News/Operations
AI enters the building, eliminates guesswork in construction decision-making
Predictive analytics is transforming construction management by replacing subjective judgment with data-driven decision-making and early problem detection capabilities. As the industry faces challenges from labor shortages, rising costs, and increasing project complexity, these AI-powered systems are proving their value by identifying potential issues before they become critical problems. This shift represents a fundamental evolution from reactive firefighting to proactive management, where objective data enhances human expertise rather than replacing it, ultimately reshaping relationships throughout the construction ecosystem. The big picture: Construction firms are increasingly adopting predictive analytics to overcome traditional management limitations and shift from documenting past events to preventing...
read Apr 24, 2025Tech providers shift to AI and industry services through acquisitions
Technology service providers are shifting their acquisition strategies amid challenging market conditions, with a sharp focus on AI capabilities and industry-specific services. The number of acquisitions by major tech service firms plummeted from 164 in 2021 to just 63 in 2023, rebounding only slightly to 74 deals in 2024. This strategic pivot reflects not just economic constraints but also a deliberate repositioning toward higher-value services as providers adapt to an AI-centric business landscape and increasingly specialized client demands. The big picture: Accenture has emerged as the dominant acquirer in the services industry, accounting for nearly half of all tracked acquisitions...
read Apr 23, 2025AI takes center stage at Schneider Electric Data Center Summit 2025
Schneider Electric's 2025 industry summit reveals the transformative impact of AI on data center infrastructure, showcasing both unprecedented challenges and strategic opportunities for the sector. The event highlighted how the convergence of generative AI, liquid cooling systems, and power management is reshaping data center requirements, while emphasizing the critical need for innovative service approaches and software integration to address the growing gap between workforce capacity and industry demand. The big picture: Generative AI is driving rapid transformation across data center operations, creating an innovation race at both national and corporate levels while significantly increasing power density requirements. Power challenges: Unprecedented...
read Apr 22, 2025AI slashes R&D costs in SaaS, boosting company valuations
The theoretical halving of R&D costs in SaaS companies through AI reveals a counterintuitive truth about software economics: cost-cutting provides far less value than growth acceleration. While AI-enabled engineering teams in startups are showing remarkable efficiency gains, this hypothetical analysis demonstrates that even dramatic reductions in development costs yield relatively modest valuation improvements compared to revenue growth strategies. This thought experiment highlights a fundamental principle that continues to drive investment decisions in both venture capital and public software markets. The big picture: Halving R&D spending would turn 72% of unprofitable SaaS companies profitable overnight, yet would only increase total enterprise...
read Apr 22, 2025AI avatars gain emotional—and business—intelligence in new generator
Yepic AI's new Human Capital OS platform aims to revolutionize business operations through emotionally intelligent AI avatars that can perceive and respond to human emotions. This technology represents a significant advancement in human-computer interaction, potentially transforming how businesses handle everything from customer service to employee training by providing AI assistants that understand not just words but also emotional context and nonverbal cues. The big picture: Yepic AI has unveiled its "emotionally intelligent" AI platform called Human Capital OS, designed to deliver lifelike interactions that adapt to users' emotional states and communication styles. The system claims to transform business operations by...
read Apr 22, 2025Ookla partners with Deloitte and Heavy.AI to improve network analysis
Ookla's new strategic partnerships with Deloitte and Heavy.AI mark a significant advancement in network analytics capabilities for the telecommunications industry. These collaborations combine Ookla's connectivity intelligence with specialized expertise in consultancy and GPU-accelerated analytics, promising to transform how telecom providers, governments, and infrastructure companies visualize, analyze, and optimize network performance at unprecedented scales. The big picture: Ookla has formed partnerships with both Deloitte and Heavy.AI to enhance network analytics capabilities and enable data-driven decision-making for telecom stakeholders worldwide. The collaboration with Deloitte combines Ookla's connectivity insights with Deloitte's consultancy services to improve network performance understanding and strategy development. The partnership...
read Apr 21, 2025Wikipedia blocks AI scrapers to reduce server strain
Wikipedia has deployed a strategic solution to combat the growing problem of AI scraping bots that have been straining its infrastructure and consuming bandwidth. By partnering with Google-owned Kaggle, the Wikimedia Foundation is providing AI developers with a structured dataset specifically designed for machine learning applications, addressing both technical challenges and reflecting a collaborative approach that contrasts with more restrictive measures taken by other content platforms. The big picture: The Wikimedia Foundation has launched a beta dataset through Kaggle containing structured Wikipedia content in English and French, designed specifically for AI developers to use instead of scraping the live site....
read Apr 18, 2025Foxconn launches FoxBrain AI to give manufacturing efficiency a boost
Foxconn's entry into the AI large language model space represents a significant shift for the world's largest electronics manufacturer, as it leverages artificial intelligence to transform its core manufacturing operations. The Taiwan-based company's new FoxBrain model, built on Meta's Llama 3.1 architecture, signals how traditional manufacturing giants are increasingly developing proprietary AI systems to optimize their industrial processes and supply chains rather than merely integrating third-party solutions. The big picture: Foxconn has developed FoxBrain, its first large language model with 70 billion parameters and a 128k-token context window, designed to enhance manufacturing and supply chain operations. The model was trained...
read Apr 16, 2025AI operations expand as Moveworks offers over 100 out-of-box agents
Moveworks has launched an AI Agent Marketplace offering over 100 pre-built agents that enterprises can customize and integrate with their existing systems. This move reflects the growing trend of agent marketplaces as businesses seek faster implementation of AI solutions across departments like HR, sales, finance, and IT operations. The platform's focus on integration with enterprise workloads positions it as a more sophisticated alternative to simple prompt-based marketplaces. Why this matters: The proliferation of agent marketplaces signals a shift in how enterprises approach AI implementation, prioritizing speed and customization over building agents from scratch. Moveworks joins major tech players like ServiceNow,...
read Apr 12, 2025How telecom providers use AI to cut costs and create new revenue
Telecommunications providers are rapidly embracing artificial intelligence as a dual-purpose technology that simultaneously reduces operational costs and creates new revenue opportunities. Fujitsu Networks executive Rich Colter highlighted at Mobile World Congress that the most successful AI implementations in telecom extend beyond just radio network optimization to encompass the entire network infrastructure, including optical networks and operational workflows. This comprehensive approach allows communications service providers (CSPs) to remain competitive while extracting maximum value from their substantial network investments. The big picture: CSPs need an end-to-end AI strategy that addresses both network optimization and new business opportunities rather than implementing isolated AI...
read Apr 11, 2025Nvidia’s new benchmarking tools help businesses measure AI infrastructure performance
Nvidia's new DGX Cloud Benchmark Recipes offer businesses unprecedented insight into AI infrastructure performance, addressing a critical need as organizations struggle to evaluate hardware capabilities for increasingly complex AI workloads. The tools allow organizations to make data-driven decisions about infrastructure investments by providing real-world performance data on today's most advanced AI models. The big picture: Nvidia has developed performance testing tools called DGX Cloud Benchmark Recipes that help organizations evaluate how their hardware and cloud infrastructure perform when running sophisticated AI models. The toolkit includes both a database of performance results across various GPU configurations and cloud providers, as well...
read Apr 11, 2025Enterprise AI in its self-driving phase: 5 trends to watch in 2025
Major technology companies are prioritizing enterprise-ready AI platforms that deliver measurable business value as they navigate the next phase of AI evolution. At Morgan Stanley's recent Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, industry leaders outlined five key trends shaping AI's trajectory in 2025—focusing on advanced reasoning capabilities, custom silicon development, cloud migration opportunities, AI evaluation methodologies, and autonomous AI systems. These developments signal a maturing AI landscape where performance optimization, profitability metrics, and security considerations are becoming central to enterprise adoption. The big picture: Tech companies are building AI platforms specifically designed for enterprise requirements, emphasizing optimized performance, profitability metrics, and...
read Apr 10, 2025AI factories emerge as the backbone of the next industrial transformation, minus the smokestacks
AI factories are emerging as the engine of the next industrial revolution, transforming how organizations generate value from artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional data centers that primarily store and process information, these specialized facilities manufacture intelligence at scale by orchestrating the entire AI lifecycle. This shift is enabling enterprises to convert massive data investments into immediate competitive advantages rather than waiting for long-term returns, with token throughput—the ability to generate real-time AI predictions—becoming the critical measure of performance. The big picture: AI factories represent a fundamental reimagining of computing infrastructure, optimized specifically for AI production rather than general-purpose computing. These specialized...
read Apr 9, 2025All-In: Telecom giants build national AI data centers instead of distributing GPUs across networks
Mobile operators worldwide are investing in AI infrastructure to create nationally-focused GPU-as-a-Service offerings, marking a strategic shift in how telecom companies approach artificial intelligence services. Rather than distributing GPUs throughout their networks for low-latency applications, carriers like SKT, DOCOMO, Verizon, and Swisscom are building centralized AI data centers designed to provide sovereign AI services within national borders. This approach represents both a departure from unsuccessful "walled garden" strategies of the past and a recognition of the realistic timeline for AI applications that genuinely require network-edge processing. The big picture: Major telecom operators across the globe are establishing centralized GPU data...
read Apr 9, 2025Point, click, repeat: Custom AI assistants eliminate repetitive setup work across major platforms
Custom AI assistants are transforming how professionals use generative AI, eliminating the inefficiency of repeatedly uploading background files and retyping prompts for routine tasks. These specialized tools—known as "custom GPTs" in ChatGPT, "Projects" in Claude, and "Gems" in Google Gemini—store recurring prompt elements, significantly enhancing productivity for frequent AI users and preserving the time-saving benefits that initially attracted users to generative AI platforms. The big picture: Major generative AI platforms now offer customizable assistants that remember your context and preferences, eliminating repetitive setup work when performing similar tasks. Why this matters: The efficiency gains from using generative AI can be...
read Apr 7, 2025Floating on Air: Award given to Airtel Business for AI-powered B2B marketing transformation
Airtel Business's AI-powered marketing strategy unlocked a lucrative enterprise badge. The company has earned industry recognition for transforming traditional B2B marketing approaches and successfully implementing artificial intelligence across its operations, creating measurable business impact through automation and personalization that delivers more relevant customer experiences. This recognition from ASSOCHAM highlights how AI implementation can create tangible benefits in enterprise marketing by enhancing team capabilities and customer intelligence simultaneously. The big picture: Airtel Business, the B2B division of Bharti Airtel, has received the "Best Adoption of AI in Marketing" award at the ASSOCHAM Branding and Marketing Excellence Awards 2025, recognizing its innovative...
read Apr 7, 2025Telecoms industry shifts from theory to practice with Open RAN, NTN, and AI
The telecoms industry is shifting from theoretical possibilities to practical implementations across several key technologies. At Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona 2025, industry leaders highlighted the growing maturity of Open RAN networks, the commercial reality of Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN), and the practical applications of AI in solving real-world telecoms challenges. This evolution represents a significant transition as operators now focus on building the fundamental infrastructure necessary to support these innovations long-term. The big picture: Open RAN technology has moved beyond discussions of theoretical potential to demonstrating real-world maturity and ecosystem growth. "Maturity is not a discussion anymore, I think we...
read Apr 4, 2025IBM to enterprise AI: $5 billion to beam up
IBM is transforming the enterprise AI landscape with a multi-pronged strategy that combines proprietary models, Red Hat hybrid cloud integration, and global consulting capabilities. The tech giant's pragmatic approach has already generated $5 billion in AI-related business in under two years, with 80% coming from consulting engagements and the remainder from software subscriptions. This enterprise-first strategy particularly targets regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, where security, governance, and compliance concerns dominate decision-making. The big picture: IBM's AI strategy centers on smaller, specialized models deployed across hybrid cloud environments rather than massive general-purpose models, positioning the company as a trusted...
read Apr 3, 2025Suggestion boxing: How AI tools are transforming feature request management for product teams
The race to manage feature requests efficiently has intensified as software development cycles accelerate. AI systems now offer promising new approaches to automate the traditionally manual process of collecting, organizing, and prioritizing user feedback. By leveraging natural language processing and machine learning, companies can transform overwhelming volumes of feature requests into actionable product roadmaps, potentially saving significant time and increasing product-market fit through more data-driven decision making. The big picture: Building an AI-powered product manager for feature requests enables companies to systematically handle user feedback without drowning in manual data analysis. Key components: An effective AI-based feature request management system...
read Apr 1, 2025AI is transforming time management for busy professionals, leaving them with only the good stuff
Artificial intelligence has emerged as a powerful tool for reclaiming time and boosting productivity in an increasingly busy business landscape. While many professionals end their days exhausted but with little to show for their efforts, AI-driven time management now offers a solution that can transform ordinary workdays into periods of extraordinary progress. By automating routine tasks, accelerating content creation, and streamlining information processing, AI tools empower business leaders to focus exclusively on high-impact activities that drive meaningful results. The big picture: AI tools can handle time-consuming administrative tasks that previously consumed hours of a business leader's day, allowing them to...
read Mar 31, 2025Is AI curiosity killing the customer relationship? SaaS fears growing client churn
The growing influence of AI is fundamentally reshaping SaaS customer retention dynamics, with new technology evaluations disrupting previously stable renewal patterns. Even satisfied customers are increasingly questioning their existing technology stacks as AI capabilities evolve rapidly, creating unprecedented pressure on vendors to innovate or lose business. This shift represents a critical strategic challenge for SaaS companies who must now demonstrate AI relevance while carefully managing customer relationships through this period of technological disruption. Why this matters: AI is causing higher churn rates across SaaS businesses not because products are failing customers but because AI innovations are prompting re-evaluation of previously...
read Mar 31, 2025“Translytical” databases emerge as essential infrastructure for AI applications
Translytical databases are emerging as essential infrastructure for AI-driven applications, offering a unified platform that combines transactional and analytical capabilities. This integration solves a critical challenge for modern AI systems that require real-time, consistent data access—particularly for applications like conversational AI, customer service chatbots, and personalization engines that depend on contextually accurate information to function effectively. The big picture: Forrester Research identifies translytical databases as a key technology enabling modern AI applications by merging previously siloed transactional and analytical systems into a single platform. Traditional data architectures that separate these functions create inefficiencies and delay insights, limiting AI application performance....
read Mar 28, 2025Managing project management: Zoho launches AI-powered Projects Plus platform, unifying management styles
Zoho's new AI-driven Projects Plus platform transforms project management by unifying traditional and agile methodologies with powerful data analytics. Launched on March 11, 2025, this comprehensive solution offers small and enterprise businesses alike a sophisticated yet accessible way to manage projects across various industries including construction, manufacturing, banking, and IT services. The platform's integration of collaborative tools, knowledge management, and AI assistance represents a significant advancement in how businesses can coordinate complex project work. The big picture: Zoho Projects Plus combines traditional project management with agile methodologies, all powered by AI and data analytics. The new platform works alongside or...
read Mar 28, 2025Forrester: CRM systems need AI-first rebuild to escape maze-like feature bloat trap
Forrester Research identifies a pivotal moment for the CRM industry as AI fundamentally reshapes product development priorities. The analysis reveals how decades of feature bloat has created "Winchester Mystery House" complexity in CRM systems, overwhelming customers with unnecessary features, convoluted pricing, and implementation challenges. This market reckoning demands a complete rebuild with AI as the foundational element rather than a bolt-on feature—potentially transforming how businesses purchase, deploy, and derive value from their customer relationship management systems. The big picture: The CRM market has reached a breaking point where complexity is actively diminishing product value, necessitating a complete architectural rebuild with...
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