Author: Art Ryan

Cyber threats in Singapore surged across multiple fronts in 2024, reflecting global trends of more sophisticated and damaging attacks, according to the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore’s (CSA) Singapore Cyber Landscape 2024/2025 report released on Sept. 3. The report highlighted that phishing, ransomware, and infrastructure infections all rose sharply, while artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as both a powerful tool for defenders and a weapon increasingly used by attackers. Phishing cases climbed by 49% to more than 6,100 reported incidents. The CSA noted that 12% of phishing emails contained AI-generated content, with financial services, government agencies, and e-commerce platforms being the…

Agentic commerce company firmly.ai has launched a partnership with affiliate marketing provider CJ. The collaboration will offer CJ’s network of publishers and merchants turnkey access to “seamless shopping experiences” for consumers and thus open “new revenue streams, real‑time attribution, and frictionless checkout across every emerging channel,” the companies said in a news release provided to PYMNTS Wednesday (Sept. 10). “As publisher referral traffic continues to decline and consumers increasingly transact within new channels, publishers, affiliates and merchants face the same challenges of engaging and converting consumers,” the release added. The companies said their integration solves this via a native checkout solution for CJ’s…

Microsoft plans to buy access to Anthropic’s artificial intelligence (AI) models for parts of Office 365 Copilot, partly reducing its reliance on OpenAI, The Information reported.  Under the plan, Microsoft will blend Anthropic’s Claude models with OpenAI’s technology inside Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. People involved told The Information that Anthropic’s latest models performed better at advanced tasks, such as automating financial functions in Excel and generating PowerPoint presentations from user instructions. Microsoft aims to announce the change in the coming weeks, while keeping Copilot pricing at $30 per user per month. OpenAI models will continue to power other Copilot features. The shift follows months of sometimes tense…

Google Cloud’s chief executive has reportedly outlined how the company is generating revenue through AI services. “We’ve made billions using AI already,” Thomas Kurian said Tuesday (Sept. 9) at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference in San Francisco, CNBC reported. “Our backlog is now at $106 billion — it is growing faster than our revenue. More than 50% of it will convert to revenue over the next two years,” Kurian said. Google reported revenue of $13.62 billion for its cloud computing unit, up 32% over the previous year. The company’s cloud business trails those of Microsoft and Amazon, the report noted, but is growing faster than them. In some cases,…

Mastercard has introduced new tools to help developers and businesses get ready for artificial intelligence-powered payments and agentic transactions ahead of the global launch of the Mastercard Agent Pay program. “We’re building the infrastructure for a new generation of intelligent transactions, where consumers and developers can empower AI agents to act on their behalf with trust, transparency and precision,” Craig Vosburg, chief services officer at Mastercard, said in a Wednesday (Sept. 10) press release. One of the new tools, the Agent Toolkit, supports integration with platforms like Claude, Cursor and GitHub Copilot by enabling AI assistants and agentic tools to access and interpret Mastercard’s API documentation using structured, machine-readable content via…

In a region increasingly battered by climate shocks, Caribbean leaders are turning to artificial intelligence to improve insurance coverage for the most vulnerable. Speaking at the “AI and Human Development” panel at the Caribbean Regional Risk Conference last week in Barbados, Heather Timothy, regional program coordinator for the Climate Risk Adaptation and Insurance in the Caribbean project, pointed out how AI-powered parametric insurance could be a game-changer for farmers, fisherfolk and informal workers in Bermuda and throughout the Caribbean. Ms Timothy explained that AI can analyse vast amounts of data to design parametric products that trigger quick, automatic payouts after…

Large language models don’t just make mistakes. They sometimes invent answers with striking confidence. A new paper from OpenAI researchers Adam Tauman Kalai, Ofir Nachum, and colleagues argues that these “hallucinations” are not mysterious glitches but predictable byproducts of the way today’s artificial intelligence (AI) systems are trained and tested. The report, “Why Language Models Hallucinate,” traces the problem to two root causes: the way models learn language during pretraining, and the way they are judged during evaluation. Together, these forces create statistical pressure to guess rather than to acknowledge uncertainty. The first stage, pretraining, exposes a model to massive datasets. The researchers argue that even…

Online booking giants are reportedly taking steps to counter the encroachment of AI agents. As the Financial Times (FT) reported Tuesday (Sept. 9), this means forging partnerships with companies such as OpenAI to gain a foothold as artificial intelligence (AI) offers travelers a way to arrange trips and lodging. According to the FT, Booking.com and Expedia are deploying new AI-enabled features using models from OpenAI to automate services and launch tools such as trip planners. And Airbnb has debuted an AI-powered customer service agent to handle customer queries, with plans to roll out more “agentic” functions on its platform next year. The FT notes that these moves are happening as AI agents, autonomous…

Walmart will offer its employees free access to the OpenAI Certification program when it launches in 2026. The retailer will offer this access to its U.S.-based frontline and office-based employees through its private training program, Walmart Academy, Walmart Chief People Officer Donna Morris wrote in a Thursday (Sept. 4) note sent to those employees and posted online. OpenAI announced the upcoming launch of the certification program on Thursday. Walmart will work with the artificial intelligence (AI) startup to develop a version of the program that is tailored to the retailer’s employees, according to Morris’ note. “This training is designed to help you at work and in your personal life in an…

Motion raised $60 million in recent funding rounds to continue developing its agentic work suite that provides artificial intelligence (AI) applications and agents designed for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The company raised the new funding across Series B, Series C and Series C2 rounds, bringing its total raised to $75 million and its valuation to $550 million, it said in a Monday (Sept. 8) press release. Motion’s agentic work platform includes the company’s AI Employees, which are agents that autonomously complete work inside the platform, according to the release. The company’s AI applications and agents help with a growing number of…

Nvidia-backed Reflection AI is raising around $1 billion in a financing that will value the startup at up to $5.5 billion, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The round could value Reflection between $4.5 billion and $5.5 billion, including the new investment, FT added. The announcement could potentially mark a nearly 10-fold valuation jump merely six months after the company’s previous external fundraising, where it was valued at $545 million, according to PitchBook data. Startups leveraging artificial intelligence continue to attract investor capital, with the nascent technology even sparking a multi-billion-dollar race for infrastructure…

Apple unveiled its iPhone 17 lineup on Tuesday, featuring its thinnest smartphone ever, as the tech giant works to prove it can keep pace in the generative AI race. The Silicon Valley powerhouse held its annual iPhone release event amid mounting pressures: the White House is pushing the company to reduce its dependence on Chinese manufacturing, while investors question whether Apple is truly ready for the AI age. Adding to these challenges, the company faces headwinds from President Donald Trump’s high tariff policies. Apple shares have dropped more than 3% since the Republican took office in January. Against this backdrop,…

While Europe may lag overall in the race for global AI dominance, the region has produced some strong contenders. Among them, the most heavily funded and probably best known is Paris-based generative AI startup Mistral AI, which was in the spotlight today with the announcement of a roughly $2 billion Series C round. Semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML Holding led the financing, joined by a long list of existing investors . The round sets a $13.7 billion valuation for the 2-year-old company, which is roughly double the level set in its June 2024 Series B. The new valuation may sound middle-of-the-road by California benchmarks, with San Francisco-based Anthropic now valued at…

Exhibitors cite strong investor leads and international visibility as inaugural event brings in participants from 78 countries Lagos, Nigeria – 09 September 2025: The debut of GITEX NIGERIA brought a global spotlight to Nigeria’s digital economy, with international exhibitors and investors confirming strong engagement and immediate business opportunities. Held under the patronage of H.E. Bola Ahmed Tinubu GCFR, President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, GITEX NIGERIA ran from 1-4 September across Abuja and Lagos. The event was supported by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy in collaboration with the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), endorsed…

Data analytics firm Databricks is closing a $1 billion Series K funding round that values it at over $100 billion, up from $62 billion at the beginning of the year. The company will use the new capital to accelerate its launch of new artificial intelligence (AI) products that help companies deploy AI apps and agents, it said in a Monday (Sept. 8) press release. Databricks’ AI strategy includes expanding its product called Agent Bricks that builds AI agents based on the user’s enterprise data, launching its new Lakebase operational databases that are optimized for AI agents, making AI acquisitions and deepening its AI research, according to the release. The company…

Anthropic will reportedly pay $1.5 billion to settle a high-profile copyright violation lawsuit. The artificial intelligence (AI) startup was sued last year by a group of authors who accused the company of illegally accessing their books. Under the terms of this settlement, Anthropic will pay around $3,000 per book as well as interest, and will also destroy the datasets that contain the allegedly pirated material, CNBC reported Friday (Sept. 5), citing a court filing. The report noted that the case had caught the attention of AI startups and media companies trying to get a sense of the copyright infringement atmosphere in the AI age. Assuming…

OpenAI is reportedly getting into the movie business. The artificial intelligence (AI) startup is lending its resources to help create a feature-length animated film made largely with AI that is expected to be released next year, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Monday (Sept. 8). The movie is called “Critterz,” an adventure featuring a cast of woodland creatures, and comes from Chad Nelson, an OpenAI creative specialist. He began developing the idea three years ago when attempting to make a short film using what was then OpenAI’s new DALL-E image-generation tool, and is now hoping to show a feature-length version of the film at…

Artificial intelligence (AI) software code generation firm Cognition is now a $10 billion company. The startup announced Monday (Sept. 8) that it had raised $400 million in a funding round, the latest in a series of AI firms seeing their valuations skyrocket recently. “We founded Cognition last year to build the future of software engineering,” Co-founder and CEO Scott Wu wrote on the company blog. “We envision a world of software abundance where engineers become architects, solving the most challenging problems and focusing on their creative visions while tasking an army of autonomous agents to support them on everything else.” Last March, Wu added, Cognition debuted…

When Dr. Mark Truty was in college, his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Doctors told the family the tumor appeared localized and attempted surgery. “I remember when the surgeon came out, he said they got most of it. And I never understood that. Like, what do you mean most of them?” Truty recalled, in a Mayo Clinic video. The cancer spread to his father’s liver and abdomen, and he eventually died in his son’s arms. “That’s probably my inner drive, is that I don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” said Truty, now a surgical oncologist at Mayo Clinic. Pancreatic cancer…

Retailers are navigating a consumer landscape where every misstep in stocking the right product can mean lost sales or excess costs. Shoppers, more selective in their spending, expect their preferred items to be available when they want them. Meanwhile, supply chains remain vulnerable to disruption. Against this backdrop, inventory management has become a lever for profitability, and some retailers are turning to artificial intelligence to balance efficiency with customer satisfaction. Their latest earnings results show that smarter, AI-driven inventory systems are helping to keep shelves stocked. Macy’s Macy’s second-quarter 2025 earnings report Wednesday (Sept. 3) showed signs of turnaround, as comparable-store sales rose 0.8%, beating expectations. Management attributed…