#AI

#AI

In the "Arabian Nights" ( The Thousand and One Nights) story collection, a young Persian queen named Scheherazade prevents the king's plans to execute her by telling a succession of stories so enthralling that the king doesn't want to miss the endings. In "The Crow and the Pitcher," one of Aesop's fables, a thirsty crow can't reach the water in a tall jug, so it drops pebbles into the jug until the water rises to its beak.

Economic boycotts are a familiar tool of protest. The problem is they often place the greatest strain on the smallest businesses. That was the case during Friday's nationwide general strike, which was designed to pressure the Trump administration to dial back its aggressive anti-immigration policies. For many small business owners, the shutdown created a dilemma. Supporting the cause often means losing a day's revenue and risking their ability to keep staff employed. Across social media, owners voiced solidarity alongside an apology for staying open.

BlockDAG has drawn major attention in the crypto space for creating one of the largest price gaps in recent presales. The project is offering its final 800 million BDAG tokens at 0.0005, while the confirmed exchange benchmark remains near 0.05. This creates a 100x multiplier opportunity for participants who enter during the few hours remaining before the presale closes. The calculation is simple.

The company, backed by Blackstone, is targeting a valuation of nearly $5.2 billion for its IPO, and is looking to raise as much as $762 million in funding by selling more than 25 million shares. Share prices are expected to range between $26 and $30. It will trade under the ticker "LFTO."

Zero trust is not a thing; it is an idea. It is not a product; it is a concept - it is a destination that has no precise route and may never be reached. But it is described very succinctly: trust nothing until the trust is justified. Justification starts with verifying every subject's identity and authority. This is the single constant in all zero trust journeys: they start with the subject's identity. Zero trust's reliance on identity, and identity's reliance on AI Two questions. Can you have zero trust without effective identity verification? No. Can you have effective identity verification in the age of AI? Maybe, and maybe not.

Outtake, founded in 2023 by a former Palantir engineer, Alex Dhillon, has found a way to automate what has largely been the manual problem of spotting and taking down digital identity posers: impersonation accounts, malicious domains posing as the company's, rogue apps, fraudulent ads, and more. This problem has grown even more difficult because AI has enabled attackers to be more convincing and faster in their efforts.

Tandem - $100M Series B HEALTHTECH Tandem, an AI-powered healthcare platform that automates prescription access tasks for providers and patients, has raised $100M in Series B funding led by Accel. Founded by Sahir Jaggi in 2023, Tandem has now raised a total of $100M in reported equity funding. Concourse - $12M Series A Concourse, a platform providing AI agents that automate financial analysis and workflows for finance teams, has raised $12M in Series A funding led by Standard Capital.

Salesforce has signed a new contract with the Army to provide access to its artificial intelligence, data, and cloud technologies for the next decade. The contract, signed by Salesforce subsidiary Computable Insights LLC, has a five-year base period and a single five-year option period. The Army and rest of the Defense Department will have access to Salesforce's Missionforce National Security products that support efforts in decision making,

Procter & Gamble is emphasizing its strengths in data and artificial intelligence as the packaged goods giant contends with a fragmented "new media reality," executives said on a call discussing earnings earlier this week. The owner of brands like Tide and Downy is working to redefine its brand-building framework to deliver more relevant marketing and better capitalize on emergent channels like retail media that are rewriting the CPG advertising playbook.

The round, for which Goldman Sachs International acted as sole placement agent, will be used to accelerate product development, expand Preply's AI and data capabilities and fuel international growth as the company seeks to reshape education through personalised, tutor-led learning supported by artificial intelligence. Founded as an online language tutoring marketplace, Preply now connects more than 100,000 tutors with learners in 180 countries, offering one-to-one lessons across more than 90 languages.

True to its name, Ramble can take your meandering, unstructured speech and turn it into organized tasks. The app will also capture other details you mention, like project deadlines, priorities, duration, and assignees. The idea is that people often think of things they need to do while on the go, but taking out their phone to jot down a note or create a reminder can be challenging.

As we enter 2026, we mark this anniversary by bringing together three leaders navigating the most complex intersection of technology, geopolitics, and organizational change we have ever witnessed. André Pienaar, Dr. David Bray, and Ken Banta joined us to discuss what boards and CEOs must understand to remain competitive in an era defined by cascading disruptions and incomplete information. The conversation focused on the critical questions every board should be asking this year.

The COVID-19 pandemic has emptied the world's offices, sending most of us to work from home for the foreseeable future and facilitating a mass migration to the digital workplace. But will it also jumpstart the arrival of our non-human colleagues? AMELIA ("AI + ME = AMELIA") from IPsoft can read 300 pages in 30 seconds, comprehend multiple languages (including logic and context), and is installed in more than 500 banks, insurance companies, and retail giants.