Author: Art Ryan

Perplexity will pay Snap $400 million over one year to integrate its artificial intelligence-powered answer engine into Snapchat. This integration marks the first integration of an external AI partner directly into Snapchat as well as the first step in Snap’s effort to make the app a platform where AI companies can connect with its 943 million monthly active users, Snap said in a Wednesday (Nov. 5) press release. “This partnership reflects our shared vision for the power of AI to enhance discovery and connection on Snapchat, and we look forward to collaborating with more innovative partners in the future,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in the release.…

Artificial intelligence (AI) and cost-reduction caused American employers to cut 153,074 jobs last month. That’s a 175% jump from October of 2024 and 183% higher than the 54,064 cuts announced in September of this year, per a Thursday (Nov. 6) report by outplacement and executive coaching company Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “October’s pace of job cutting was much higher than average for the month,” Andy Challenger, workplace expert and the company’s chief revenue officer, said in a news release. “Some industries are correcting after the hiring boom of the pandemic, but this comes as AI adoption, softening consumer and corporate spending, and rising costs drive…

Apple is reportedly nearing a $1-billion-per-year deal with Google to power its long-awaited Siri upgrade. That deal would give Apple access to a powerful 1.2 trillion parameter artificial intelligence (AI) model from Google, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (Nov. 5), citing sources with knowledge of the matter. After an evaluation period, the two tech giants are now finalizing an agreement, those sources told Bloomberg. Apple, the report added, is counting on Google’s assistance to overhaul the technology powering its Siri voice assistant, aiming to roll out new features next year. The report also notes that the Google model’s 1.2 trillion parameters, which are a measure of…

Chime Financial’s results released after the markets closed on Wednesday (Nov. 5) demonstrated double digit growth in the FinTech’s active membership base and increased usage of Chime Card for everyday spending. During the conference call with analysts, CEO Chris Britt said that the company has notched 9.1 million active members in a market of nearly 200 million people earning up to $100,000 per year. We’re at a $2 billion revenue run rate, in an over $400 billion market. There’s a secular shift happening in mainstream America towards digital banking,” he said. The company delivered 29% year over year revenue growth despite lapping…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) may be rewriting product playbooks, but it hasn’t yet written humans out of them. The newest PYMNTS Intelligence report, “From Spark to Strategy: How Product Leaders Are Using Gen AI to Gain a Competitive Edge,” finds that while nearly every chief product officer (CPO) now uses gen AI, the technology’s greatest influence is not in automation or cost-cutting. It’s in how teams ideate, design and decide. That subtle shift, from replacing labor to redefining creativity, is changing the economics of innovation. The study, based on a March 2025 survey of 60 U.S. product leaders at companies each generating at least…

In its first earnings call after going public, Pattern told investors Wednesday (Nov. 5) that its technology platform continues to scale efficiently as global brands shift toward automated, data-driven commerce. CEO Dave Wright said the company’s systems “act as an intelligent layer that connects brands to demand across every major marketplace,” enabling real-time optimization of pricing, logistics and product visibility. CFO Jason Beesley said results reflected “broad-based strength across markets” and pointed to continued improvements in fulfillment and marketplace execution as key drivers of operating leverage. Pattern reported Q3 2025 revenue of $639.7 million, up 46% from a year earlier. Net revenue retention reached 122%, its highest level to date. The company’s…

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said Wednesday (Nov. 5) that the company is working on a multimodal device and that the firm wants a federal guarantee that would lower the cost of financing investments in artificial intelligence chips. Friar shared these news items while speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event in California. The WSJ posted video clips of her remarks. Asked about the device OpenAI is developing with Jony Ive, Friar said that she could not share what it looks like or feels like. She added that, historically, every new era of compute has brought with it a new substrate, such as PCs…

A bill that is set to be introduced in the Senate would require major companies and federal agencies to report artificial intelligence-related layoffs, hires, job displacements, retraining and other job effects to the Department of Labor (DOL). The bill would also require the DOL to compile data on AI-related job effects and publish a report to Congress and the public, according to a press release issued Wednesday (Nov. 5) by the bill’s sponsors. The sponsors, Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Mark Warner, D-Va., said in the release that they will introduce the AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act. Organizations would be required to report, and the DOL would be required to publish,…

The technology landscape for banks is shifting fast, and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said the firm’s response is to build for both scale and intelligence. Speaking at the bank’s investor day on Nov. 5, he said decades of steady digital investment have created a foundation that now allows artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to expand across every part of the organization, stretching from consumer services to capital markets. Investing for the Long Run Moynihan told investors the bank will spend $13 billion on technology this year, with $4 billion tagged as “code initiatives” — projects that directly create new capabilities.…

OpenAI said it now has more than 1 million business customers around the world. The artificial intelligence (AI) startup announced this milestone Wednesday (Nov. 5), saying it makes OpenAI “the fastest-growing business platform in history.” The figure, the company said on its blog, “includes all organizations that actively pay OpenAI for business use—either through ChatGPT for Work, or through direct consumption of our models through our developer platform.” “Our enterprise momentum is fueled in part by consumer adoption,” the post added.“With more than 800 million weekly users already familiar with ChatGPT, adoption and ROI within businesses is realized more rapidly—pilots are shorter and…

For years, progress in artificial intelligence was defined by scale and model size. Companies poured billions into training massive systems with ever-growing data sets, assuming that bigger meant better. That assumption is beginning to change. The next phase of AI is about efficiency, building models that are smaller, faster and cheaper to run without sacrificing performance. Anthropic and IBM are among the companies with smaller models. at the forefront of this shift. Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5 matches much of the accuracy of its larger sibling, Sonnet 4.5, while running twice as fast and costing roughly one-third as much. IBM’s recent launch of its Granite…

State-sponsored threat fraudsters have developed malware powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that can not only generate malicious scripts but also “change its code on the fly” to get around detection systems, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a Wednesday (Nov. 5) blog post. GTIG said in a report released Wednesday that this is the first time it has seen malware families use large language models during execution. “While still nascent, this represents a significant step toward more autonomous and adaptive malware,” the report said. This is one example of the ways threat actors are using AI not only for productivity gains but also for…

Finance platform United Fintech has acquired lending automation company Trade Ledger. With this deal, United Fintech gets access to a customer base that includes Barclays and Bank of Queensland, as well as Trade Ledger’s expertise in data-driven lending and commercial banking automation, the companies said in a Wednesday (Nov. 5) news release. “AI is redefining how banks operate, and Trade Ledger is at the forefront of that change,” United Fintech founder and CEO Christian Frahm said in the release. “Trade Ledger CEO and Co-Founder Martin McCann and his team have built exceptional technology that transforms lending into a real-time, data-driven experience for customers.” The release notes that this deal…

Firmly has launched a platform designed to make it easier for merchants to adopt agentic commerce. The new Buy Now platform standardizes the emerging protocols for agentic AI commerce and enables merchants to make their products shoppable across all digital platforms, with no engineering effort required, the company said in a Wednesday (Nov. 5) press release emailed to PYMNTS. The platform provides a secure, standardized interface that solves the complexity around the many protocols, evolving standards and fragmented integrations, firmly Chief Revenue Officer Scott Hendrickson said in the release. “AI agents and humans are ready to transact within digital platforms, and firmly ensures…

Artificial intelligence (AI) lending marketplace Upstart saw growing consumer demand and steady consumer credit strength in the third quarter, executives said Tuesday (Nov. 4) during an earnings call. The company’s originations rose 80% year over year in the third quarter to reach $2.9 billion, according to a presentation released in conjunction with the call. By category, compared to the third quarter of 2024, personal loan originations were up 73% to $2.7 billion, auto originations were up fivefold to $128 million, and home originations were up fourfold to $72 million, per the presentation. “Consumer demand for Upstart continued to grow rapidly, with more than 2 million…

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…