. Your booking page, calendar, and automated reminders go live in minutes.

3. Share your booking link. Clients book themselves online any time, day or night, while you get back to the work you do best.

Pro tip: Use code ALLEY20 at checkout to take 20% off Pro, so your first year runs $4 per user a month instead of $5. Most switches stall during migration, so we move yours for free with a real person, and you don’t pay until your last appointment is moved.

Start Appointible free now →

AI goes apocalyptic

Apocalyptic thinking is the strongest impulse in American capitalism today. Elon Musk, a character who could be straight from Mackay’s pages, will soon float SpaceX, a rocket company whose professed mission is to avert existential threats to humanity by establishing a colony on Mars. Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra.

Mr Musk is rushing to list before two other prophets with similarly millenarian worldviews. Anthropic filed paperwork for a public offering this week. Dario Amodei, its boss, has made much of the destructive potential of his firm’s Mythos model, which has thus far been kept from the public. OpenAI, run by Sam Altman, will probably file its paperwork soon. The lab recently published a utopian plan for the social contract after (or, rather, under) AI.

Debates about regulating AI have taken an evangelical turn. Peter Thiel, a tech investor, says AI will summon the Antichrist in the form of authoritarian rules. “Merely regulating it is insufficient,” wrote Pope Leo XIV in a 40,000-word essay on AI last month. “It must be disarmed.” A new tune by Charli XCX, a pop star, captures both the papal and the popular mood: “Spring, Summer ’26/When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it/Yeah, we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell.”

Much of Wall Street is in a fatalistic mood. The list of financial innovations central bankers say pose “systemic” risks to the economy is so long it’s hard to believe the system hasn’t collapsed under the weight of its own anxiety. Predictions of total and irreversible change certainly have their uses: there is no stronger pitch to investors than claiming your business will end the world as we know it....

Read on The Economist

A feast for the ages

They promise to be the biggest stockmarket debuts in history. On June 11th SpaceX reportedly hopes to raise $75bn from investors, by issuing shares that will begin trading on the Nasdaq exchange the next day. Elon Musk’s rocketry firm will probably soon be followed by two other mammoth listings. Anthropic, an artificial-intelligence lab, filed draft paperwork for its initial public offering on June 1st; OpenAI, a competitor, is expected to do so soon. The two are rumoured to be seeking as much as $60bn apiece.

A broader worry still is that the giga-IPOs herald more capital-raising, both by the newly listed tech giants and their older peers. For years, notes Victor Haghani of Elm Wealth, an investment firm, capital has been abundant and shares increasingly scarce. Tech giants have generated so much cash that they have been buying back shares rather than issuing new ones at the same time as white-collar workers have ploughed retirement savings into the market. This has driven up share prices.

Now the tech behemoths are slowing share buy-backs or halting them altogether, instead reinvesting their profits to develop AI. Several have turned to the bond market for more capital. This month Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, said it would issue $85bn in new shares. And the club’s newest members are tapping the stockmarket.

The answer is: lots of investors in an extraordinarily deep and liquid market. Unprecedented as the serving of supersized IPOs is, America’s extraordinary stockmarket will gulp it down. In the years to follow, though, expect some indigestion....

Read on The Economist

AI’s reality check has arrived

The past few days have been full of bad news for the AI industry. The headlines paint a picture of an industry confronting growing pushback on multiple fronts, from political and regulatory headwinds to disappointing financial returns.

In a notable shift in tone, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that artificial intelligence is unlikely to trigger the “jobs apocalypse” he had previously warned about. Speaking virtually at a Commonwealth Bank event in Sydney, Altman downplayed earlier predictions of widespread job displacement, admitting his early economic intuitions were “pretty wrong” regarding immediate white-collar layoffs. Altman said the hit to entry-level office work has been significantly smaller than he expected.

AI company executives have sometimes dramatized the potential negative effects of AI as a way of hyping the power of their models. But now that popular resistance to the technology, born partly of job-loss fears, is threatening the construction of new data centers, AI companies may be trying to tone down the rhetoric….

Read on Fast Company

APPOINTIBLE: THE BOOKING SYSTEM BUILT FOR SERVICE BUSINESS OWNERS

Every service business owner deserves scheduling software that works for them, not the other way around.

The use case: Appointible is booking software built for owners who run their business on appointments. You get online booking, automated SMS reminders, team calendars, and a real person on the phone to help you move your data over, so you can get your evenings back. No setup fees. No credit card to start. Just bookings that fit how you work.

Step-by-step:

1. Appointible is free to start today, with up to 4 users and 200 appointments a month, forever. When you’re ready for more, upgrade to Pro at $5 per user a month billed yearly, and use code ALLEY20 for 20% off your order, which brings it down to just $4 per user a month.

1. Everything runs from one place: online booking, automated reminders, room scheduling, a simple CRM, and automatic review requests after every visit.

2. Open Appointible and add your services, hours, and team. Your booking page, calendar, and automated reminders go live in minutes.

3. Share your booking link. Clients book themselves online any time, day or night, while you get back to the work you do best.

Pro tip: Use code ALLEY20 at checkout to take 20% off Pro, so your first year runs $4 per user a month instead of $5. Most switches stall during migration, so we move yours for free with a real person, and you don’t pay until your last appointment is moved.

Start Appointible free now →

Anthropic gets ahead of rival OpenAI with stock market filing

Anthropic has filed confidentially for an initial public offering on the US stock market, the company announced on Monday. The AI firm makes the Claude chatbot, popular with software engineers and other business clients, and has seen a meteoric rise this year.

The company did not disclose the valuation it will target on the stock market, nor did it make public other terms of the offering. The startup announced on Thursday that it had raised $65bn in funding to value the company at $965bn post-money. Anthropic was valued at $380bn in February.

Anthropic’s filing continues the company’s banner year, as well as pre-empts its rival OpenAI, which is expected to imminently file for its own IPO. Anthropic’s latest valuation also meant that the company leapfrogged OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable startup.

The filing underscores the rising financial stakes of AI race as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are all slated to go public this year. SpaceX has filed for a stock market float at a valuation of about $1.75tn as it seeks $75bn in investment....

Read on The Guardian

How Microsoft lost its way in the AI race

Redmond, Washington, mid-January 2026. The weather, cold and gray. It’s the kind of morning the snooze button was built for. But the team of engineers camped out in Building 92 on Microsoft’s sprawling campus got here early. They are in a race. And they are behind.

The team is working on a new AI product, one that functions as a personal assistant, capable of doing everything from booking flights to responding to emails to finding a good local plumber. They know competing teams at other companies are working on similar products. As if they needed a reminder that a lot is riding on their work, Satya Nadella drops by. He wants to show them something.

The Microsoft CEO opens a laptop and fires up an application. It’s a kind of system for instructing and controlling multiple AI agents. He calls it “Chain of Debate.” As Nadella walks them through the demo, the engineers trade knowing looks, the sort regulars at the local basketball court exchange when they realize a newbie’s got game. Because Nadella didn’t get someone to build this app for him. He created it himself, vibe coding with an AI tool. “That set the tone for how hard the team was going to push,” recalls Jacob Andreou, the executive vice president responsible for the design of Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant. He was in the room with folks, like over their shoulder, there with his machine out....

Read on Fortune

Anthropic jolts market for hot Pre-IPO shares

In the moments after Anthropic expanded a ban on popular ways to buy its shares, investor chatrooms around the world lit up.

“Are we screwed?” one person wrote in a WhatsApp chat for family offices with several hundred members. Similar questions reverberated more publicly across X, Reddit and Chinese-language social media, as investors worried whether their shares in the artificial intelligence developer — one of the most coveted private companies — had suddenly become worthless.

Days later, there is little clarity. Anthropic PBC issued a stern warning on its website last week about unauthorized sales, taking the unusual step of naming eight firms whose offerings would be considered void. It also expressly prohibited investors from buying shares through special purpose vehicles, a common tool to raise financing.

Both Anthropic and rival OpenAI have long warned against unauthorized transactions — fine print overlooked by eager buyers until last week when the Claude maker removed any ambiguity. Publicly traded funds touting exposure have plunged on the back of the update and private brokers are reeling….

Read on Bloomberg

The use case: Otis is the world’s first cinematic AI experience — a wise elder on a cinematic porch at sunset, back turned, ready to talk through your hardest business decisions, leadership challenges, and high stakes conversations. No scheduling. No small talk. Just honest wisdom on demand.

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The vibes are off at OpenAI

OpenAI’s current batch of public controversies started early in the year. At the end of February, the company agreed to an apparently expansive Pentagon contract that its competitor Anthropic had refused to sign out of concerns about autonomous weapons.

Then came the product announcements. Last month, OpenAI unexpectedly announced it would discontinue Sora, an AI video-generation app that it had planned to roll into ChatGPT. It exited its Disney partnership so rapidly that the companies had reportedly been working together just 30 minutes before Disney found out about the shutdown.

“We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” OpenAI’s Fidji Simo reportedly told employees last month, as the company announced it would pivot to focusing on enterprise and coding tools. Even its once-heralded Stargate data center project may have largely stalled.

At the start of this week, a piece in The New Yorker expanded on years of reports of Altman potentially misleading OpenAI’s board, former company executives, and even contemporaries in roles he held before cofounding OpenAI.

As the pressure builds to square OpenAI’s revenue with its nearly unprecedented spending, the company is looking to put its compute behind projects with the highest profit potential. It’s attempting to catch up to leading rival Anthropic’s current popularity in coding, while also facing significant competition from Google, since Gemini is well integrated within Google’s ecosystem of apps and tools. It’s possible the company will find a way to pull ahead — but things may not be going as smoothly as Altman hopes....

Read on The Verge

Silicon Valley forgot what normal people want

What NFTs, AI and the metaverse tell us about “thought leadership”!

One of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made. Recently, I ran into an acquaintance of mine, who began talking my ear off about an amazing discovery he’d made with LLMs. Knowledge, it turns out, is structured into language! You could put one word into ChatGPT and it might understand what you wanted, or make up a word and see if it understood what you meant! These amazing new tools have revealed that the English corpus contains so much about its speakers! - He concluded that LLMs are a discovery on par with writing.

While this particular kind of hubris makes people crashing bores, it’s not just an annoying personal trait. It seems to have seeped into the professional side of Silicon Valley as well.

Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future. My guess is that they’re aping what they thought Steve Jobs was doing when he, for instance, got rid of the optical drives on the MacBook Air. At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it.

The people who tell us that AI will dominate our future and take our jobs are the people who are hoping that will be true. They may be hoping this because it makes them feel important, or because they want to be billionaires, or because they simply do not understand other people. I think that final point is underestimated. If you are going to provide me with a robot servant, I have a very clear bar: It’s gotta be at least as much bang for my buck as my dishwasher. (famously people’s #1 task for future robots is - do the dishes surveys say)

The actual use for LLMs in most normal people’s lives is cheating on schoolwork. For adults, it’s looking up information — LLMs are in the process of supplanting Google Search. Google had been degrading its search project for some time, and the results just kept getting worse. This opened the door for an alternative, and the LLMs stepped through.

How is it that all these wunderkinds trying to build the next product to take over the world haven’t thought about this? I think the answer is simple. They do not have much in common with normal people, and haven’t thought much about what normal people’s lives are like, or what normal people value. What they have been doing instead is getting high on their own supply — listening to VC podcasts, freaking themselves out about whether they’ll be able to keep up with AI agents, and otherwise getting increasingly more detached from reality.

The hubristic entrepreneurs (and the VCs who need them) are a relatively small slice of the population. It may be the case that the real way to shape the future isn’t to dictate it to consumers. It is simpler just to give people things they actually want….

Read on The Verge

Apple debuts Business Service that includes offering Ads in Map

Apple Inc. introduced a new platform that helps businesses manage devices and reach customers, in part by making it easier to advertise on its Maps app. The offering — called Apple Business — lets users configure employee groups and device settings, the company said in a statement Tuesday. The free service will be available April 14 in more than 200 countries and regions, Apple said.

Apple Business, a new platform for businesses of all kinds that combines cloud services, device management, and collaboration features into one system.Businesses may use the platform to control staff devices, set up applications, and set up email and calendars for their own use. It also has iCloud storage choices and AppleCare+ subscription programs. Companies in the U.S. and Canada will be allowed to put ads at the top of search results and in suggested places. This is a sign that Apple is expanding its advertising business outside its usual offerings.

Apple is more interested in getting businesses to use its products and services, especially because it wants to get more corporate customers….

Read on Bloomberg

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How AI is transforming the C-suite

Mastercard is betting the next wave of AI won’t just analyze transactions — it will help run companies. The payments giant is building what it calls a “Virtual C-Suite,” a group of AI agents designed to give small businesses the kind of financial and operational insights typically reserved for large corporations. The first digital executive, a virtual CFO, is expected to launch later this year through Mastercard’s network of financial institutions, accounting firms, and software partners. A virtual CFO helps owners manage cash flow, working capital, and financial risk.

“Many small-business owners are stretched thin—acting as CEO, CFO, and COO all at once,” Mark Barnett, Mastercard’s global head of small and medium enterprises, told me. The timing may be significant for small businesses, which support the U.S. economy but continue to grapple with economic uncertainty. U.S. small-business sentiment fell again last month, slipping from 99.3 in January to 98.8 in February, according to a report by the National Federation of Independent Business released on Tuesday. The net share of owners expecting higher real sales dropped 8 points, erasing the strong gains seen earlier this year.

At the same time, many small companies can’t afford a full-time finance chief—the kind of expertise that can help navigate an uncertain environment. Instead, they are increasingly turning to fractional or virtual CFOs, a trend that is growing quickly....

Read the original on Fortune

Facebook and AI. It’s actually paying off

Meta Platforms(Facebook) doesn’t sell artificial-intelligence services or data-center capacity, but it might be reaping some of the richest benefits from the AI boom so far. Meta offered evidence that AI is helping its advertising-business boom like never before. “I think what we’re seeing is sort of a sustainable trend that’s largely grounded in some of the AI investments that they’ve made,” said Benjamin Black, an internet analyst at Deutsche Bank.

“Our world-class recommendation systems are already driving meaningful growth across our apps and ads business. But we think that the current systems are primitive compared to what will be possible soon,” Mark Zuckerberg said on a call with investors and analysts.

Those actions led users to click on ads on Facebook 3.5% more often and to a gain of more than 1% in conversions, meaning purchases, subscriptions or leads, on Instagram, she said. Other AI-related improvements led to a 3% increase in conversions across its family of apps. On the ad-buying side, Meta has also been working toward using AI to automate ad creation for businesses that want to advertise their products or services on Facebook and Instagram. “The more compute the ad platform gets, the far better it performs, and that’s a real structural advantage that Meta has,” said Black, the internet analyst….

Read the original on Wall Street Journal

Google for Nonprofits 10+ new no-cost AI tools

Google for Nonprofits is introducing new Workspace for Nonprofits and Ad Grants features free of charge to support nonprofits in furthering their missions. However, only one in five nonprofits report that at least half their organization uses AI — and this is despite nearly nine out of 10 reporting a positive productivity gain when using AI apps and features. Today Google for Nonprofits is launching three new updates to help nonprofits build AI capacity to continue to serve their communities.

With Workspace for Nonprofits, organizations can help up to 2,000 employees or volunteers do their best work every day at no-cost across Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Meet, NotebookLM and Gemini app. Now, more than 10 additional features are included with enterprise security and data protections through the no-cost Workspace for Nonprofits plan. These include NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews — lively deep dive discussions between two AI hosts who can summarize key topics from your sources in more than 50 languages — and Gemini’s Deep Research, which helps save hours by browsing the web, analyzing information and developing comprehensive research reports in real-time.

Ad Grants can now run on eligible Google Maps’ placements. For more than 20 years, Ad Grants has driven more than 14 billion visits to nonprofits’ websites from no-cost Search ads. With new AI-powered features, like Performance Max Ad Grants campaigns, organizations are able to increase their reach to even more people. Now, we’re expanding Ad Grants to run on eligible Google Maps placements in Performance Max campaigns free of charge. Ads can appear beside, above or below search results on Google Maps, including the Maps app, allowing nonprofits to engage people at a local level. Since its inception, Google.org has provided more than $18 billion in donated products to nonprofits.

How Google Ad Grants works you’ll receive $10,000 USD of in-kind advertising from Google each month to create text-based ads, and get access to tools to help you build effective campaigns that can display on Google Search and Maps....

Read the original on Google.org

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Doomsday AI report goes viral

A new article offering an apocalyptic vision of humanity’s future with artificial intelligence has gone viral and caused stock prices to tumble in major tech and financial firms. “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” published Sunday by Citrini Research, strikes a doomsday tone about the looming threat of AI to white-collar work, and what could potentially lead to a “global intelligence crisis.”

“For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input,” wrote Citrini Research in the report. “We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium.” It continued: “Machine intelligence is now a competent and rapidly improving substitute for human intelligence across a growing range of tasks. The financial system, optimized over decades for a world of scarce human minds, is repricing. That repricing is painful, disorderly, and far from complete.”

The authors noted the article was not a prediction, but a hypothetical situation as if it were June 2028, and posed the question of whether “our AI bullishness continues to be right…and what if that’s actually bearish?” Despite the cautionary note, the article spread like wildfire Monday. Shares in software firms that utilize AI - Datadog, CrowdStrike and Zscaler - each dropped more than 9 percent. IBM, which has an integrated AI development studio Watsonx, also saw its stock drop 13 percent, in its worst one-day performance since 2000. American Express, KKR and Blackstone, all mentioned in the Citrini post, also fell, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The fears of AI disruption are “happening sooner than most folks anticipated,” Jordan Rizzuto, chief investment officer for investment strategy research firm GammaRoad Capital Partners, told the Journal. “Such is the nature of an accelerating technology.”....

Read the original on Citrini Research

Some AI gig workers make $1,000 an hour

A common proclamation made by tech leaders is that while artificial intelligence will destroy jobs, it will also create many new ones. But what kinds of new careers will AI spark? And, more importantly, will they last? Few spell out what will replace the swathes of white-collar roles that could be automated out of existence in the coming years. New forms of employment such as AI researchers and prompt engineers are few and far between.

There is one clear example of “new work” being triggered by AI: professional trainers for the software models. Several startups with names like Surge AI (valued last year at $25 billion) and Turing (valued at $2.2 billion, according to Pitchbook) populate a new market hiring white-collar professionals to train AI systems, usually as contractors, to form a new kind of office-worker gig economy. Among the biggest is Mercor.io Corp., founded in 2023 in San Francisco and valued at $10 billion, and frequently named as one of the fastest growing startups in AI. Around 30,000 people from a wide range of disciplines — lawyers, doctors, financial consultants, cooks, osteopaths — are paid hourly by Mercor to train AI models to become more proficient in those fields, often for clients like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Mercor plans to grow its contractor base “by many orders of magnitude,” founder and Chief Executive Officer Brendan Foody tells me.

Their work is done in secret, protected by hefty non-disclosure agreements, and is technically challenging. Contractors sometimes create scoring guides known as “evals” or “rubrics,” which are then used to teach AI models and evaluate their responses, a bit like designing the bar exam to test human lawyers. Grim and paradoxical as it seems to train an AI that could replace you, Mercor’s contractors say the pay is excellent. One of them, who declined to be identified, told me they’ll never make as much money as they are right now.

But let’s presume there are roughly 100,000 professionals doing expert AI training work today, on top of the millions more doing the traditional low-paid data labeling. It is hard to tell if this will be the new form of work that fills the hole AI could leave in labor markets, while many other jobs morph. But for this new generation of professional gig workers, the future looks murky when you consider what happened to the older market of lower-paid data labelers. Many are now being squeezed out of their roles, with software handling simpler tasks and the new, expert trainers taking over complex ones….

Read the original on Bloomberg

Reuters scales AI for regulated industries

One million professionals have chosen CoCounsel, the company’s professional-grade AI technology, across 107 countries and territories. The milestone reflects a broader transition underway across high-stakes industries including legal, risk, compliance, tax, accounting, audit and global trade professionals. AI is moving from experimentation to production. Rather than standalone tools, firms are embedding AI directly into daily workflows where accuracy, sourcing, and data protection are essential.

It integrates into the tools professionals already use, analyzes licensed content refined over 175 years, incorporates expert-developed validation logic, and delivers structured, citation-backed outputs. “Professionals are not deciding whether to use AI anymore. They are deciding which AI they trust when their reputation and their clients’ data are on the line,” said Steve Hasker, President and Chief Executive Officer, Thomson Reuters. “CoCounsel is built for moments when being almost right is not good enough. It is grounded in decades of authoritative content, validated by domain experts.

The next generation of CoCounsel Legal, entering beta soon, is designed around conversational task execution. Soon, legal professionals within law firms and corporations, will be able to describe an objective as they would brief a colleague. CoCounsel will build a plan, retrieve authority from Westlaw and Practical Law, search relevant user documents and precedent, analyze the material, verify that citations remain in good law, and deliver structured work product within a single system....

Read the original on PR newswire

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At some point, your job changes. You probably thought you were done managing inboxes, double-checking CRMs, or chasing follow-ups across Slack threads.

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The next level of growth isn’t about adding more tools. It’s about removing yourself from the middle of routine execution.

That’s where Wing comes in. Wing embeds managed support into the parts of your business that require steady follow-through—sales, operations, admin, and customer support.

• Follow-ups

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Inside Apple’s AI shake-up

In June 2025, I reported on a major inflection point inside Apple Inc. After a disappointing launch of the Apple Intelligence platform and delays to a new Siri digital assistant, software chief Craig Federighi and other executives were seriously considering sidelining the company’s internal AI models in favor of a third-party provider. The story sent shockwaves through Apple’s foundation models team, which builds its underlying AI technology. Beyond the reputational sting, the report raised existential questions about the future of the group — and the jobs of its employees. Within hours of that story’s publication on June 30, Apple’s top AI leadership moved to contain the fallout.

Mike Rockwell, who oversees Siri, and John Giannandrea, then Apple’s head of AI, convened an emergency all-hands meeting with the foundation models team. The message from leadership was unequivocal: Apple wasn’t putting its own models on the back burner. Rockwell even dismissed the article as “bulls--t,” according to people in the meeting. Few in the room were persuaded. It was obvious that Apple Intelligence lagged behind rival platforms and that the Siri delay was deeply embarrassing. The company was at risk of missing the biggest technology shift since the internet, and seeking outside help made a lot of sense. Over the following months, the models group steadily lost talent — including its leader, Ruoming Pang.

At the time, the company was already in discussions with both Anthropic PBC and OpenAI about supplying models to rebuild Siri and power parts of Apple Intelligence. At the start, Google wasn’t considered a likely partner for this. The Alphabet Inc.-owned company wasn’t seen as the leading tech provider. By August, negotiations with Anthropic had stalled. The startup was seeking several billion dollars annually over multiple years, terms that weren’t favorable to Apple. And partnering with OpenAI posed its own problems: That company was actively poaching Apple engineers and pursuing its own hardware. That left Google....

Read the original on Bloomberg

***

AI’s next frontier

The English engineer, Henry Mill, submitted the first-ever patent for a “machine transcribing letters” in 1714. It never actually went into production, but it was a forerunner of the typewriter and then the electronic keyboard: 312 years later, Christian Klein, CEO of software giant SAP, is noting the end of an era. “The end of the keyboard is near,” he tells me. “When you encounter voice recognition from many of these large language models, [it] is super strong. Now we have to do some work to translate voice into business language and business data.” SAP’s prediction that “data-inputting” via typing will end in the next two to three years at the firm has significance well beyond the death of QWERTY.

“The future will be, for sure, that you are not typing any data information into an SAP system. You can instead ask certain analytical questions with your voice. You can trigger operational task workflows. You can also make entries in the system with your voice—performance feedback, pipeline entries, et cetera. The technological capabilities are there, it really is now about the execution.”

He argues that there are two broad categories of businesses when it comes to AI adoption. First, the company that says, “AI is really changing the way I run my business.” Then the other that says, “I invested a ton of money, but I see rather low value in it.” The latter might be viewing AI as an efficiency hack for one division or function. The issue here is that there is no reach across to other parts of the firm.

He gives an example of a large consumer goods company SAP is working with which is beginning to link customer-demand planning with company financial planning and then with inventory control—a laborious, often monthslong process. “They said, ‘Okay, this agent really is predicting the demand much more intelligently than all the human beings I had in planning,’” he said. “‘But it still always takes months until I adjust the inventory—and the inventory is dependent on procurement and the manufacturing side.’ So we are now building, with agents, an end-to-end planning scenario which helps them optimize inventory by 20%. This is real money.”

Applying AI horizontally throughout the business, rather than vertically in divisions, is key. Add in training of your employees, and the transformational effects of AI can finally begin to be realized....

Read the original on Fortune

***

CEO of Glassdoor and Indeed - AI is not replacing workers

Diane Brady talks to Recruit Holdings CEO about current hiring and firing trends. As CEO of Recruit Holdings, the $23 billion-a-year parent of Indeed and Glassdoor, among others, Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba thinks a lot about global labor markets. Down in Europe; up everywhere else.

Only a small fraction of layoffs are directly attributed to AI so far. Yet perceptions among workers (especially Gen Z) are far more pessimistic, feeding distrust and “AI anxiety.” “People are screaming that AI is replacing people. That’s totally not true. We’re not seeing that kind of data at all,” he told me. (U.S. employment data and my conversations with other leaders reinforce that conclusion.) Tech layoffs are highly visible but represent a small share of total employment; he believes they reflect post‑pandemic over‑hiring more than AI‑driven job destruction.

Big changes are coming in terms of how leaders source and assess talent. AI is creating a host of new challenges for employers, from generating a tsunami of automated applications—often in the millions for Fortune 500 companies—to enabling applicants to hide deficits in writing, thinking and analysis because of LLMs. As a result, sites like Indeed are playing a bigger role in verifying qualified candidates to narrow the funnel, even doing basic background checks upfront and helping employers assess how the roles they’re hiring for are likely to evolve. “Your team is spending a crazy amount of time on this,” he said. “This year, I think CEOs will be a little more sophisticated about the ROI.”

His teams are designing AI agents to reach out to job seekers on behalf of employers on his platforms, to screen and interact with applicants. Not only does that ease the workload and cut costs for HR teams, it creates better interactions with applicants and hopefully more affection for the employer’s brand, even if they don’t end up getting hired….

Read the original on Fortune

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Life template for the AI era

Most of us are still living by an Industrial Age life script — learn, work, retire. Yet, AI with human-like capabilities, able to operate around the clock, is making that script irrelevant. Businesses are at the forefront of this shift — they operate at the edge of change, where new skill demands surface long before traditional systems can respond. For the past century, the broad framework for life progression — learning, career, retirement — has been largely unchanged. Innovation did occur within each stage, yet it did so largely within the existing framework, and new pathways to support a more fluid reality have not materialized at scale. And while AI is now seen as indispensable in the workplace, with businesses considering its use critical to adaptation, teachers are struggling with how to integrate it into the educational experience.

Our scaffolding for work and retirement similarly lacks the plasticity needed to support more dynamic career paths and people’s desire to continue making meaningful contributions into later life. Longer lifespans and rapid skill turnover suggest careers will be more fluid and people will have to cycle through multiple “learn – unlearn – relearn – work” phases over a lifetime, with periods of renewal built in. Finally, we lack widely-adopted pathways for late career contributions. Too often, experienced workers end up competing for roles optimized for early-career strengths, when competencies that often deepen with experience – judgment under ambiguity, systems thinking, the ability to mentor, to de-escalate, to build trust — could deliver significant value. Intentional redesign must yield systems that allow for a gradual ramp-down without losing status, income, or belonging.

Education, work, and retirement are ultimately institutional answers to fundamental societal needs: turning people into capable, value-anchored individuals who can navigate and improve their world; converting human potential into value, for oneself and society; and providing structured support for the work transition that comes with age, health changes or changing priorities.

In the US, apprenticeships have historically been associated with the trades, but that’s changing. At Cognizant, we’re partnering with educational institutions on paid apprenticeships that offer work-based learning and serve as early talent pipelines. A new life template also needs explicit structures for later-life contribution, with recognized roles and pathways that enable workers to change how they contribute over time. With life expectancy at around 78 years in the US and evidence linking a strong sense of purpose to better cognitive health. Businesses play a critical role in building a new, integrated system of learning and work because they see change first. They own the tools and data shaping modern work, and they sense when a capability becomes obsolete or when a new one is needed....

Read the original on Fortune

***

Recruiters vs AI

Manny harried recruiters would have greeted the release of ChatGPT with glee. At last, a tool that could ease the burden of drafting job descriptions, scheduling interviews and rejecting candidates. Like happy beachgoers who cannot see an approaching tsunami, they failed to predict what came next. A giant wave of AI- generated applications has washed over them. The number of job applications an average candidate sends has risen by 239% since ChatGPT’s release in 2022, according to global data collected by Greenhouse, a provider of applicant-tracking software. Paid services like LazyApply and aiApply let candidates submit applications while they sleep, tailoring résumés and cover letters to a tee.

AI has even made it easier for spies and fraudsters to infiltrate companies. Last month Amazon blocked 1,800 applications from North Koreans applying for remote IT jobs. Gartner, a consultancy, predicts that by 2028 as many as one in four candidate profiles could be fake. Inundated recruiters are taking various steps in response. Some are politely asking candidates to refrain from using chatbots. Anthropic, an AI lab, asks candidates not to submit entirely AI- generated cover letters. So does Mastercard, a payments provider. Others are capping the number of applications a person can submit. OpenAI, another AI lab, limits candidates to a maximum of five over a six-month period. Companies are also speeding up their use of AI to help winnow the growing pile of résumés and cover letters. Two-thirds of recruiters plan to increase their use of the technology to conduct screening calls, according to data from LinkedIn, a social network for professionals. Many also use AI to sift through applications and flag those that match the criteria for a job, though firms such as KPMG, a professional-services giant, are keen to emphasize that humans make final decisions. AI models can even recommend applicants for one role as candidates for another, says Alicia Pittman, who directs hiring for BCG, a consultancy. Still, the time it takes for companies to fill vacancies has declined only slightly since 2021, according to Ashby, a recruiting-software company. When it comes to adopting AI, recruiters face a structural disadvantage compared with job applicants, reckons Robert Newry, co-founder of Arctic Shores, a psychometric testing firm. Jobseekers need not worry whether an AI tool will run afoul of anti-discrimination or data-protection laws. They do not need to check with their boss or IT department before adopting the latest technology. “I say to my clients: ‘In the arms race between you and the candidate, you will lose,’” says Mr Newry.

Eventually the rise of AI may change hiring more fundamentally. Companies could rely more on tasks that cannot be pasted into chatbots, such as visual puzzles, says Mr Newry. They might also rely more on finding candidates before they even think to apply. Juicebox, a recruitment startup, offers a service called “PeopleGPT” that automates the process of hunting for possible hires across the web. It says that many of its clients have reduced the time it takes to find candidates by half. LinkedIn has rolled out a “Hiring Assistant” for recruiters that trawls the site for suitable candidates.

Companies may one day abandon the job application entirely, to the delight of recruiters and candidates alike. Daniel Chait, boss of Greenhouse, reckons that both sides will eventually use AI agents to talk to one another and determine whether they might be a match. “We’re at the point today where it’s automating tasks,” Mr Chait says. “I’m eager to get to the part where we can think about why we have job posts at all.” Until then, recruiters will have to wade through a sea of em-dashes and eerily polished résumés as they search for the perfect hire....

Read the original on the Economist

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Gemini AI-powered Electric Vehicle

Volvo’s ground-breaking, mid-sized electric SUV will be the first to ship with Google’s Gemini AI assistant already baked in, allowing for more natural conversations between occupants and the car itself. Combining hardware from Nvidia and Qualcomm with both Google and in-house developed software, Volvo says its brilliantly-named ‘HuginCore’ system is powerful enough to deliver highly personalized and deeply integrated responses via Google’s Gemini voice assistant.

Complex tasks can be managed through more natural and “multi-turn” conversation, rather than drivers having to remember specific commands or by having to prod various menus that pop up on the touchscreen display. Volvo gives a number of potential use cases for the technology, such as searching for a hotel booking address in a linked email account (Gmail presumably works best), checking if a recently bought item fits in your EX60 trunk, or brainstorming ideas for an upcoming road trip.

Rather than merely acting as a built-in voice assistant that takes care of a limited amount of vehicle functionality, Gemini integration means drivers and occupants can deal with life admin via any linked Google services, as well as ask more generic questions. It’s also tipped to play nicely with Google Maps, which has become widely regarded as the dominant mapping and navigation service for drivers. This means owners can check if locations are open and even book hotels and restaurants on the move with natural voice prompts, in theory at least. The next-generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platform from Qualcomm provides the highest levels of processing power ever seen on a Volvo, while Nvidia’s latest Drive AGX Orin system-on-a-chip runs the operating system as a whole. Combined, this is said to offer a lag-free infotainment system with maps that load instantly and voice assistants that don’t take an age to compute the request and respond.

The race is now on for automotive manufacturers to deliver AI-powered voice assistants that are actually useful. Up until this point, they have been clunky, to say the least, with response times long and multiple attempts often required to get the desired answer….

Read the original on TechRadar

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Anthropic’s new ‘Cowork’ AI agent

Anthropic’s Claude Code tool is having a moment: It’s recently become popular among software developers for its use of agents to write code, run tests, call tools, and multitask. In recent months the company has begun to stress that Claude Code isn’t just for developers, but can let other kinds of workers build websites, create presentations, and do research—and stories about non-coders completing interesting projects have filled social media.

The latest offering, called Cowork, is a new version (and a rebranding) of Claude Code for work beyond coding, and it could dramatically widen the audience for Anthropic’s tools within the enterprise. Cowork is in “research preview” and is available only to Anthropic’s $100-per-month Max plan subscribers; there’s a waitlist for users on other plans.

While Claude Code requires an API key and runs in the terminal, users can access Cowork through the Claude desktop app with a familiar chatbot interface. Most important, Cowork is built to access content stored in the file system on the user’s computer. A user can give the tool permission to modify, or just read, files in a given folder. They can also allow Claude to create new files or organize existing ones. The new tool could help Anthropic as it eyes an IPO in 2026 (reportedly at a $350 billion valuation), and may put additional pressure on Microsoft, which offers a number of predesigned AI agents (for things like research, analysis, and meeting facilitation) as part of its Copilot AI assistant.

Cowork can do simple things like organize a user’s desktop folders or the contents of a “downloads” folder. Or it can search folders and emails for recent expenses and collect them in a new folder. But its most powerful use cases involve more complicated tasks. The tool can produce slide decks, large reports, or spreadsheets by calling up local (folder) data or data from connected business tools (such as Microsoft Teams or Zendesk) and then synthesizing the information. For multipart tasks, Cowork can create subagents for each part. Each of the subagents start with a clean context window so it has plenty of room to gather and remember information about its task. (In single chats with complex tasks, chatbots sometimes run out of context window memory, or become overwhelmed with data and then fail to make sense of it.)

For example, a user might present the tool with a long document, then ask the AI to analyze it from different perspectives (legal, financial, ethical, public relations, etc.). A main agent might assign each perspective to a subagent. Each subagent would work independently to collect data and form a draft document, then return to sync up its work with that of the other subagents. A master document would be created and delivered to the user. Then the user might begin talking to the chatbot about how to refine the result. Anthropic’s models, workers may find in Cowork their first taste of AI agents that build trust through quality—which could change how people see the technology as a tool that can actually help them at work....

Read the original on Fast Company

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Scotland Yard(Met) arrests 100 using AI

Police have arrested more than 100 wanted criminals thanks to a live facial recognition (LFR) pilot programme. The live facial recognition cameras were fixed to structures like lamp posts in Croydon, and their feeds monitored remotely, for the first time in London in October. The cameras scan the faces of pedestrians walking and compare them to a digital watchlist of 800 suspects and “high-harm” offenders. The move has enabled officers to run deployments without a van and has so far led to 103 arrests. Since the start of 2024, the Met has taken more than 1,700 offenders off the streets of London using LFR and the force has hailed its “impact and success”.

The LFR cameras in Croydon are only activated when officers are present and conducting a deployment, according to the Met. On each five or six-hour deployment, 50,000 to 60,000 faces are scanned in seconds. The system measures metrics, such as the distance between people’s eyes, nose and mouth, and creates a “digital signature” of the face. Each is processed and cross-referenced by an algorithm against a watchlist generated the night before.

People wearing baseball caps, beanies or balaclavas can still be identified. When the computer throws up a match, officers take over and approach the individual, treating the images as “intelligence” to be checked. They can override a match if they believe it is inaccurate. The force said Croydon was selected because it is a “crime hotspot” and that at present there are no plans to extend the scheme to other areas....

Read the original on the Telegraph

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OpenAI cofounder’s journal outlines plot

Court files from Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI revealed that Greg Brockman, one of its co-founders, wanted to get the company out from the Tesla founder since 2017. According to a document from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, posted on X, case discovery revealed that Brockman didn’t just want to remove Musk from OpenAI, but also tried to convert it into a for-profit company without him. In a publicly-posted rebuttal of some aspects of the journal, OpenAI has acknowledged that the journal is real.

“This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon. Is he the ‘glorious leader’ that I would pick? We truly have a chance to make this happen. Financially, what would take me to $1B?” Brockman wrote in his personal files revealed during the lawsuit. “Accepting Elon’s terms nukes two things: our ability to choose (though maybe we could overrule him) and the economics.” In another extract, Brockman wrote, “can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight. i’m just thinking about the office and we’re in the office. and his story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for profit just without him.”

According to the court files, “Brockman wrote after the meeting [with Musk to reaffirm OpenAI’s commitment to the non-profit structure] that the ‘conclusion is we truly want the b-corp. Honestly, we also want to get back to work, but it’s super clear how we get there.’ He also continued, ‘cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit, don’t want to say that we’re committed, if, three months later, we’re doing B-Corp, then it was a lie.” The document also revealed that Brockman did not like the situation and the “the true answer is that we want [Musk] out.”

With the way things are shaping up, this case seems set to be an epic court fight between two AI tech bros, with billions of dollars at stake. Elon Musk is reportedly seeking damages ranging from $79 billion to $134 billion, as well as an unspecified punitive penalty….

Read the original on Tom’s Hardware