#ai

#ai

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."

Despite industry discussions around channel convergence, "most marketers' playbooks are actually not that diversified," said Albert Thompson, director of digital innovation at Walton Isaacson. "They have the appearance that they're diversified," Thompson said, "but, in reality, there's no intersection between their heads of investment." Instead, they deal discretely with agency teams that handle broadcast TV, streaming, social video, etc. Many marketers buy what's familiar or "what they think makes sense," Thompson said, partly because they're beholden to traditional agency holding company structures.

On Facebook, our feed and video ranking improvements in Q4 2025 delivered a 7% lift in views of organic feed and video posts, with video time spent growing double-digits year-over-year in the US. Facebook is now surfacing over 25% more same-day Reels compared to Q3 2025, and on Instagram we increased the prevalence of original content in the US by 10 percentage points in Q4, with 75% of recommendations now coming from original posts. Threads is benefiting too, with Q4 optimizations driving a 20% lift in time spent.

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.

Malachowsky Hall is the central hub for data- and AI-focused academic and research programs from the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, the College of Medicine, and the College of Pharmacy. Here, faculty and students from these and other colleges at the University of Florida work together to use data analytics and AI to improve health; engineer the next generation of robotics, unmanned vehicles, and communication systems; and ensure AI is used ethically and equitably.

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.

"We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI either enhanced or eliminated or transformed, 40% globally. This is like a tsunami hitting the labor market," Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said during a panel discussion on the global economic outlook. Young people searching for jobs will find it harder to get a good placement. "Wake up. AI is for real, and it is transforming our world faster than we are getting [it] handled," Georgieva said.

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.

"I am much more convinced that this is a technology that will actually build on the foundation of cloud and mobile platforms, spread faster, bend the productivity curve, and create local surpluses and economic growth around the world," said Nadella. He also emphasized that the future is unlikely to belong to a single dominant AI model. According to Nadella, the core principle will be for companies to combine different models with their own data and model distillation to create smaller and cheaper solutions.

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.

Wondering what your career looks like in our increasingly uncertain, AI-powered future? According to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, it's going to involve less of the comfortable office work to which most people aspire, a more old fashioned gruntwork with your hands. Speaking at the World Economic Forum yesterday, Karp insisted that the future of work is vocational - not just for those already in manufacturing and the skilled trades, but for the majority of humanity. In the age of AI, Karp told attendees at a forum, a strong formal education in any of the humanities will soon spell certain doom.

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.

"I always wanted this job -- I worked towards it," he said. "If you want to climb the ladder, you've got to try things that are outside your comfort zone, which I certainly have. That means I've made mistakes along the way."

Business Insider is on the ground at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, and we want to take you along with us.

Cupertino Library's Teen Advisory Board (TAB) is holding a tech symposium on the future of AI on Jan. 24. Presenters include SellScale co‑founder Aakash Adasera; Aditya Sharma, a Google Pixel AI engineer; Animesh Singh Alang, a UCSC AI researcher and founder of Rizzy; Prof. Navrati Saxena, a globally recognized expert in AI, 5G, IoT and next‑gen communications; and Lesya Hendrix, developer of autonomous systems for Earth and lunar construction, with experience in Tesla, Nuro, Scania and frontier tech.