Author: Art Ryan

Amazon plans to invest $35 billion in India through 2030 to support business expansion, artificial intelligence (AI) digitization, export growth and job creation. This will build on the $40 billion the company has already invested in India in terms of compensation to employees and development of infrastructure, it said in a Wednesday (Dec. 10) press release. Amazon’s investments to date have built fulfillment centers, transportation networks, data centers, digital payments infrastructure and technology development, according to the release. The company has digitized 12 million small businesses, enabled $20 billion in cumulative eCommerce exports and supported 2.8 million direct, indirect, induced and seasonal…

The pace at which emerging enterprises convert sales into cash has become a defining measure of resilience and competitiveness. In fact, it was the subject of a recent PYMNTS Intelligence project, the Time to Cash Index™. These firms, taking in between $250 million and $2.5 billion in annual revenue, increasingly see time to cash not as a back-office metric but as a core driver of business velocity. Of course, the executive most responsible for this time to cash velocity is the chief financial officer. That role is evolving too as CFOs take ownership of decisions that directly improve cash flow, liquidity and control. “CFOs are in the business of control,”…

Adobe said it is adding a trio of its apps to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Express and Adobe Acrobat will be directly available on the artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s chatbot, Adobe announced Wednesday (Dec. 10), letting users ask ChatGPT to create designs or edit photos and PDFs. “Adobe apps for ChatGPT build upon the company’s innovation in agentic AI, enabling everyone to easily enhance vacation photos, design event invitations and create polished, professional documents simply by describing what they want to achieve with their words,” the company said in a news release. “By combining the power of Adobe’s creative technology with ChatGPT’s conversational interface,…

The Linux Foundation has formed the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), saying the new organization aims to help ensure agentic artificial intelligence (AI) evolves transparently and collaboratively. The AAIF is a neutral, open foundation, the Linux Foundation said in a Tuesday (Dec. 9) press release. “We are seeing AI enter a new phase, as conversational systems shift to autonomous agents that can work together,” Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said in the release. The AAIF is supported in its mission by the contributions of three technical projects: Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is a universal standard protocol for connecting AI models to tools, data and applications; Block’s goose,…

Google’s Gemini is reportedly outpacing OpenAI’s ChatGPT in growth, though ChatGPT still has close to twice as many users. During November, in terms of monthly active users, Gemini grew 30% to reach 346 million, while ChatGPT increased 5% to 810 million, Seeking Alpha reported Tuesday (Dec. 9), citing a paywalled article by The Information. ChatGPT also led in terms of the number of minutes per day users spend in the app, according to the report. ChatGPT users averaged 17 minutes per day, while Gemini users averaged 11 minutes per day. The Information article cited data from Sensor Tower, according to the report. Sensor Tower did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’…

BNY Mellon announced Monday (Dec. 8) that the bank will integrate Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise into its enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) platform Eliza, further expanding the bank’s use of agentic AI to accelerate research, automate complex tasks and improve data processing.  The company said the upgrade will help employees analyze large volumes of information more efficiently and deliver insights faster across business functions. Sarthak Pattanaik, BNY Mellon’s Chief Data and AI Officer, said the initiative reflects the firm’s broader strategy to embed AI more deeply across the organization. “At BNY, our AI strategy is clear: AI for everyone, everywhere and everything,” he said, describing Gemini Enterprise as a way to…

The era of artificial intelligence (AI) experimentation in business is officially over. A new report from OpenAI, “The state of enterprise AI 2025,” released Monday (Dec. 8), doesn’t just chronicle growth; it signals a structural pivot where generative AI is transitioning from a supplemental productivity tool to embedded, mission-critical infrastructure within the global financial and digital economy. Organizations are moving beyond pilot programs to scaled, operational deployment, effectively codifying institutional knowledge into intelligent, persistent assistants. The average enterprise worker now sends 30% more ChatGPT messages weekly than a year ago, while API reasoning token consumption per organization increased 320-fold, demonstrating both broader…

Visa CEO Ryan McInerney’s annual letter to shareholders, released Tuesday (Dec. 9) reads like a technology thesis for where payments is headed, not just a performance recap. In the letter, part of the company’s annual report, he described a “rewiring” of commerce driven by agentic artificial intelligence (AI), tokenized credentials and data, stablecoins and digitized identity. He argued that every new way to pay (from account-to-account and wallets to crypto and “agent-led commerce”) only matters if it can scale with security, reliability and modern risk controls. McInerney put agentic AI at the front of the platform shift. In his view, the next wave…

Amazon is rolling out new shopping features for its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Alexa+. As reported Tuesday (Dec. 9) by TechCrunch, these features include a shopping hub, a feature that lets users add items to recent orders and personalized recommendations. The report notes that while Amazon has been developing features to make Alexa+ more of a shopping assistant with abilities such as automated deal tracking and automatic purchases, the company is now turning its screen-outfitted Echo devices into a shopping hub with an interface that it’s calling the “Shopping Essentials” experience. With this dashboard, Amazon shoppers can monitor deliveries in real time, find information about…

Anthropic said that it is bringing Claude Code directly into Slack, giving companies a way to turn routine channel discussions into coding tasks and draft pull requests without leaving the messaging platform. The rollout, launched as a research preview, represents a shift toward artificial intelligence (AI) agents embedded inside everyday enterprise tools rather than stand-alone chatbots competing for attention outside the flow of work. The feature allows users to tag @Claude in any channel or thread. If the message resembles a coding request, Claude Code automatically detects intent, analyzes the surrounding Slack conversation for context and selects the correct repository the user…

OpenAI has appointed former Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its chief revenue officer. In this role, Dresser will oversee the artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s global revenue strategy across enterprise and customer success and will “help more businesses put AI to work in their day-to-day operations,” OpenAI said in a Tuesday (Dec. 9) blog post. “We’re on a path to put AI tools into the hands of millions of workers, across every industry,” Fidji Simo, CEO of applications at OpenAI, said in the post. “Denise has led that kind of shift before, and her experience will help us make AI useful, reliable and accessible for businesses everywhere.” At…

Wells Fargo’s CEO said artificial intelligence (AI) could potentially influence company decisions on staffing levels. Speaking Tuesday (Dec. 9) at a Goldman Sachs-hosted conference, Charlie Scharf noted that his company has begun offering generative-AI tools to its engineers, making it 30% to 35% more efficient for them to write code. While it hasn’t led to job cuts, teams are more productive. “We’re not as efficient as we should be without the benefits of AI,” said Scharf, whose comments were reported by Bloomberg News. The CEO added that there are many other places where the banking giant will be able to determine how to use large language models…

In this week’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup funding news, fresh capital flowed into companies focused on computing, operational efficiency and domain-specific AI tools. As reported by Bloomberg, the largest deal came from Unconventional AI, which raised $475 million in a seed round at a $4.5 billion valuation as it builds a novel computer optimized for AI workloads. The company was founded two months ago by former Databricks head of AI Naveen Rao and aims to rethink the architecture of AI computing by drawing inspiration from biology and analog physics. According to the report, Unconventional AI is designing systems that prioritize energy efficiency by exploring semiconductor-level…

Google denied a Monday (Dec. 8) report by AdWeek that the tech giant plans to bring ads to its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Gemini. “This story is based on uninformed, anonymous sources who are making inaccurate claims,” Dan Taylor, vice president, global ads at Google, said in a Monday post on X. “There are no ads in the Gemini app and there are no current plans to change that.” AdWeek had said earlier in the day, in a post on X promoting a paywalled article: “[Google] has told advertising clients in recent days that it plans to bring ads to its AI chatbot Gemini, according to agency buyers familiar with…

Qatar has established a new artificial intelligence (AI) company called Qai, joining larger Gulf nations that are channeling state resources into building domestic AI capabilities and expanding their influence in the global technology sector. The company will operate as a subsidiary of the Qatar Investment Authority, the country’s $524 billion sovereign wealth fund, according to Bloomberg. Qai will invest in AI infrastructure in Qatar and abroad and provide high-performance computing along with a connected suite of tools. The creation of Qai places Qatar alongside other Gulf states that have moved aggressively into artificial intelligence as part of broader economic diversification plans. The United…

Anthropic has teamed with consulting firm Accenture to help companies scale artificial intelligence (AI) projects. The collaboration, announced Tuesday (Dec. 9), has resulted in the Accenture Anthropic Business Group, which will provide training to around 30,000 professionals. “Our new partnership means that tens of thousands of Accenture developers will be using Claude Code, making this our largest ever deployment—and the new Accenture Anthropic Business Group will help enterprise clients use our smartest AI models to make major productivity gains,” said Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic. In addition, the companies are launching an effort to help chief information officers (CIOs) scale AI powered software, with…

Ulta Beauty reported strong third-quarter results, with digital engagement rising, eCommerce up in the mid-teen range and loyalty membership growing 4% to a new high. AI-driven personalization, social-led discovery and expanded app capabilities contributed to stronger conversion across channels. Early holiday results were positive, supported by consistent traffic and faster fulfillment. Ulta said digital performance was a central driver of Q3 growth, supported by a faster app, new checkout features and broader ship-from-store coverage. CEO Kecia Steelman noted that the digital business continues to gain momentum. “We have had three consecutive quarters of double-digit e-commerce comp,” she said, adding that “our investments to elevate…

Microsoft has pledged $17.5 billion for artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing in India. The investment, which the company called its largest ever in Asia, was announced Tuesday (Dec. 9) after CEO Satya Nadella met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss the country’s AI vision. “Microsoft’s investment in India focuses on three pillars—scale, skills and sovereignty—aligned with the Prime Minister’s vision of building a comprehensive ecosystem that drives AI innovation and access at a national scale,” the company said in its announcement. “Together, Microsoft and India are poised to set new benchmarks and drive the country’s leap from digital public infrastructure to AI…

The increasingly heated fight for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is, on its face, about libraries: HBO’s prestige slate, DC’s franchises and Warner’s studio machine. But the bidding war now featuring Netflix and Paramount is also a referendum on something less visible and arguably more defensible than IP: the consumer-facing algorithms that decide what gets watched, when and how often. Netflix reached a $72 billion equity deal for WBD’s studio and streaming assets, while Paramount Skydance has countered with a $30-per-share hostile bid, prolonging a contest already drawing regulatory scrutiny and pricing questions. Streaming has become one of the most refined subscription machines…

Safebooks has emerged from stealth and announced it raised $15 million in seed funding for its intelligent automation layer for quote-to-revenue finance operations. The Agentic Revenue Integrity (ARI) layer provides continuous monitoring, reconciliation and artificial intelligence-powered automation, eliminating the need for manual reviews, reconciliations and data entry, the company said in a Tuesday (Dec. 9) press release. The Safebooks platform reads documents in any format; validates they match what’s in the user’s customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and billing systems; catches discrepancies as they happen; and auto-remediates them, according to the release. It works on top of users’ existing systems, processes…