Author: Art Ryan

Dubai, UAE – On 26–27 November 2025, Madinat Jumeirah will host DATE — a Digitization, AI & Emerging Technology Summit, where technology meets investment and deals take shape. An initiative by Trescon, D DATE will bring together government leaders, global innovators, investors, and technology visionaries to explore how emerging technologies — powered by cloud, hybrid, and hyper-converged infrastructure — are shaping industries and translating innovation into tangible business outcomes. Co-located with CARE – Climate Action, Renewable Energy & Sustainability Forum, DATE will create a powerful convergence of technology and sustainability — highlighting how digital innovation, AI, and emerging technologies can…

Amazon is introducing a series of AI-powered solutions to help business clients. These new offerings, announced Wednesday (Nov. 11), include the new Amazon Business Assistant which is available to Amazon Business at no added cost. “The assistant combines Amazon’s deep understanding of purchasing with smart conversational support to provide organizations with instant, interactive, and easy-to-follow recommendations on using and configuring an Amazon Business account,” the release said. In addition, the assistant recommends ways to buy more efficiently based on purchase history and will continue to learn as time goes on through user interactions and feedback ratings. Users can find the Amazon Business Assistant…

Ant International’s Alipay+ has added iris authentication features to its smartglasses-embedded payment solution. The addition to GlassPay is the result of partnerships with “leading smart glasses producers” and is a “global first,” Ant said in a news release Wednesday (Nov. 12). “Riding on rapid advances in AI, smart glasses are emerging as a new gateway for interactive commerce by bridging physical and digital consumer experiences,” the release said. “The device integrates instant try-ons, interactive shopping and simplified checkout wherever the customer is. By industry estimates, consumer adoption of smart glasses could grow almost sevenfold between 2024 and 2029 to 18.7 million units globally.” Iris…

Fei-Fei Li, known as the “godmother of AI,” argues that the current era of artificial intelligence (AI), dominated by large language models and image classifiers, has reached its limits. In her new essay, “From Words to Worlds,” she writes that while machines have mastered text and images, they still lack the grounding needed to understand space, motion and consequence. “We’ve built machines that can read and write,” she wrote, “but not ones that can see, move and live in the world.” Why AI Needs Spatial Intelligence Li’s central point is that without spatial intelligence, the ability to perceive geometry, depth, movement and the relationships between objects,…

Merchants, independent software vendors (ISVs), independent sales organizations (ISOs) and financial institutions (FIs) all play vital roles in the payment ecosystem. Those roles used to overlap or compete, but today they increasingly depend on one another to deliver integrated, data-driven experiences. Maverick Payments Vice President of Product Justin Downey told PYMNTS that success across the ecosystem begins with clearly defining each participant’s role and creating the ideal conditions for collaboration rather than competition. “There are areas where players serve different roles,” Downey said. “They could look at it as competing for client acquisition, but there’s really an area where they can collaborate and grow together,…

Traditional cross-border payment systems weren’t built for today’s global workforce. Millions of creators, freelancers and on-demand workers now expect to be paid instantly. And in many countries with volatile fiat currencies, they want that payment in digital dollars. These micropreneurs don’t want to wait days for transfers or lose money to fees to accelerate their paydays. Their expectations for speed, flexibility and transparency are exposing just how out of step existing banking infrastructure has become for this new segment of worker. It’s even leading to a shift in how money moves, with Visa, the world’s largest payment network, piloting a…

Models, compute and infrastructure dominate AI headlines, but the deeper transformation is unfolding quietly behind them. This week’s tech roundup surfaces the incremental systems work, platform upgrades and engineering shifts that show how AI is weaving itself into the core of global production, communication and decision-making. Meta Shares New Insights on GEM, Its ‘Central Brain’ for Ads In a Monday (Nov. 10) press release, Meta shared new details about GEM, short for Generative Ads Model, which it calls the “central brain” of its global advertising network. The system, already deployed across Meta’s platforms, combines reinforcement learning and multimodal generation to design, test and optimize ad creatives in real time. GEM continuously retrains on billions of impressions,…

Dubai, United Arab Emirates – 11 November 2025: The Dubai AI Festival is set to make a monumental return in 2026, this time expanding to the Dubai World Trade Centre to accommodate the overwhelming surge in international participation and interest. As the flagship event of Dubai AI Week, the third edition of the festival is expected to surpass all previous records, building on the success of the 2025 edition which welcomed over 10,000 attendees. The upcoming event, scheduled for 7–8 April 2026, will bring together more than 20,000 participants, 500+ investors, 200+ global speakers, and 200+ exhibitors from 120+ countries.…

Working capital, pulsing through receivables, payables and inventory, has always been the bloodstream of enterprise health. For generations, CFOs managed that flow through experience and judgment, aided by rows of spreadsheets and late-night reconciliations. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) is rewiring the circulatory system itself, turning data into intuition and process into intelligence. Across industries, finance teams are testing generative and agentic AI systems to sharpen forecasts, accelerate supplier onboarding, and automate workflows that have traditionally consumed time and talent. According to findings from the 2025/2026 Growth Corporates Working Capital Index, a Visa report in collaboration with PYMNTS Intelligence, 43% of growth corporates surveyed say…

Organizations now sit atop a mountain of data that would’ve been unimaginable even a decade ago. Every customer interaction, workflow, ledger entry and payment is increasingly logged, quantified and distributed across digital systems. The promise of this abundance has traditionally been positioned as a more agile ability to analyze, forecast and respond in real time. But the reality for many CFOs can ultimately look a little different. CFOs who once worried about data scarcity are now finding they must deal instead with data congestion. In boardrooms and budget meetings, they see technical teams present gleaming dashboards containing hundreds of metrics,…

For decades, enterprise technology strategies have hinged on a deceptively simple question: should we build it, buy it, or partner for it? The answer has never been simple, and artificial intelligence (AI) has put an entirely new spin on it. Particularly the emergence of agentic AI solutions, a new class of AI systems, capable of reasoning across workflows, initiating tasks and chaining actions without constant human oversight. PYMNTS Intelligence in the September 2025 PYMNTS Data Book series finds that when it comes to buying, building or partnering for agentic AI solutions, CIOs and CFOs are weighing not just cost, control and speed,…

Artificial intelligence (AI) startups raised billions in new funding this week, with investors allocating capital to companies embedding intelligence into core business operations across enterprise infrastructure, healthcare and payments. Enterprise AI Infrastructure Fireworks AI raised $250 million in Series C funding at a $4 billion valuation to expand its enterprise-ready AI platform. The company helps organizations use and customize large language models more efficiently, cutting both costs and delays in deploying them. Fireworks says its systems run open-source models up to 40 times faster and eight times cheaper than comparable commercial providers, processing over 10 trillion tokens a day for more than 10,000 clients. Its platform supports…

Flight delays tied to the U.S. government shutdown have renewed attention on how artificial intelligence (AI) could help airlines and regulators manage disruptions. With the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) scaling back air-traffic operations, carriers are navigating reduced flight capacity and longer delays at major airports. For airlines already contending with surging passenger demand and labor shortages, the timing has highlighted the need for more technological enhancements to be proactive in resolution.   For passengers, the most visible advances are in how airlines handle delays and rebookings. Delta Air Lines has rolled out Delta Concierge, an AI assistant within its Fly Delta app that helps…

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia, issued a call to artificial intelligence (AI) developers and companies to stop scraping information from the Wikipedia site and instead use its paid, opt-in API platform, Wikimedia Enterprise, to “responsibly” access its content. A Monday (Nov. 10) blog post explained that making Wikimedia Enterprise a paid service sustains Wikipedia’s global volunteer editor base and nonprofit funding model. The post highlighted that Wikimedia Enterprise enables organizations to efficiently use Wikipedia’s vast repository of human-generated knowledge without overburdening its servers. The foundation asked AI developers to provide proper attribution to Wikipedia content contributors when incorporating information into AI answer…

Scribe, a San Francisco–based AI startup, has secured $75 million in a Series C funding round, boosting its valuation to $1.3 billion. The funding round was led by StepStone and included participation from previous investors such as Amplify Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Tiger Global, Morado Ventures and New York Life Ventures. According to a TechCrunch report, the new funding may enable Scribe to speed up the launch of Scribe Optimize. The platform is designed to automatically map workflows across entire organizations and help them identify processes best suited for automation or AI interventions. In an interview with TechCrunch, Scribe CEO Jennifer Smith…

For decades, oncologists have worked with fragmented information. Imaging tests, biopsy results and clinical records often sit in separate databases, making it difficult to see how one piece of data affects another. The 2025 wave of studies suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) can close that gap by merging data from multiple sources into a single model that captures the full complexity of a patient’s disease. Seeing the Full Picture of Cancer A large study published in Nature Cancer used real-world data from more than 15,000 patients across 38 tumor types to test how well multimodal AI could predict outcomes. The model, trained on a mix of…

Online broker Robinhood wants to let everyday investors put funds into private AI companies. In an interview with the Financial Times (FT) published Monday (Nov. 10), CEO Vlad Tenev said he was interested in offering “normal people” a chance to invest in fast growing artificial intelligence firms, and less worried about a possible industry bubble. AI is going to lead to “widescale disruption, and we want people to have exposure to the drivers of that disruption,” said Tenev. He told the FT the company aims to offer tradeable shares in a new fund managed by its subsidiary Robinhood Ventures, which will invest in five or more…

The CE 100 Index slipped 3.5%, in a week governed by earnings reports. Only the Banking segment and the Be Well pillar, both up 0.5%, were in the green.   Call it a “buy the rumor, sell the news wave,” where runups into quarterly announcements and even strong results from a variety of firms nonetheless led to sell-offs. The tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 3.3%. In large part, names with artificial intelligence (AI) as a growth engine were prime targets for those sell-offs. Big Tech names such as Microsoft and Meta were down more than 4%. Pinterest stands out as a key example of…

For decades, oncologists have worked with fragmented information. Imaging tests, biopsy results and clinical records often sit in separate databases, making it difficult to see how one piece of data affects another. The 2025 wave of studies suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) can close that gap by merging data from multiple sources into a single model that captures the full complexity of a patient’s disease. Seeing the Full Picture of Cancer A large study published in Nature Cancer used real-world data from more than 15,000 patients across 38 tumor types to test how well multimodal AI could predict outcomes. The model, trained on a mix of…

The Prompt Economy™ was generous this week. Instead of the recent deluge of instructions and advice for developers, we saw some more practical applications for digital media and retail as agentic artificial intelligence (AI) continues to become a real factor for the end of the year. One of the more interesting use cases came in the area of SEO and digital media. Search is moving from a keyword-driven exercise to an intent-driven conversation between users and intelligent systems. As Search Engine Journal explains, agentic AI doesn’t just respond to queries. It acts on goals, retrieves and tests information, and guides users toward outcomes it deems most relevant. That means visibility is…