Author: Art Ryan

Google has introduced an artificial intelligence-powered conversational platform designed for the workplace. The new Gemini Enterprise brings together a company’s data, tools and people; enables employees to chat with the company’s documents, data and applications; and provides pre-built AI agents as well as the tools to build and deploy agents, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Thursday (Oct. 9) blog post. “Gemini Enterprise is an AI-powered conversational platform designed to bring the full power of Google AI to every employee for every workflow,” Pichai said in the post. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a Thursday blog post that Gemini Enterprise combines Google’s Gemini models, a no-code workbench for…

Artificial intelligence (AI) agent startup n8n has raised $180 million in new funding. The company’s Series C round, which included participation from Nvidia’s investment arm, values n8n at $2.5 billion, according to a Thursday (Oct. 9) announcement. Based in Germany, n8n helps companies develop and deploy agentic AI automations. “n8n has built the automation and orchestration layer for the AI era: today, more than 80% of workflows built on n8n embed AI agents,” Accel, which led the funding round, wrote in its own announcement. “n8n has dramatically expanded the share of work that can be automated. Teams can fully customize workflows, mixing AI agents with deterministic steps and team inputs…

Google argued against a Justice Department proposal that would bar it from bundling its YouTube and Google Maps apps with its Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) service, telling a judge Wednesday (Oct. 8) that these haven’t been found to be monopoly products. The argument came during the court battle in which the judge is developing a remedy after finding that Google has a monopoly in search and search advertising, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Google lawyer John Schmidtlein said in court Wednesday that there has been no finding that the company has a monopoly in the AI market or that Maps or YouTube are monopoly products, according to the report. Judge Amit Mehta ruled…

Google’s philanthropic initiative Google.org is providing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with $5 million in funding to develop and launch a national artificial intelligence (AI) training program for small businesses. The Small Business B(AI)sics program aims to provide foundational AI skills to 40,000 U.S. small businesses, Google said in a Wednesday (Oct. 8) blog post. Google also announced in the post that its training initiative Grow With Google launched a short course that helps small business owners learn how to use AI for work. The online version of the “Make AI Work for You” course uses case studies from small businesses to share ideas, best practices and guidance on using AI tools, according…

Few titles carry as much weight in balancing risk and opportunity as CFO. And that weight is only growing. Over at least the last five years, and with mounting urgency post-pandemic, CFOs have faced a dual mandate: to modernize aging financial infrastructure and to safeguard enterprises against sophisticated fraud and compliance risks. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become central to CFOs’ efforts, and not as a speculative experiment, but as a pragmatic tool to address acute vulnerabilities. For proof, look no further than the news this week from Anthropic and Deloitte, which have partnered to build AI compliance solutions; and Ramp, which added new AI agents to Bill Pay, its accounts payable automation…

Hospitals are facing unprecedented cost pressures and persistent staffing challenges, forcing a deeper look at where automation can make a measurable impact. The American Hospital Association’s “Cost of Caring” report shows that labor and related compensation now account for nearly 56% of total hospital expenses, underscoring the system’s heavy reliance on human capital. Executives are turning to artificial intelligence not just for new diagnostic breakthroughs but also to fix long-standing operational inefficiencies. The latest partnerships and funding rounds indicate that AI is moving into the operational aspects of healthcare, according to recent Wall Street Journal coverage that detailed how hospitals are deploying AI agents for…

Dates: October 13–17, 2025Location: Dubai World Trade Centre, Dubai, UAE The wait is almost over! In just four days, GITEX GLOBAL 2025 — the world’s largest and most influential technology event — will open its doors at the Dubai World Trade Centre. From October 13 to 17, Dubai will once again become the beating heart of global innovation, bringing together 200,000 tech executives from 180+ countries. This year’s edition promises to be the most ambitious yet, where AI ambitions meet real-world business value and cross-sector growth. With 6,500+ exhibiting companies, GITEX GLOBAL 2025 will redefine how industries collaborate, innovate, and…

Thinking Machines, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, has released its first product, Tinker, a training application programming interface (API) that gives organizations full control over model training and fine-tuning while the company manages the underlying infrastructure. With Tinker, Thinking Machines joins a growing number of firms building tools aimed to help organizations train and deploy models faster, at lower cost and with greater control than major providers like OpenAI or Anthropic. In a recent press release, the company said its mission is “enabling more people to do research on cutting-edge models and customize them to their needs.” The launch comes months after the…

FurtherAI raised $25 million in a Series A funding round to expand the capabilities and the adoption of its artificial intelligence workspace purpose-built for the insurance industry. The company will use the new funding to expand its library of insurance-specific workflows, deepen its integration with the systems of brokers and carriers, and scale its go-to-market teams, it said in a Tuesday (Oct. 7) press release. This round came six months after FurtherAI’s seed round, in which it raised $5 million, and it brings the company’s total funding to $30 million, according to the release. “Insurance is the backbone of the economy, but the…

Google’s virtual try-on technology now lets users see how they would look in a pair of shoes that they found online. Beginning Wednesday (Oct. 8), the company added shoes to the other clothing items available in this artificial intelligence-powered technology, it said in an announcement. “To try on shoes, just tap on any product listing on Google, select the ‘try it on’ button and add a full-length photo of yourself,” the announcement said. “Within moments you’ll see what you might look like in those heels or sneakers.” Google also said in the announcement that it will expand its virtual try-on technology…

For decades, finance teams have been branded as the “cost center” of the enterprise, a department primarily responsible for controlling budgets, approving expenses and delivering reports. “Go to the finance team to get your expenses approved, right? Or to check on your budget, and they say yes or no,” Emanuel Pleitez, head of finance at Finix, said during a discussion for the PYMNTS B2B Payments 2025 event series “B2B.AI: The Architecture of Intelligent Money Movement.” But that was then. Now, in an era defined by real-time data, global volatility and investor expectations, CFOs are reimagining their function as something far more ambitious: a driver of enterprise value.…

Is the B2B sales world ready for AI-powered platforms that act less like pieces of software and more like tireless, always-on members of the sales team? It might be. Artificial intelligence (AI) is writing a new thesis for the near future of B2B commerce. Buyers want to self-educate quickly, on their own terms, without being forced into a slow, generic funnel. Sellers want to spend more time closing, less time sorting. AI, as PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster put it, is quickly becoming the center of gravity for sales optimization and offers “an efficient way to organize the inbound sales funnel.”…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says his company is investing in Elon Musk’s xAI. The executive confirmed the chipmaker’s participation in xAI’s latest funding round in an interview with CNBC Wednesday (Oct. 8). An earlier report by Bloomberg News said that Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup is aiming to raise about $20 billion, with sources familiar with the matter telling the news outlet that Nvidia would contribute $2 billion. Huang told CNBC he’s “super excited” about the funding opportunity, adding that he wishes he could give the billionaire more money. “Almost everything that Elon is part of, you really want to be part of as well,” Huang…

Artificial intelligence (AI) entered the business world with a promise of speed and savings. It’s now showing up as a line item on the balance sheet and a backlog in IT. The World Economic Forum reports that CFOs are uncovering hidden costs beneath the promise of automation, while another analysis finds that CIOs are facing a growing tangle of systems that need to be managed, patched and paid for. The World Economic Forum reports that many AI deployments fall short because companies underestimate the less visible costs of implementation. Data preparation, system integration, retraining and governance often consume more resources than the initial software or cloud…

Artificial intelligence-related goods accounted for nearly half of the overall growth in world merchandise trade in the first half, the World Trade Organization said Tuesday (Oct. 7). While AI-related products account for 15% of global imports and exports, they made up 43% of global trade growth, the WTO said in its latest Global Trade Outlook and Statistics. The trade in these goods, which include semiconductors, servers, telecommunications equipment and about 100 other product lines, rose nearly 20% year over year to reach $1.92 trillion during the first half, according to the report. During the same period, trade in non-AI goods grew by less…

ClickHouse announced an extension of its Series C financing and related transactions to fuel the growth of its offerings in real-time analytics, data warehousing, observability, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company added several new investors, including Citi Ventures, along with continued participation from existing investors, it said in a Tuesday (Oct. 7) press release. “This extended Series C financing will accelerate our mission to empower organizations with lightning-fast analytics on massive datasets,” ClickHouse CEO Aaron Katz said in the release. “Our data platform gives customers the speed, flexibility and efficiency they need to tackle their most critical use cases at scale, helping them…

OpenAI has acquired artificial intelligence (AI)-powered personal finance app Roi. That’s according to an announcement from Roi co-founder/CEO Sujith Vishwajith last week in a post on social media platform X. “We started Roi 3 years ago to make investing accessible to everyone by building the most personalized financial experience. Along the way we realized personalization isn’t just the future of finance. It’s the future of software,” Vishwajith wrote. “This acquisition marks an incredible milestone for Roi, and we’re thrilled to continue building out our vision at OpenAI.” According to a report by TechCrunch, the word “we” here applies solely to the CEO, as sources tell that news outlet…

For two years, the enterprise story on artificial intelligence centered on testing whether chatbots, copilots and generative models could deliver measurable value. Now, the focus has shifted to execution. The week’s announcements from IBM, Oracle and Nvidia show that AI is becoming a foundation of the enterprise stack. IBM signaled that transition by announcing a partnership with Anthropic to embed the Claude family of large language models into its new AI-first software-development environment. The integration will bring Claude into IBM’s hybrid-cloud ecosystem, allowing developers to modernize code, automate testing, and deploy updates within tightly governed systems. The move matters because it addresses…

IBM has launched a partnership with artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic. The collaboration, announced Tuesday (Oct. 7), is designed to encourage development of enterprise-ready AI by infusing Anthropic’s Claude large language model (LLMs) into IBM’s software portfolio. The goal is “to deliver measurable productivity gains, while building security, governance, and cost controls directly into the lifecycle of software development,” IBM said in a news release. “Enterprises are looking for AI they can actually trust with their code, their data, and their day-to-day operations,” said Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer. “Claude has become the go-to AI for developers at the world’s largest companies because of…

OpenAI has inked roughly $1 trillion in deals for computing power this year. That’s according to a report Tuesday (Oct. 7) by the Financial Times (FT), which notes that these agreements dwarf the artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s revenues while raising questions about how it can honor those commitments. The report came one day after OpenAI forged a new agreement with chipmaker AMD, following similar deals with Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave, as the company seeks the computing power it projects it will need to power AI offerings such as ChatGPT. According to the FT, these deals would give OpenAI access to upwards of 20 gigawatts of computing capacity, around the equivalent of power…