#Automation

#Automation

Every single day-weekend, weekday, rain or shine-whichever robot vacuum I'm currently testing starts running at 9 am. It's always a good sign. I heave a sigh of relief and continue with whatever else I was doing, content that at least that f*cking chore in my house is getting done.

People working at the front and back offices of banks are going to have wildly different experiences with AI, says Sopnendu Mohanty, the group CEO of the global advisory and investment firm GFTN. He told Business Insider that the disruption posed by AI will depend on whether one works in a bank's front, middle, or back office. "Front is all for the customer. The middle is all for the bank, and the back is just for processing all the activity," Mohanty said.

The amount of money being spent on artificial intelligence is astronomical. Investors have lavished the top tech companies and startups alike with hundreds of billions of dollars - so much so, in fact, that an estimated 92 percent of US GDP growth now comes from AI. If trends continue in 2026, conservative estimates peg the spending from just the "largest technology firms" at $550 billion.

Many organizations are racing to build AI strategies, but too often they focus on adopting the latest tech, rather than creating the environment to support it. The reality is that lasting transformation is fueled by people, which requires companies to take a good look at their culture. At Architech, that's exactly what we did. By prioritizing and rewarding innovation, we aligned our culture with our AI strategy-and it worked.

DeepL calls its brand new Agent an AI-driven colleague. This assistant automates repetitive tasks, while the Customization Hub introduced today facilitates translation processes. In addition, DeepL has expanded its support with 70 new languages. DeepL Agent is available after extensive beta testing with more than 1,000 users. The tool performed 20,000 tasks during the test phase. The system automates tasks such as CRM management, customer service, and marketing activities, going far beyond the translation tasks you might associate with DeepL.

For years, automation has promised to make our lives easier - and to some extent, it has. But in 2025, things feel different. Traditional automation resembles a giant "if-else" statement that struggles to adapt to diverse situations. Agentic AI changes that narrative by enabling workflows to adjust and optimize themselves for countless scenarios that were difficult for older automation tools. In October 2025, OpenAI launched its AgentKit tool for building AI agents, and let me tell you, it is glorious!

Where the altruistic utopian designs of Buckminster Fuller provided an ideal for the first wave of Silicon Valley pioneers (a group including computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier and Wired editor Kevin Kelly), later entrepreneurs have hewn closer to the principles of brilliant scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla, who believed, as he told Liberty magazine in 1935, that "we suffer the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age."

Businesses replacing human support agents with chatbots isn't new. Even before the AI chatbots of today, which are extremely common now, companies were using heavily engineered chatbots that could understand only certain keywords and respond with specific answers. They were terrible, but the one remarkable thing about them is that they showed us what different demographics really expect from customer support and set the standard for how AI-first helpdesks should work - not only in terms of support agents but support overall, including documentation.

Do, president of the East Side Union High School District board, will compete with Neysa Fligor, Yan Zhao and Rishi Kumar to replace longtime assessor Larry Stone in November's special election. If elected, Do said he plans to create a public dashboard with data on appeals and appraisal accuracy. "[Stone] may do it internally - and he may, he may not. I don't know, because it's internally," Do, 51, said. "But I'm willing to do that publicly."

Many infrastructure and operations leaders aren't able to dig out enough money from budgets to reallocate to AI projects, Gartner said in a survey released this week. The research firm surveyed 253 IT leaders globally, and the budget issue plagued half the participants. As a result, 54% said they are focusing on AI projects with attainable results and foreseeable cost savings, Gartner said.

"As a result, we don't need as many roles in some areas as we once did," he wrote, without disclosing the number of affected roles. Protti said Meta is making the changes as it has invested in "building more global technical controls" over the past few years, and has made "significant progress" in its approach to risk management and compliance.

Throughout 2025, via political donations and not-so-subtle business moves, DoorDash has been showing the millions of gig workers who make its multibillion-dollar business viable that it's willing to spend far more to undermine their rights than to compensate them fairly-and it may soon replace them entirely with driverless vehicles. Last week, the United States' largest food-delivery platform announced it was kickstarting a partnership with the autonomous vehicle brand Waymo-a subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet,

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the landscape of modern life, a quiet yet consequential negotiation is unfolding-one that centers not on contracts or boardroom deals but on the essence of what it means to be human. With algorithms now handling everything from data analysis to creative content generation, individuals are increasingly grappling with questions about relevance, identity, and value in an AI-driven world.

Anthropic's new 'Skills' feature lets Claude autonomously perform structured tasks, another sign that AI agents are moving beyond chat and into action. Model builders are moving beyond simple AI chatbots to creating comprehensive assistants that, in the words of AI dignitary Ethan Mollick, " do real work " in enterprise workflows. Anthropic is continuing its push in this area with a new feature, Agent Skills, which allows Claude to improve its execution of specific tasks. When relevant, the model can automatically access folders containing specific instructions, scripts, and other resources, then act on them with human approval.