Author: Art Ryan

Shopify put agentic artificial intelligence (AI) and the Prompt Economy™ at the center of its strategy on its Nov. 4 earnings call, arguing that it will reshape how consumers shop, and is already having an impact. “AI is not just a feature at Shopify. It is central to our engine that powers everything we build,” President Harley Finkelstein told analysts. Finkelstein said the shift is already visible. “Since January, we’ve seen AI‑driven traffic to Shopify stores up 7x, and … orders attributed to AI searches up 11x,” adding that a Shopify survey found 64% of shoppers expect to use AI during the holiday season. Shopify’s “commerce for…

Amazon and artificial intelligence (AI) startup Perplexity are in a dispute over the deployment of third-party AI agents for shopping. Perplexity said in a Tuesday (Nov. 4) blog post that it received an “aggressive legal threat” from Amazon demanding that it prohibit the users of its Comet browser from using their AI assistants to shop on Amazon’s platform. The AI startup said in its post that it will not be intimidated and will fight to ensure users can deploy agentic AI “to take control of their digital lives.” “Amazon […] forgets how it got so big,” Perplexity said in its post. “Users love it. They want good…

Stablecoin payment platform Pay3 is the latest company to embrace agentic AI. The company on Tuesday (Nov. 4) unveiled its Agentic Payments Platform, designed to allow artificial intelligence (AI) agents to autonomously “execute and optimize” financial transactions using stablecoins. “As agentic AI adoption accelerates, enterprises are seeking infrastructure that supports autonomous decision-making and digital asset transactions,” Pay3 said in a news release, citing projections from Gartner that 33% of enterprise software will include agentic AI capabilities within three years. Pay3 said it addresses this need by integrating stablecoin payments, intelligent routing and real-time settlement across major blockchains, letting AI systems manage pricing, billing and treasury flows, setting the…

Anthropic has reportedly projected growth of 28% over the next three years. And by 2028, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup expects to bring in up to $70 billion in revenue, compared to roughly $5 billion this year, the Information reported Tuesday (Nov. 4), citing a source familiar with Anthropic’s financials. The company reportedly expects demand from businesses for its AI models to fuel that growth. Anthropic had previously forecast that its revenue for this year from selling access to those models via an application programming interface (API) would roughly double similar sales by chief competitor OpenAI. The uptick in business could attract new investors,…

Crypto investors are reportedly uneasy about the high valuations of some artificial intelligence (AI) stocks. The price of the leading cryptocurrency has fallen roughly 6% in the last two days, CNBC reported Tuesday (Nov. 4), while Ether, the second-biggest token in terms of market capitalization, has fallen nearly 10% during the same time frame. As the report noted, the two coins draw many of the same investors as AI stocks, which means when one sector tumbles, it can hurt the other. The Nasdaq Composite, which houses the leading AI stocks, fell 1% Tuesday, with investors selling AI-connected Palantir due to concerns over its high…

Zest AI said Tuesday (Nov. 4) that it secured strategic investment for its artificial intelligence-powered lending solutions. The round was led by five of Zest AI’s financial institution customers, including Citi, the company said in a Tuesday press release. It did not report the amount raised in the round. Zest AI will use the new funding to expand its automation initiatives and drive wider implementation of its lending intelligence platform, LuLu, according to the release. In addition to Lulu, the company offers solutions for automated underwriting and fraud detection. Its machine learning models enable lenders to achieve, on average, a 25% increase in approvals…

The saying “two heads are better than one” never accounted for the use of artificial intelligence. Updated research from two business schools show what AI and a human collaboration can do. The research from Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management found that people working with AI produced 60% more output than those working without it, while maintaining the same quality. They also exchanged 23% fewer messages, showing less time spent coordinating and more time completing tasks. The pattern suggests that AI is reshaping collaboration. People focus on context, reasoning and judgment. Machines handle repetition, data and scale.…

OpenAI is doing “well more” than $13 billion in revenue, CEO Sam Altman said on a BG2Pod podcast over the weekend. That figure has been widely reported, and some observers have wondered how OpenAI could pay for its recent compute deals with $13 billion in revenue, according to Seeking Alpha, which flagged Altman’s remarks in a Monday (Nov. 3) report. “First of all, we’re doing well more revenue than that,” Altman said on the podcast, adding that the company’s revenue is growing steeply, per the report. When one of the podcast’s hosts asked if OpenAI could reach $100 billion in revenue in 2028 or 2029, Altman said, according…

Autonomous coding agents can now generate, test and debug entire applications but they still falter without human oversight. A new academic work titled, “A Survey of Vibe Coding with Large Language Models” finds that even advanced models capable of building complete apps lose accuracy and efficiency when developers aren’t part of the process. The study measured a 53% decline in code accuracy and a 19% increase in task completion time when human feedback loops were removed. The findings support a growing consensus: AI will not replace software engineers anytime soon, but it will redefine how they work. Autonomy Without Context The study’s…

Tech companies are reportedly increasing efforts to combat a security flaw in their AI models. Google Deepmind, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI are among the companies working to stop indirect prompt injection attacks, the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday (Nov. 2). As the report notes, these attacks happen when a third party hides commands inside a website or email to trick artificial intelligence (AI) models into turning over unauthorized information. “AI is being used by cyber actors at every chain of the attack right now,” said Jacob Klein, who heads the threat intelligence team at Anthropic. According to the report, companies are doing things like hiring external testers and using AI-powered…

As impressive as artificial intelligence (AI) in all its forms can be, its effectiveness still depends on one essential factor: the quality and governance of the data that powers it. For financial institutions that sit atop vast reservoirs of information, this connection between data and decision-making is creating both opportunity and pressure to evolve. That evolution is the focus of Snowflake Intelligence, the new enterprise AI agent designed by Snowflake to bridge the gap between the raw material of data and the intelligence that drives outcomes. The launch marks what Snowflake is positioning as a shift from data warehousing to decision intelligence…

Dubai, UAE: The inaugural edition of CARE (Climate Action, Renewable Energy & Sustainability) forum series by Trescon, is set to become the MENA region’s most influential platform for sustainability investment and climate innovation. The forum will unite regional and global leaders driving the Middle East’s clean energy transition. Co-located with DATE, a Digitization, AI & Emerging Tech Summit, CARE MENA will take place on 26-27 November at the iconic Madinat Jumeirah. “With the GCC committing billions to renewable infrastructure, CARE MENA offers a unique, action-oriented platform where capital meets climate ambition,” said Naveen Bharadwaj, Group CEO, Trescon. He continued, “From…

Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q) hosted its first AI Hackathon – a collaborative, interdisciplinary event that brought together medical students from WCM-Q with computer science students from Cornell and Cornell Tech to develop AI-driven solutions for pressing clinical challenges. The Oct. 10-11 event, “MedAI Hack Collaborative: Unlocking Precision Health with AI,” was co-sponsored by Dr. Javaid Sheikh, dean of WCM-Q; and Dr. Curtis Cole, Cornell’s global chief information officer. The hackathon marked a milestone in WCM-Q’s mission to champion innovation at the intersection of medicine, data science and technology. Six interdisciplinary teams took part, merging the clinical knowledge of WCM-Q students with…

In search of an AI that keeps things private, Apple is reportedly planning to pay Google to provide a kind of white-label version of Google Gemini AI that will run securely on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers. Weekend reports explained a little about how this is meant to work: AI- as-a-service The basic premise here seems to be that pending introduction of its own proprietary search tools; Apple will make use of Gemini. Further, because privacy is extremely important to Apple, the company will use a version of Gemini hosted on its own Apple servers. This isn’t the first AI partnership…

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Verizon Business today announced a new Verizon AI Connect deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide the resilient high-capacity, low-latency network infrastructure essential for the next wave of artificial intelligence (AI) innovation. As part of the deal, Verizon will build new, long-haul, high-capacity fiber pathways to connect AWS data center locations. This will enable AWS to continue to deliver and scale its secure, reliable, and high-performance cloud services for customers building and deploying advanced AI applications at scale. These new fiber segments mark a significant commitment in Verizon’s network buildout, to enable the AI ecosystem to intelligently deliver the…

Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to secure more compute capacity for meeting its customers’ heavy demand for AI services. On Monday, the Redmond-based tech giant signed a $9.7 billion, five-year contract with Australia’s IREN to secure further AI cloud capacity. The deal will give Microsoft access to compute infrastructure built with Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, which will be deployed over phases through 2026 at IREN’s facility in Childress, Texas, planned to support 750 megawatts of capacity. IREN said it is separately buying GPUs and equipment from Dell for about $5.8 billion. The deal comes after Microsoft last…

Microsoft will invest $15.2 billion in the United Arab Emirates over the next four years, the company announced Monday at the first annual Abu Dhabi Global AI Summit. The investment will include the first-ever shipments of the most advanced Nvidia GPUs to the UAE. As part of the deal, the U.S. has granted Microsoft a license to export Nvidia chips to the UAE, a move that positions the country as both a proving ground for U.S. export-control diplomacy and a regional anchor of American AI influence. The deal allows Microsoft to expand its foothold into the Middle East, a key region in the global fight…

OpenAI isn’t done securing the AI infrastructure it needs to rapidly scale agentic workloads. The ChatGPT-maker on Monday said it has reached a deal with Amazon to buy $38 billion in cloud computing services over the next seven years. OpenAI said it will immediately start using AWS compute, with all capacity targeted to be deployed before the end of 2026, with the ability to expand further into 2027 and beyond. The deal follows OpenAI’s restructuring last week, which freed the company from having to secure Microsoft’s approval to buy computing services from other firms. OpenAI’s deal with Amazon is part of its…

After training over five million learners worldwide, Be10x is launching its flagship no-coding AI workshop for United States professionals — a live, 4-hour hands-on session built to turn busy managers, analysts, and creators into confident AI power users. Rated 4.9/5 by 5M+ professionals, Be10x has earned its reputation for practical, results-first learning — not hype. This United States launch is designed to help participants apply AI to real work within hours, not weeks. What is Be10x? Be10x is an ed-tech platform focused on helping professionals become 10x more valuable with AI—without writing code. Its workshops teach participants to prompt better, analyze data faster, produce persuasive content, and…

Radar has long been used across the world to detect severe weather, airplanes, and other objects. But a collaboration between Polar Bears International and Spotter Global has developed a unique radar system in the Arctic. They call it “Bear-dar.” The innovation is only one of several high tech operations looking for new ways to protect polar bears, as climate change threatens the survival of the species. Polar bears depend on sea ice to hunt seals, their natural prey. As summers have grown longer in the Arctic, the polar bears have to wait longer and risk running low on fat reserves…