Author: Art Ryan

The humble travel text message is getting an upgrade. RCS messaging for travel brands is changing the way companies connect with their customers, offering richer and more interactive experiences. UK travel and hospitality companies are rapidly moving toward Rich Communication Services, better known as RCS, as brands rethink how they talk to customers before, during and after a trip. New figures highlighted by Breaking Travel News, based on Infobip’s Messaging Trends Report 2026, show RCS interactions in the UK travel and hospitality sector jumped by more than 300% during 2025. SMS grew too, but at a much slower 22%. WhatsApp…

Artificial intelligence isn’t disappearing from the travel industry. Quite the opposite. It’s becoming ordinary. But what does the travel industry beyond AI look like as the technology becomes mainstream? That shift is at the center of Travel Trends Summit V3, a two-day virtual event scheduled for October 28–29, 2026. More than 40 founders, executives, investors, marketers and technology leaders are expected to take part, but the summit isn’t being pitched as another marathon discussion about AI tools. The question this time is more interesting: What happens when AI is simply part of the infrastructure? That changes the conversation. Instead of…

Artificial intelligence has a space problem. And a power problem. And, increasingly, a water problem. So some developers are looking somewhere that has plenty of all three: the ocean. Underwater and floating data centers are moving from strange engineering experiments toward something companies are seriously considering as AI infrastructure expands. The basic argument is hard to ignore. Oceans offer enormous amounts of space, naturally cold water for cooling, and access to offshore wind, solar and tidal energy. That does not make putting thousands of servers at sea simple. It just makes the idea much less ridiculous than it sounded a…

AI is starting to become part of the telecom package itself. Recent developments in e& UAE agentic AI are helping to drive these changes in the industry. e& UAE has become the first telecom provider in the region to embed agentic AI directly into core business mobile and fixed-connectivity offerings, according to Middle East AI News. Instead of selling connectivity first and leaving companies to assemble their own AI infrastructure later, e& is pulling the pieces closer together. Internet access, mobile connectivity, AI tools and — for businesses that need considerably more power — sovereign GPU compute can now sit…

Stripe appears ready to spend billions on something that has very little to do with swiping a credit card. News broke this week that Stripe acquires OpenRouter, signalling a strategic move beyond their traditional payments business. The payments giant has reportedly finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, according to reports citing people familiar with the deal. OpenRouter operates an AI gateway that lets developers access and switch between hundreds of artificial intelligence models through a single platform. Neither company is publicly celebrating the acquisition yet. Stripe told TechCrunch that it does not comment on “rumors…

Alibaba has quietly crossed a line that would have sounded unlikely not long ago. Its Qwen family of artificial intelligence models has recorded more than 3 billion downloads worldwide over the past six months, according to figures reported by Bloomberg and cited by PYMNTS. That puts Alibaba ahead of major open-model efforts from Google and Meta by a wide margin. This is not just another leaderboard win. Downloads do not automatically mean revenue, active users or enterprise contracts. But in the open AI world, they reveal something else: what developers are actually picking up, testing, modifying and building around. And…

Dubai isn’t talking about adding a few AI assistants to its financial district. The plan is considerably bigger. The Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) is working toward becoming what it calls the world’s first AI-native financial centre, putting artificial intelligence into the foundations of how the district operates — from regulation and financial services to buildings, transportation and eventually robotics. The numbers attached to the plan are just as ambitious. DIFC expects its Native AI programme to generate $3.5 billion (AED 12.9 billion) in economic value and support the creation of 25,000 jobs. AI Won’t Sit on Top of DIFC.…

Artificial intelligence can write polished Arabic. The recent launch of the MBZUAI Arab culture AI benchmark aims to evaluate how well AI understands regional language and cultural nuances. That does not necessarily mean it knows how people in the Arab world actually speak. Researchers at Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) are digging into that gap with a new benchmark designed to test AI models on Arab culture, everyday conversations and regional dialects. The project, called ArabCulture-Dialogue, looks beyond Modern Standard Arabic and asks a more awkward question for today’s large language models: can an AI…

Abu Dhabi’s AI ambitions are starting to look less like a digital upgrade and more like a rethink of what government actually does. Agentic AI — systems designed not only to respond to a prompt but to take actions, coordinate tasks and work across different platforms — could become a major part of that shift. Deloitte Middle East experts say these AI agents could eventually handle administrative processes, connect information from several government systems and coordinate work that currently passes between multiple departments. That changes the equation. A chatbot gives you an answer. An AI agent could potentially do the…

Artificial intelligence is moving deeper into the hospital — not as a chatbot sitting on a website, but inside the machines doctors already rely on to see what is happening inside a patient. AI-powered diagnostics in UAE hospitals are beginning to reshape the way medical professionals approach patient care and decision-making. Aster DM Healthcare partnered with Fujifilm to introduce AI-enabled diagnostic, imaging and radiology systems across its healthcare network in the Gulf, with the UAE among the first markets targeted for deployment. The agreement was announced in October 2023 and was positioned as a significant expansion of AI-powered medical imaging…

AI has written emails, reviewed résumés, scheduled shifts and helped companies decide who gets interviewed. Now an AI has recommended firing somebody. At Andon Market, an experimental retail store in San Francisco, an AI manager named Luna decided that one of its human employees should be dismissed after a long stretch of attendance and workplace problems. There is an important detail buried underneath the more dramatic “AI fires human” headline: Luna didn’t physically call the employee into an office and deliver the bad news. Humans at Andon Labs reviewed the decision and handled the actual termination. Still, this was no…

For years, the economic promise of artificial intelligence has mostly lived in forecasts, investment announcements and very large numbers attached to data centres. Now, the UK AI boom is starting to turn those predictions into a visible reality. Britain may now be getting something more tangible: signs of AI activity showing up in actual economic data. The UK economy expanded by 0.4% in the second quarter of 2026, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), after growing 0.6% during the first three months of the year. Services did much of the work, rising 0.5% over the quarter. Look beneath…

SpaceX is no longer easy to describe as a rocket company. That label was already getting shaky with Starlink, xAI and the company’s growing investment in massive computing infrastructure. Now the SpaceX $60 billion Cursor deal pushes the story into a very different category: developer software. SpaceX agreed in June 2026 to acquire Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, in an all-stock transaction valuing the AI coding company at roughly $60 billion. The move followed an earlier compute partnership between SpaceX and Cursor and gives a clearer picture of what Elon Musk’s company appears to be building — a technology stack…

The AI conversation is getting less theoretical. That shift will be hard to miss at AI Summit Seoul 2026, which returns to Seoul from August 19 to August 21, 2026, at the COEX Grand Ballroom and Exhibition Hall B. The event is positioning itself around applied AI — not simply bigger models or another round of chatbot demos, but what happens when companies actually try to put AI into factories, healthcare systems, enterprise workflows, infrastructure and everyday products. Hosted by the publisher of MIT Technology Review Korea and organized by DMK Global, COEX and KITA, the summit brings together international…

Technology & Innovation The biggest technology story of the week came from Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg published a long-form AI strategy essay alongside the release of Muse Glimmer, a new open-weight model aimed at competing with closed frontier systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. In this edition of Weekly AI News, we explore how Meta positioned the model as part of its “personal superintelligence” vision: AI systems that run closer to users, support everyday work and creativity, and give individuals more control over how AI behaves. The technical significance is not only the model itself, but Meta’s renewed push for open-weight…

A Public Consultation Turns Heated in Oton A public consultation over a proposed artificial intelligence data center in Oton, Iloilo took an unexpected turn after the project’s Norwegian proponent walked out while residents questioned what the development could mean for their community. The planned Oton Iloilo AI data center has sparked debate among locals and officials alike. Daniel Stefan Robertsen, the businessman associated with the proposal, was seen leaving the consultation as local journalists followed him for comment. According to GMA News, Robertsen responded angrily to members of the media and used profanity while attempting to stop them from approaching…

Singapore is putting a clearer legal boundary around one of generative AI’s ugliest uses: creating sexually explicit images of real people without their permission. The new Singapore AI-generated intimate images law is designed to address this serious issue. New criminal law provisions taking effect on August 17, 2026 will explicitly make it an offense to produce intimate images without consent, including material created entirely with artificial intelligence. Someone convicted can face up to two years in prison, a fine, or both. The change matters because AI image generators have made an old problem much easier to scale. A person no…

Something odd is happening in the secondhand book trade. Recently, there have been reports of AI companies buying secondhand books in large quantities, raising questions about their motives. Booksellers across the UK and Ireland say they have been receiving unusually large orders for books that seem to have almost nothing in common. An obscure magazine issue might appear beside a literary translation and a decades-old specialist title. No obvious collector theme. No neat subject category. And now some sellers are wondering whether the customers are really readers at all. The suspicion: AI companies buying secondhand books as fresh training data.…

The humble travel text message is starting to look a little old. This is where Agentic AI and RCS come in, promising a fresh approach to how we communicate and interact while on the move. UK travel and hospitality companies are rapidly increasing their use of Rich Communication Services, or RCS, as brands look for something more interactive than traditional SMS. And sitting behind that shift is another technology moving quickly into customer communications: agentic AI. New figures from communications platform Infobip suggest RCS traffic among UK travel and hospitality businesses jumped by more than 300% during 2025. SMS didn’t…

Oracle’s enormous Project Jupiter AI data center in New Mexico is still moving forward on schedule, according to the company, despite the kind of regulatory, environmental, and power challenges that can easily derail infrastructure projects of this size. And “size” is doing a lot of work here. Project Jupiter is planned as a roughly 1,400-acre AI data center campus in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. The development has been associated with as much as $165 billion in long-term investment, making it one of the most ambitious AI infrastructure projects currently under development in the United States. The project is expected…