#Automation

#Automation

There were specialists monitoring dashboards, tuning AI behavior, debugging API failures, and iterating on knowledge workflows. One team member who had started their career handling customer questions over chat and email (resetting passwords, explaining features, troubleshooting one-off issues, and escalating bugs) was now writing Python scripts to automate routing. Another was building quality-scoring models for the company's AI agent. This seemed markedly different from the hyperbole I'd been hearing about customer support roles going away in large part due to AI.

Zoom in: AI isn't just hitting software valuations, it's changing how these companies operate from the inside out. The big picture: As of this week, investors are seriously looking at AI not just as a productivity boost for software firms, but as a substitute. "AI is not just going to do something to labor ... it's going to do something to profits," Shelby McFaddin, portfolio manager of a $2.6 billion fund, tells Axios. One strategist likened it to BlackBerry: It survived, but its business model and valuation never recovered after being fully disrupted.

It's Super Bowl weekend here in America, which means a few things: copious amounts of gut-busting food, controversial half-time show performances, extravagant commercials, and occasionally a bit of football. For the tens of thousands rich enough to afford tickets to the Big Game, transportation to and from Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, will be paramount. Thankfully, our robotic saviors are here to rescue the throng from the indignity of sharing a ride with an actual human being.

The Microsoft AI CEO said in an episode of the "Exponential View" podcast published Thursday that AI tools now make it possible for anyone to quickly start launching code and apps. "It is so accessible now," said Suleyman. "You can watch a three-minute video, get spun up, launch one of these things." "You can create an app, a web app in seconds," he added. Suleyman said people don't need deep technical skills to get started. Instead, they can learn by experimenting, watching, and doing.

The new talk of the town is one where humans have no place a site called Moltbook that describes itself as a "social network for AI agents." The Reddit-styled site, launched in late January by US-based entrepreneur Matt Schlicht, is one where thousands of AI assistants talk to each other and discuss topics ranging from the technical to the philosophical.

As the self-storage industry navigates a technology inflection point, operators face mounting pressure to modernize operations while managing tighter margins in an increasingly competitive landscape. The sector's race toward digital transformation has exposed a critical gap: while public storage operators like Public Storage report 85% of customer interactions are now digital and have reduced labor hours by over 30% through automation, thousands of independent operators still rely on legacy systems that can't deliver these efficiencies.

The monthly purchasing managers' index showed employment numbers fell more sharply in January compared with December, continuing a trend that started in October 2024. The PMI survey, which is considered to be one of the most reliable indicators of how a sector is performing, said this was the longest period of job shedding in the UK services sector in 16 years, with firms also choosing not to replace voluntary leavers.

One thing I always do when I prompt a coding agent is to tell it to ask me any questions that it might have about what I've asked it to do. (I need to add this to my default system prompt...) And, holy mackerel, if it doesn't ask good questions. It almost always asks me things that I should have thought of myself.

Mid-career women with at least five years' experience are being overlooked for digital roles in the tech and financial and professional services sectors, where they are traditionally underrepresented, according to the report by the City of London Corporation. The governing body that runs the capital's Square Mile found female applicants were discriminated against by rigid, and sometimes automated, screening of their CVs, which did not take into account career gaps related to caring for children or relatives, or only narrowly considered their professional experience.

The difference between staying wealthy and losing it all isn't about making brilliant investment moves or having insider knowledge. After interviewing over 200 people for my articles, including everyone from startup founders to researchers studying wealth preservation, I've noticed something fascinating: Wealthy people who maintain their wealth make profoundly boring choices that most of us overlook. These aren't the sexy decisions that make headlines. They're the mundane, almost tedious habits that create an unshakeable foundation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be constantly marching forward across nearly every industry. While food service is an area that has long relied on human touch (be it via skilled cooks or friendly faces interacting with customers), it too is facing a new wave of AI-powered technologies. These innovations are often sold as being a means to improve working conditions by increasing efficiency and reducing stress - particularly in hectic fast food kitchens -

It feels like an episode of The Jetsons come to life, but the truth is that the AI boom has officially entered the physical world. Most of us interact with artificial intelligence through screens- Gemini drafts our emails, ChatGPT summarizes our docs-but behind the scenes, engineers are racing to give AI hands and feet. Robots already pack boxes in warehouses and make guacamole in fast-food kitchens. Soon, they will be washing dishes, taking care of pets, and performing your manicure.

On a six-block walk I pass at least a half dozen, each with their own vibe: one focused on chai, another inside a yoga studio, a Starbucks that's surprisingly busy for late afternoon downtown. I passed them all up to get to one shop in particular, where a barista named Jarvis would address me by name and make me a thoroughly decent latte with rose-flavored syrup - nothing out of the ordinary in Seattle.

Customer service in the UK has a problem. According to recent survey data, almost half of UK customers have experienced poor customer service over the past year. That's not a minor data point, but rather a warning sign. Long wait times, unhelpful responses, and automated loops that dead-end are just the beginning, and they erode customer trust quickly. While many businesses have invested heavily in digital tools and AI to help address these problems, that comes with its own drawbacks.

Feeling overwhelmed isn't a time-management problem - it's a leverage problem. But understanding smart AI strategies can get you out of the weeds and back to focusing on the kind of work that actually helps your business grow. You'll learn how to turn AI into an invisible team working behind the scenes to support your business without adding more tools, noise or complexity.

Threat hunting is in flux. What started as a largely reactive skill became proactive and is progressing toward automation. Threat hunting is the practice of finding threats within the system. It sits between external attack surface management (EASM), and the security operations center (SOC). EASM seeks to thwart attacks by protecting the interface between the network and the internet. If it fails, and an attacker gets into the system, threat hunting seeks to find and monitor the traces left by the adversary so the attack can be neutralized before damage can be done. SOC engineers take new threat hunter data and build new detection rules for the SIEM.

Results of the survey, conducted in April, have been compiled into GitLab's 2024 Global DevSecOps Report, which was announced June 25. Among the findings, 78% of respondents said they are currently using AI in software development or plan to in the next two years, an increase from 64% of respondents who said they were using or planning to use AI in development last year.

"This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over," Dahl wrote. "Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it."

Land Gorilla said the integration combines the Encompass Partner Connect framework with the company's artificial intelligence tools. Using automated workflows and AI-based document processing, the system maps construction budget data directly to loans, reducing the need for manual data entry and streamlining draw management. This is a major step forward for construction lending, said Sean Faries, CEO of Land Gorilla.

The biggest success so far of generative artificial intelligence in the enterprise is AI coding tools that assist programmers. Startups such as Cursor, Replit, Lovable Labs, Harness, Windsurf, Augment Code, All Hands AI, and Microsoft, with its Visual Studio with GitHub Co-pilot, all offer programs that can drastically reduce the hand-coding humans need to do. And so I wondered: Could a newbie like me, with limited programming knowledge, talk my way through creating an app?

As though exercising my corporeal form wasn't trial enough, now robots? Who in their right mind would want a walking, talking surveillance machine inside their home? The privacy invasion required for such robots to function goes far beyond your smart speaker listening into your conversations, your automatic pet feeder capturing footage, or your Roomba mapping the inside of your home and sharing it with Amazon.