Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

A year-and-a-half ago, management consulting firm McKinsey had just 3,000 AI agents in its possession, with its 40,000 employees far outnumbering its agentic fleet. But in just 18 months, that number has grown more than 500% to about 20,000 AI agents supporting the company's work, CEO Bob Sternfels said on Harvard Business Review's Ideacast. Now, the company is evaluating how well job candidates can work with its AI tool as part of the interview process.

If you want to win in AI - and I mean win in the biggest, most lucrative, most shape-the-world-in-your-image kind of way - you have to do a bunch of hard things simultaneously. You need to have a model that is unquestionably one of the best on the market. You need the nearly infinite resources required to continue to improve that mode and deploy it at massive scale.

It found that using AI in education can "undermine children's foundational development" and that "the damages it has already caused are daunting," though "fixable." Because generative AI is still young ChatGPT was released just over three years ago the report's authors dubbed their review a "premortem" intended to study AI's potential in the classroom without a postmortem's benefits of time, long-term data or hindsight.

I attended the convention, held in New York City from January 11 to 13, for the first time tohear from industry insiders about the retail trends to watch in 2026. This year's event drew speakers such as Walmart's incoming CEO John Furner and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who announced a new AI deal this week, as well as Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin. It was clear that artificial intelligence was the big topic on the minds of the attendees from over 5,000 brands at the event.

Ahmad Al-Dahle, who most recently led generative AI at Meta and the team behind its Llama open-source models, joins the company Wednesday and will oversee its engineering and data science teams.

The crypto market is no longer being dictated by speculation and trends of trading in the short run. With the evolution of digital assets, investors demand more structured, data-driven and technology-supported strategies that are more stable, transparent, and have long-term potential. With all these changes, platforms with built-in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and high-end hashing infrastructure are altering the way crypto participation operates.

The model, released on Tuesday, marks the first time a state-of-the-art multimodal model completed its full training cycle on Chinese-made chips, Zhipu said in a statement. The Beijing-based company trained the model on Huawei's Ascend Atlas 800T A2 devices using the MindSpore AI framework, completing the entire pipeline from data preprocessing through large-scale training without relying on Western hardware.

Google announced on Wednesday that it's launching a new beta feature in the Gemini app that allows the AI assistant to tailor its responses by connecting across your Google ecosystem, starting with Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube history. Although Gemini could already retrieve information from these apps, it can now reason across your data to provide proactive results, such as connecting a thread in your emails to a video you watched.

He won't be the last executive pressed on money spent on tech and AI. The quiet concerns that started last year regarding massive AI investments are escalating into loud protests in 2026. Dimon wasn't just asking for blind faith from his shareholders. He discussed the threat posed by his peers and fintechs, and said spending on technology and AI is far more important than trying to "meet some expense target."

In its earlier years, the Adobe Learning Summit felt very much like a traditional user conference. The focus was squarely on tools, especially Captivate. Sessions went deep into features, workflows, and practical techniques for building eLearning. For instructional designers and developers who work hands-on with authoring tools every day, this was incredibly valuable. The Summit was a place to sharpen skills and learn about new developments and upcoming initiatives.

At the start of 2024, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI were united against military use of their AI tools. But over the next 12 months, something changed. In January, OpenAI quietly rescinded its ban on using AI for "military and warfare" purposes, and soon after it was reported to be working on "a number of projects" with the Pentagon.