Author: Art Ryan

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…

RIYADH: The King Abdulaziz Public Library will host an international symposium on artificial intelligence and translation in Seoul, bringing together experts from Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and South Korea. The event on Sept. 30 is titled “Translation and Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Challenges,” according to Saudi Press Agency. It will be held at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies as part of the 11th King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Award for Translation. Organizers said discussions will cover key issues for the industry, including the most effective AI tools for translators, ethical and copyright concerns, practical applications, and frameworks for responsible adoption. The…

Artificial intelligence capabilities are developing rapidly and companies globally are frantically trying to keep up and implement AI tools, but there are consequences to sloppy execution. In fact, 79% of companies globally expect to incur an “AI debt” as a result of poorly implemented autonomous tools, according to a new report by Asana on the State of AI at Work which surveyed over 9,000 knowledge workers across the U.S., U.K., Australia, Germany, and Japan. The report highlighted that companies are unprepared and lack the infrastructure and oversight required to foster a smooth collaboration between human employees and autonomous AI agents. Differing from generative…

From tech giants to startups, South Korean players are developing large language models tailored to their own language and culture, ready to compete with global heavyweights like OpenAI and Google. Last month, the nation launched its most ambitious sovereign AI initiative to date, pledging ₩530 billion, (about $390 million), to five local companies building large-scale foundational models. The move underscores Seoul’s desire to cut reliance on foreign AI technologies, hoping to strengthen national security and keep a tighter control over data in the AI era. The organizations picked by the Ministry of Science and ICT to compete were LG AI Research, SK Telecom, Naver Cloud, NC…

Researchers have developed a new attack that reveals privacy vulnerabilities by determining whether your data was used to train AI models. The method, named CAMIA (Context-Aware Membership Inference Attack), was developed by researchers from Brave and the National University of Singapore and is far more effective than previous attempts at probing the ‘memory’ of AI models. There is growing concern of “data memorisation” in AI, where models inadvertently store and can potentially leak sensitive information from their training sets. In healthcare, a model trained on clinical notes could accidentally reveal sensitive patient information. For businesses, if internal emails were used in training, an attacker…

When ransomware attacks like Akira and Ryuk began crippling organisations worldwide, the cybersecurity industry’s first instinct was predictable: build bigger walls, deploy more aggressive automated responses, and lock down everything. But there was a different problem emerging, according to Romanus Prabhu Raymond, Director of Technology at ManageEngine. The company’s customers were demanding aggressive containment features, yet automatically quarantining a suspicious hospital computer or bank teller system might prove more devastating than the original threat. The dilemma – balancing rapid threat response with real-world consequences – exemplifies why ethical cybersecurity practices have become one of the defining challenges of 2025. In…

Samsung is overcoming limitations of existing benchmarks to better assess the real-world productivity of AI models in enterprise settings. The new system, developed by Samsung Research and named TRUEBench, aims to address the growing disparity between theoretical AI performance and its actual utility in the workplace. As businesses worldwide accelerate their adoption of large language models (LLMs) to improve their operations, a challenge has emerged: how to accurately gauge their effectiveness. Many existing benchmarks focus on academic or general knowledge tests, often limited to English and simple question and answer formats. This has created a gap that leaves enterprises without a reliable…

If you’ve been on the New York City subway recently, you’ve probably seen stark white ads promoting a wearable AI device called Friend. CEO Avi Schiffman told Adweek that the company spent more than $1 million on a campaign with more than 11,000 cards on subway cars, 1,000 platform posters, and 130 urban panels. Some stations, like West 4th Street, are completely dominated by Friend ads. “This is the world’s first major AI campaign,” Schiffman said. (There have been other AI ads of questionable effectiveness, but perhaps not a print campaign of this scale.) He described it as “a huge gamble,” adding, “I don’t…