Author: Art Ryan

California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday (Sept. 29) signed the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, making the state the first in the U.S. to require developers of advanced artificial intelligence systems to disclose how they manage catastrophic risks. The measure, Senate Bill 53, establishes penalties for violations, mandates reporting of safety incidents and builds new infrastructure to expand access to AI resources, placing the state ahead in setting rules for frontier AI, per a news release. The law targets companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue that build “frontier” AI models. Developers must publish frameworks for managing catastrophic risks such…

AI-related infrastructure spending by Big Tech is expected to surpass $2.8 trillion through 2029. That’s according to a report Tuesday (Sept. 30) by Reuters, citing projections from Citigroup, which had earlier forecast that spending figure to come to $2.3 trillion. The bank pointed to early investments by hyperscalers and rising demand for enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) use. Citi expects capital expenditures among hyperscalers — or data center operators — to reach $490 billion by the end of next year, up from an earlier estimate of $420 billion. As Reuters noted, hyperscalers such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft have already spent billions to ease…

Squarespace has introduced what it calls an “AI-powered business partner” for entrepreneurs. Squarespace Beacon AI, announced by the website design platform Tuesday (Sept. 30), is part of a group of products, features and updates under the company’s “Refresh 2025” banner. “At Squarespace, we know entrepreneurs are navigating a complex digital landscape and looking for guidance on how to get discovered and grow,” Paul Gubbay, chief product officer at Squarespace, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS. “With Refresh 2025, we are expanding our product suite by combining design expertise with AI-powered tools to make it easier to run a business while…

OpenAI reportedly recorded roughly $4.3 billion in revenue for the first half of 2025. That’s a 16% increase over last year, The Information reported late Monday (Sept. 29), citing disclosures from the artificial intelligence (AI) startup to its shareholders. The report notes that OpenAI’s cash burn rate for the half year came to $2.5 billion, chiefly related to research and development expenses, such as the costs tied to building advanced AI models and running ChatGPT. PYMNTS has contacted OpenAI for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. The company spent $6.7 billion on research and development during the period, the report said,…

Bank of America is using AI to help its Global Payments Solutions team serve clients. The new Ask Global Payments Solutions (AskGPS) tool, announced Tuesday (Sept. 30), lets employees pose “simple to complex” client queries and get answers within seconds. The tool was created in-house and trained on more than 3,200 internal documents and presentations, such as product guides, term sheets and FAQs. “AskGPS turns institutional knowledge into real-time intelligence,” Mark Monaco, head of GPS at Bank of America, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS. “It’s more than a search tool—it’s a strategic engine, helping our teams respond faster and deliver the…

OpenAI’s launch of Buy It in ChatGPT marks another touchpoint on the agentic artificial intelligence (AI) roadmap. With Instant Checkout, ChatGPT shifts from being a conversational assistant to becoming a transactional platform that collapses search, discovery and payment into a single flow. At launch, the feature supports Etsy products in the U.S., with Shopify’s more than 1 million merchants next in line. Instead of redirecting shoppers to external sites, ChatGPT now enables them to tap “Buy,” confirm payment and shipping, and complete the purchase inside the chat. The system runs on Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, co-developed with OpenAI and open-sourced from day one. It signals a transformational shift in the future of eCommerce. This…

PayOS and Mastercard announced Monday (Sept. 29) that they have completed the first live agentic payment using a Mastercard Agentic Token, a milestone that shifts agentic commerce from theory to practice and shows how AI agents could begin to transform the way payments are authorized, secured and scaled. Building the Trust Layer for Agentic Payments The demonstration was powered by Mastercard Agent Pay, a framework built on the same network tokenization infrastructure that underpins mobile contactless payments, card-on-file storage, and Mastercard Payment Passkeys. By extending those rails, the system enables AI agents to initiate payments while still enforcing user consent, authentication and…

The AI boom’s second act is being financed not just by venture dollars but by borrowing, as companies sprint to build the data centers and buy the chips needed to train and run large language models. That shift is changing who can compete and how quickly and introduces new risks for enterprises buying AI services. Oracle’s $300 Billion Bet The most visible example is OpenAI and Oracle’s $300 billion contract. According to the Wall Street Journal, to deliver, Oracle must invest heavily up front. KeyBanc analysts estimate the company may need to borrow roughly $25 billion annually over the next four…

Fiserv is rolling out a cloud-based content management system designed to help financial institutions streamline operations and automate workflows, the company announced Monday (Sept. 29). The product, called Content Next, was developed with enterprise software firm OpenText and will be offered to banks and credit unions beginning in 2026, according to Fiserv. The system combines document storage, workflow automation and integration with widely used business tools such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Content Next is intended to reduce reliance on IT teams by enabling administrators and business users to manage access controls and configure roles independently, Fiserv said. The company highlighted embedded…

OpenAI’s launch of Buy It in ChatGPT marks another touchpoint on the agentic artificial intelligence (AI) roadmap. With Instant Checkout, ChatGPT shifts from being a conversational assistant to becoming a transactional platform that collapses search, discovery and payment into a single flow. At launch, the feature supports Etsy products in the U.S., with Shopify’s more than 1 million merchants next in line. Instead of redirecting shoppers to external sites, ChatGPT now enables them to tap “Buy,” confirm payment and shipping, and complete the purchase inside the chat. The system runs on Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, co-developed with OpenAI and open-sourced from day one. It signals a transformational shift in the future of eCommerce. This…

Paid raised $21 million in a seed round to expand its mission to include helping software-as-a-service companies pivot to selling artificial intelligence (AI) agents. This move extends Paid’s original mission of helping builders get paid for their agents, the company said in a Sunday (Sept. 28) blog post. Public SaaS companies are seeing their growth slow and their core business model break down because seat counts are dropping as AI agents replace entire teams and customers refuse to pay “per seat” for software that eliminates seats, Paid Co-Founder Arnon Shimoni said in the post. “The route is clear, and smart SaaS companies are already…

The global banking establishment is entering 2026 confronting a growing array of existential questions. Chief among them is whether the future of money can be built without undermining the trust that sustains it. Digital transformation across financial services is now bringing with it not merely another cycle of upgrades, but a fundamental choice: whether, and how, to reinvent core banking infrastructure for a world shaped by tokenized assets, artificial intelligence (AI) core systems, and a coming wave of digital currencies, even quantum applications, already breaking at its shores. That, at least, was the overarching theme on Monday (Sept. 29) at…

Retailers already face an uphill battle managing inflation, tariff-driven price shifts and the looming holiday rush. Now comes another challenge: learning a new language. It’s the language of agents. As Mirakl Americas CEO Scott Eckert explained to PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in a Monday Conversation, agents don’t shop like people do. “Where people used to type three keywords into Google,” he said, “the AI agent now adds more context. All of that rich context makes the opportunity for search much more targeted on behalf of the customer.” Instead of “black dress,” agents process requests like “a black dress for a summer cocktail party in the…

As they should, companies in all business verticals are asking some tough questions about agentic AI. Those questions defined the past week in the Prompt Economy as various thought leadership articles articulated the promise, fears and doubts around agentic AI. One of the most dramatic questions came from MIT offshoot Liquid.AI, which asked the VentureBeat audience “What If We’ve Been Doing Agentic AI All Wrong?” Liquid AI has unveiled a new class of foundation models it calls “Nanos,” compact systems with as few as 350 million parameters that the company says can deliver GPT-4o-level performance on specialized tasks. Unlike today’s massive frontier models that require…

Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 4.5, saying it outperforms other artificial intelligence models in coding, building complex agents and using computers. “Claude Sonnet 4.5 is state-of-the-art on the SWE-bench Verified evaluation, which measures complex real-world software coding abilities,” the company said Monday (Sept. 29) in an announcement. “Practically speaking, we’ve observed it maintaining focus for more than 30 hours on complex, multi-step tasks.” Anthropic added in the post that Sonnet 4.5 leads a benchmark that tests AI models on real-world computer tasks, OSWorld, at 61.4%. Together with the release of Sonnet 4.5, Anthropic has released upgrades to its products, according to the…

The roles of chief financial officers and treasurers are being redefined in a volatile environment where decisions must be made faster and with greater precision. Finance leaders today face a deluge of data from disparate systems, markets and geographies. The challenge is not only interpreting that flood but transforming it into actionable recommendations that can guide the enterprise. Bank of America is aiming to meet that need with its latest CashPro App enhancement, Capital Markets Insights, announced Monday (Sept. 29). By embedding artificial intelligence (AI) tools into its widely used digital banking platform, the bank is extending its reach from treasury operations deeper…

OpenAI’s CEO has reportedly met with the UAE’s president to discuss the country’s artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions. That’s according to a report Saturday (Sept. 27) from Reuters, citing the United Arab Emirates (UAE) state news agency. According to the report, the talks between Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman focused on boosting cooperation between OpenAI and its counterparts in the UAE, especially in the field of AI research and its practical applications. “This cooperation aligns with the UAE’s ambition to establish an integrated AI ecosystem, supporting the country’s development plans and its drive to build a knowledge-based economy,” the agency…

Walmart is reportedly preparing for artificial intelligence (AI) to transform its workforce. “It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job,” CEO Doug McMillon said last week, per a Friday (Sept. 26) Wall Street Journal report. The report characterized McMillon’s comments, at a workforce conference at Walmart’s headquarters in Arkansas, as among “the most pointed assessments” so far from a major company’s chief executive on the effect of AI on employment. At the conference, the CEO said some roles at Walmart will be eliminated, while others will be created. “Maybe there’s a job in the world that AI won’t change, but I…

AI startup Black Forest Labs is reportedly seeking a $4 billion valuation in a new funding round. The German image generation company is in talks to raise between $200 million to $300 million, the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday (Sept. 28), citing three sources familiar with the matter. According to the report, Black Forest has already raised an undisclosed amount of funding valuing the artificial intelligence (AI) company at $1 billion. PYMNTS has contacted Black Forest for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. FT characterizes Black Forest, which launched a little more than a year ago, as one of the few European…

To use AI reflexively is to reach for it automatically, without hesitation. It becomes the instinctive first step rather than a conscious decision. It is when workers stop asking “should I use AI here?” and instead treat it as naturally as email or search. That shift from curiosity to obligatory is unfolding across industries. From Curiosity to Obligatory A few years ago, AI adoption was a curiosity project. Innovation labs ran pilots, and early adopters tinkered. Today, not using AI risks falling behind. The Wall Street Journal has reported that corporate org charts are being redrawn to account for embedded AI roles…