Author: Art Ryan

Global logistics has become defined by a fundamental paradox: Like many of the world’s critical commercial functions, the sector is caught between two worlds, the analog past and digital future. Global logistics is one of the most operationally sophisticated industries underpinning commerce, coordinating ships, planes, trucks, ports, warehouses, customs authorities, and retailers across continents. But at its core, global supply chains remain stubbornly fragmented, propped up by spreadsheets, phone calls, manual reconciliations, and systems that were never designed to talk to one another. “Everybody has their own systems. All the systems are disparate, they’re not connected. And asking something simple as like, ‘Where is my stuff? Where is my shipment?’ is virtually impossible to do…

Merchants have spent much of the eCommerce era obsessed over understanding a single buyer: the human at the other end of a screen, swayed by brand storytelling, emotional triggers, intuitive design, and social proof. But a second customer class has quickly and stealthily entered the marketplace. This new customer does not browse, feel, or behave according to any of the norms that have shaped modern commerce. This customer is the AI agent. Findings in the report, “Prompt Economy™: When Bots Are the Customer,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa, reveal that agentic AI tools like Amazon’s Rufus, Walmart’s Sparky, Google’s AI-enabled Chrome, and…

The traditional consumer journey from initial home project idea to completed build is notoriously inefficient, opaque and cash intensive. Retailers and construction managers are now turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to create a streamlined, digitally native decision path that dictates where and how money is spent. AI Assists Employees, Shoppers Lowe’s has deployed Mylow Companion across more than 1,700 stores, marking one of the largest rollouts of an AI assistant for in-store retail associates. The handheld tool gives employees real-time access to product specifications, project instructions and inventory status. Lowe’s said associates now rely on the system to help shoppers compare materials, clarify installation steps and locate products in categories that typically…

Adobe expects to see revenue of $25.9 billion to $26.1 billion in fiscal year 2026, saying its growth will be driven in part by the rapid adoption of its artificial intelligence-powered tools. “By advancing our innovative generative and agentic platforms and expanding our customer base, we are excited to target double-digit ARR [annual recurring revenue] growth in FY 2026,” Adobe Chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen said in a Wednesday (Dec. 10) press release. Adobe Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Dan Durn added in the release, “We are confident in our ability to deliver industry-leading innovations, double-digit ARR growth and world-class profitability.” Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Adobe’s annual forecast…

Wearables, robotics and infrastructure are emerging as the next places big tech is trying to capture value in the artificial intelligence (AI) stack. This week’s developments, from Google’s smart-glasses revival to Skild AI’s acquisition talks and multibillion-dollar cloud commitments, show the stack shifting beyond models and applications. Google Revives AI Smart Glasses for 2026 Google plans to release AI-enabled smart glasses in 2026, according to CNBC. The report said the device will run on Android XR and incorporate Google’s Gemini model to deliver real-time answers, translation tools and optional augmented displays. The glasses mark Google’s return to wearables after earlier efforts…

Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved rapidly into every corner of the economy. Financial services is a flash point over whether AI will strengthen or destabilize markets, as illustrated at a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday (Dec. 10). Market operators, cloud providers, cybersecurity leaders, consumer advocates and housing-platform executives differed on policy, they shared a broad consensus: AI is already transforming risk scoring, fraud detection and financial decisioning, and those shifts require clear guardrails to ensure safety, fairness and trust. AI’s Expanding Role At the hearing, titled “From Principles to Policy: Enabling 21st Century AI Innovation in Financial Services,” Nasdaq President Tal Cohen described an industry changing at…

Abu Dhabi, UAE — [Date] — At the prestigious Global AI Show Abu Dhabi, Master Works, one of Saudi Arabia’s leading digital transformation providers, spotlighted its growing influence in the regional AI ecosystem. Representing the company, Ahmed Khaled Ezzeldin, AI Sales Manager, shared how Master Works—through its specialized AI subsidiary Nabih—is accelerating the adoption of next-generation artificial intelligence across the GCC. With six subsidiaries supporting a wide range of digital services, Master Works has positioned Nabih as the center of AI innovation, building cutting-edge systems that serve governments, airports, enterprises, and regulated industries across the region. Over the past five…

Abu Dhabi, UAE — At one of the world’s premier technology gatherings, the Global AI Show Abu Dhabi, Amira AI unveiled the next evolution of intelligent automation with its award-winning “Almost Human” platform. Positioned at the intersection of advanced conversational AI and enterprise automation, Amira AI is set to transform customer service, operational efficiency, and revenue generation for businesses across the globe. Representing the company, Andreas Wilmers described Amira AI as “a process automation platform designed to not just support customer service — but to orchestrate it.” The platform acts as an intelligent layer that integrates with virtually any communication…

Amazon plans to invest $35 billion in India through 2030 to support business expansion, artificial intelligence (AI) digitization, export growth and job creation. This will build on the $40 billion the company has already invested in India in terms of compensation to employees and development of infrastructure, it said in a Wednesday (Dec. 10) press release. Amazon’s investments to date have built fulfillment centers, transportation networks, data centers, digital payments infrastructure and technology development, according to the release. The company has digitized 12 million small businesses, enabled $20 billion in cumulative eCommerce exports and supported 2.8 million direct, indirect, induced and seasonal…

The pace at which emerging enterprises convert sales into cash has become a defining measure of resilience and competitiveness. In fact, it was the subject of a recent PYMNTS Intelligence project, the Time to Cash Index™. These firms, taking in between $250 million and $2.5 billion in annual revenue, increasingly see time to cash not as a back-office metric but as a core driver of business velocity. Of course, the executive most responsible for this time to cash velocity is the chief financial officer. That role is evolving too as CFOs take ownership of decisions that directly improve cash flow, liquidity and control. “CFOs are in the business of control,”…

Adobe said it is adding a trio of its apps to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Express and Adobe Acrobat will be directly available on the artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s chatbot, Adobe announced Wednesday (Dec. 10), letting users ask ChatGPT to create designs or edit photos and PDFs. “Adobe apps for ChatGPT build upon the company’s innovation in agentic AI, enabling everyone to easily enhance vacation photos, design event invitations and create polished, professional documents simply by describing what they want to achieve with their words,” the company said in a news release. “By combining the power of Adobe’s creative technology with ChatGPT’s conversational interface,…

The Linux Foundation has formed the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), saying the new organization aims to help ensure agentic artificial intelligence (AI) evolves transparently and collaboratively. The AAIF is a neutral, open foundation, the Linux Foundation said in a Tuesday (Dec. 9) press release. “We are seeing AI enter a new phase, as conversational systems shift to autonomous agents that can work together,” Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said in the release. The AAIF is supported in its mission by the contributions of three technical projects: Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is a universal standard protocol for connecting AI models to tools, data and applications; Block’s goose,…

Google’s Gemini is reportedly outpacing OpenAI’s ChatGPT in growth, though ChatGPT still has close to twice as many users. During November, in terms of monthly active users, Gemini grew 30% to reach 346 million, while ChatGPT increased 5% to 810 million, Seeking Alpha reported Tuesday (Dec. 9), citing a paywalled article by The Information. ChatGPT also led in terms of the number of minutes per day users spend in the app, according to the report. ChatGPT users averaged 17 minutes per day, while Gemini users averaged 11 minutes per day. The Information article cited data from Sensor Tower, according to the report. Sensor Tower did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’…

BNY Mellon announced Monday (Dec. 8) that the bank will integrate Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise into its enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) platform Eliza, further expanding the bank’s use of agentic AI to accelerate research, automate complex tasks and improve data processing.  The company said the upgrade will help employees analyze large volumes of information more efficiently and deliver insights faster across business functions. Sarthak Pattanaik, BNY Mellon’s Chief Data and AI Officer, said the initiative reflects the firm’s broader strategy to embed AI more deeply across the organization. “At BNY, our AI strategy is clear: AI for everyone, everywhere and everything,” he said, describing Gemini Enterprise as a way to…

The era of artificial intelligence (AI) experimentation in business is officially over. A new report from OpenAI, “The state of enterprise AI 2025,” released Monday (Dec. 8), doesn’t just chronicle growth; it signals a structural pivot where generative AI is transitioning from a supplemental productivity tool to embedded, mission-critical infrastructure within the global financial and digital economy. Organizations are moving beyond pilot programs to scaled, operational deployment, effectively codifying institutional knowledge into intelligent, persistent assistants. The average enterprise worker now sends 30% more ChatGPT messages weekly than a year ago, while API reasoning token consumption per organization increased 320-fold, demonstrating both broader…

Visa CEO Ryan McInerney’s annual letter to shareholders, released Tuesday (Dec. 9) reads like a technology thesis for where payments is headed, not just a performance recap. In the letter, part of the company’s annual report, he described a “rewiring” of commerce driven by agentic artificial intelligence (AI), tokenized credentials and data, stablecoins and digitized identity. He argued that every new way to pay (from account-to-account and wallets to crypto and “agent-led commerce”) only matters if it can scale with security, reliability and modern risk controls. McInerney put agentic AI at the front of the platform shift. In his view, the next wave…

Amazon is rolling out new shopping features for its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Alexa+. As reported Tuesday (Dec. 9) by TechCrunch, these features include a shopping hub, a feature that lets users add items to recent orders and personalized recommendations. The report notes that while Amazon has been developing features to make Alexa+ more of a shopping assistant with abilities such as automated deal tracking and automatic purchases, the company is now turning its screen-outfitted Echo devices into a shopping hub with an interface that it’s calling the “Shopping Essentials” experience. With this dashboard, Amazon shoppers can monitor deliveries in real time, find information about…

Anthropic said that it is bringing Claude Code directly into Slack, giving companies a way to turn routine channel discussions into coding tasks and draft pull requests without leaving the messaging platform. The rollout, launched as a research preview, represents a shift toward artificial intelligence (AI) agents embedded inside everyday enterprise tools rather than stand-alone chatbots competing for attention outside the flow of work. The feature allows users to tag @Claude in any channel or thread. If the message resembles a coding request, Claude Code automatically detects intent, analyzes the surrounding Slack conversation for context and selects the correct repository the user…

OpenAI has appointed former Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its chief revenue officer. In this role, Dresser will oversee the artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s global revenue strategy across enterprise and customer success and will “help more businesses put AI to work in their day-to-day operations,” OpenAI said in a Tuesday (Dec. 9) blog post. “We’re on a path to put AI tools into the hands of millions of workers, across every industry,” Fidji Simo, CEO of applications at OpenAI, said in the post. “Denise has led that kind of shift before, and her experience will help us make AI useful, reliable and accessible for businesses everywhere.” At…

Wells Fargo’s CEO said artificial intelligence (AI) could potentially influence company decisions on staffing levels. Speaking Tuesday (Dec. 9) at a Goldman Sachs-hosted conference, Charlie Scharf noted that his company has begun offering generative-AI tools to its engineers, making it 30% to 35% more efficient for them to write code. While it hasn’t led to job cuts, teams are more productive. “We’re not as efficient as we should be without the benefits of AI,” said Scharf, whose comments were reported by Bloomberg News. The CEO added that there are many other places where the banking giant will be able to determine how to use large language models…