Google SA, DHET Partnership Brings AI to Higher Education
Google South Africa and the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) have signed a two‑year memorandum of understanding to upskill students and staff across the country's public universities, TVET and community colleges with AI and digital capabilities. The deal includes an initial grant of R49 million (about $2.6 million) and 10,000 Google Career Certificate scholarships in AI essentials, cybersecurity and data analytics, beginning with a pilot at ten institutions. Google estimates AI could contribute roughly R172 billion (around $9.1 billion) to South Africa’s economy, prompting the partnership’s five‑pillar focus on training, teacher development, curriculum, device support and policy guidance. The initiative is executed with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the African Technology Forum to align graduate skills with industry demand.
The Man Who Put AI at the Centre of America’s War Machine
Former Marine colonel Drew Cukor spearheaded the Pentagon’s Project Maven, turning artificial intelligence from a surveillance aid into a core targeting system for the U.S. war machine. Launched in 2017, Maven now powers a software platform that processes thousands of...
Schools Guidance Advises that AI ‘Must Foster Human Connection’
The Scottish Government, together with the Educational Institute of Scotland, has released non‑statutory guidance for schools on safe AI use. The document outlines seven sections, including core principles, data protection, and ethical considerations, and sets five key tenets such as...
NetSuite Extends Commitment to Helping Businesses Use AI Their Way
Oracle NetSuite unveiled enhancements to its AI Connector Service, adding a Companion module, support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) Apps, and broader integration with NetSuite Analytics Warehouse. The Companion provides a curated library of over 100 finance‑specific prompt templates and...
ICO Calls on Recruiters to Review Use of Automated Decisions
The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued new guidance urging employers to review automated decision‑making (ADM) tools used in recruitment, citing the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 that eases lawful AI adoption. The regulator highlighted both efficiency gains...
Bell Integration Wins NICE’s Implementation Partner of the Year for CX Innovation and AI-Led Transformation
Bell Integration has been named NICE’s Implementation Partner of the Year for CX Innovation and AI‑Led Transformation, recognizing its role in scaling the AI‑driven NICE CXone Mpower platform. The award highlights Bell’s deep expertise, including more than 350 AI practitioners...
4G-Connected Earbuds Use AI to Generate Meeting Notes
Mobvoi has introduced the TicNote Pods, the first 4G‑connected AI earbuds that automatically record, transcribe, and index spoken content. The earbuds capture both in‑ear audio and ambient sound, while the charging case records in‑person meetings from several meters away. Transcripts...
Regulator Says Humans Remain Responsible For AI Audit Errors
The UK Financial Reporting Council (FRC) released the world’s first guidance on AI use in auditing, emphasizing that human auditors remain accountable for audit quality. The guidance warns that AI can produce hallucinations, data distortions, and other errors that could...
LLM Build Vs. Buy: A Decision Framework for LLM Adoption
Enterprises face a nuanced build‑vs‑buy decision for large language models (LLMs), weighing cost, control, governance, and readiness. The article outlines four assessment pillars: total cost of ownership, customization and IP, risk management, and organizational capability. It cites a 2025 Omdia...
The Infrastructure Paradox of AI Development in LMICs
A new cross‑sectional study of 91 AI practitioners across 27 low‑ and middle‑income countries uncovers an “Infrastructure Paradox” where the regions most poised to benefit from AI lack the foundational resources to develop it. The research identifies three non‑linear dynamics:...
Chip Maker Fractile in Talks to Raise $200m at Unicorn Valuation, Reports Say
London‑based AI chip maker Fractile is courting $200 million in new capital at a $1 billion unicorn valuation. The round is being led by Accel and early backer Oxford Science Enterprises, with interest from other investors. Fractile, founded in 2022, develops AI...
How Are Publishers Responding to AI Search? Take Our Survey
Publishers are grappling with the uncertain impact of AI‑driven search on traffic, fearing potential declines as algorithms prioritize AI‑generated results. WAN‑IFRA has launched a global, anonymous survey to capture executive insights on which content formats are most at risk and...
Why Seattle’s AI Ambitions Started with a Hypervisor Migration
Seattle faced a $250 million budget gap and launched a hypervisor migration with Nutanix to consolidate 2,500 legacy virtual machines. The project delivered $1.6‑2 million in annual savings, improved uptime, and created a hybrid, cloud‑smart foundation. City leaders stress workload‑specific placement and...
4 AI Chatbots Tried to Fact-Check Rubio on Iran. They Couldn’t Agree
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Good Morning America that the United States’ goals in the Iran conflict mirror the four objectives President Donald Trump outlined on February 28, including destroying Iran’s air force, navy, missile capability, and factories. The article...
Elon Musk Doubles Down on Grok Imagine After OpenAI's Sora Shutdown: ‘Future of AI Is…’
Elon Musk defended xAI's video generation tool Grok Imagine after OpenAI shut down its Sora service. He argued that video understanding is essential for achieving artificial general intelligence and highlighted that Grok Imagine operates at a positive gross margin, unlike...
Automation First: The Practical Path to AI-Ready Accounting
Accounting firms face mounting pressure from regulation, client expectations and AI advances, prompting a shift toward automation. Dext’s new Practice Automation Blueprint advises firms to begin with systematic manual‑process automation before tackling full AI transformation. By reducing data‑entry effort, improving...
Predicting Mental Health Treatment Seeking in the Technology Industry Using Machine Learning: A Comparative Analysis of Supervised Classification Models
Researchers applied five supervised machine learning models to the 2016 OSMI survey of tech workers to predict mental health treatment seeking. XGBoost delivered the top accuracy at 88.7%, slightly ahead of Random Forest and Logistic Regression. Prior diagnosis and family...
I Connected My Dropbox to ChatGPT — and It Changed How I Find Everything
OpenAI’s latest update lets ChatGPT connect directly to Dropbox, indexing PDFs, Word documents, Excel sheets and PowerPoint decks for conversational search. Users link their account via the Apps menu, after which the model can locate files and even extract relevant...
Wealthtech Startup Bachatt Raises $12 Mn in Series A Led by Accel
Bachatt, an AI‑driven savings and wealth platform focused on India’s self‑employed, closed a $12 million Series A round led by Accel, with Lightspeed and Info Edge Ventures also participating. The funding follows a $4 million seed raise last year and will be used...
The AI Industry Loves Token Inflation. Your Company Shouldn’t
The AI industry is embracing token inflation as agentic models consume ever more tokens for planning, tool calls, memory, and multi‑step reasoning. Infrastructure providers such as Google, which now processes over 1.3 quadrillion tokens monthly, and Nvidia are profiting from the...
Microsoft Commits $1 Billion to Thailand for Cloud and AI Infrastructure
Microsoft announced a commitment of more than $1 billion to build cloud and AI infrastructure in Thailand from 2026 to 2028, its largest Southeast Asian investment to date. The plan covers green‑energy data centers, sovereign‑cloud services, and large‑scale AI skills training...
CEO of America’s Largest Public Hospital System Says He’s Ready to Replace Radiologists with AI
Mitchell H. Katz, CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, announced the system is prepared to let artificial‑intelligence algorithms perform first‑read radiology interpretations once state regulations allow. He highlighted AI’s growing role in mammogram and X‑ray analysis and the potential for...
The SA Director Betting Everything on AI Filmmaking
South African director Donovan Marsh, co‑founder of Dragon Studios AI, says generative AI can produce blockbuster‑level films at a fraction of traditional costs. He claims AI could cut a $40 million production like "Hunter Killer" by up to 100 times, and expects...
Here's a Thing - What if Shadow AI Is Actually Telling Us Something Useful?
Enterprises are confronting a surge of shadow AI—unauthorized, employee‑driven use of large language models and autonomous agents. As governance lags, these tools make decisions and act independently, amplifying risk beyond traditional shadow IT. Experts argue that treating employees as AI...
EE Launches AI TV Search Feature
EE has introduced Smart Search, an AI‑driven feature on its EE TV platform that lets users find shows and movies by describing mood, theme, plot or a simple one‑liner. The tool pulls content from live TV, on‑demand libraries and third‑party...
RBC Prepares for the AI Era
Royal Bank of Canada has launched a standalone AI Group, headed by Bruce Ross and reporting directly to the CEO, to accelerate the bank’s artificial‑intelligence agenda across retail, wealth and capital‑markets businesses. The group builds on RBC’s decade‑long AI foundation,...
Walrus Pitches MemWal as Decentralized Storage for AI Agent Memory
Walrus Foundation, backed by Mysten Labs, launched MemWal, a developer SDK that offers decentralized, blockchain‑based storage for AI agents' long‑term memory. The service leverages the Walrus protocol on the Sui blockchain and is paid for with the $WAL token, which...
SheSparks 2026: How Women Leaders Are Enabling the Workforce to Build AI Skills in GCCs
At SheSparks 2026, Kyndryl’s Kush Mahajan and BT Group’s Arunima Dhiman discussed how women leaders are shaping AI adoption in Global Capability Centers (GCCs). They framed AI as an efficiency‑boosting partner that frees employees for higher‑order judgment rather than a...
Nebius to Construct 310 MW AI Factory in Finland
Nebius announced the construction of a new AI factory in Lappeenranta, Finland, with up to 310 MW of power, expected to serve customers starting in 2027. The project follows a recent 75 MW expansion in Mäntsälä and contributes to Nebius’s goal of...
Hongkong Land Foundation Launches AI for Good Hackathon
The Hongkong Land Foundation launched an "AI for Good" hackathon in partnership with the Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation at PolyU, bringing together NGOs, students, and volunteers to prototype community solutions over two days. Participants used AI‑enabled design...
Robotic Online Intelligence Introduces Kubro(TM) Agents – A Toolkit For Bespoke Agentic Workflows In Market Research
Robotic Online Intelligence (ROI) has launched Kubro™ Agents, a new module on its Kubro platform that lets data firms and investment research teams build fully configurable, multi‑step agentic workflows for market research. The toolkit offers more than 50 granular parameters...
Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Concludes with AI Sustainability Projects
Samsung’s “Solve for Tomorrow” competition concluded in Hong Kong, drawing over 250 teams from 100 primary, secondary and tertiary schools. The contest focused on AI‑driven environmental sustainability and AI‑enabled sports/social change, with finalists presenting projects such as AquaPulse, an AI...
![How To Identify Which LLM Is Actually Working For You [Webinar] via @Sejournal, @Hethr_campbell](/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,quality=75,format=auto,fit=cover/https://cdn.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/callrail-webinar-041426-llm-conversion-rates-768.png)
How To Identify Which LLM Is Actually Working For You [Webinar] via @Sejournal, @Hethr_campbell
Search Engine Journal is hosting a live webinar to help marketers pinpoint which large language model (LLM) actually drives conversions in specific industries. Panelists Danielle Wood of CallRail and Natalie Johnson of SweetGlow will share real‑world conversion data for ChatGPT,...
Speech Analysis for Assessing Physical Competence Under the Concept of Physical Literacy (PhD Academy Award)
A PhD thesis by Rui Si Ma demonstrates that speech characteristics can serve as reliable indicators of physical competence. Using machine‑learning and deep‑learning models, the research extracts vocal features that correlate with exercise intensity, enabling non‑invasive fitness assessment. The methodology is designed...
‘Fragmentation Is Poison’: How Microsoft Is Targeting Disparate Data to Boost AI Adoption
Microsoft unveiled Database Hub and Fabric IQ at FabCon and SQLCon 2026, extending its Fabric SaaS analytics platform to unify roughly 20 data services under a single management plane. The new Database Hub adds AI‑driven, natural‑language exploration across Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL and...
SolasAI Launches New Solution for Proactive Model Monitoring and Auditing at Enterprise Scale
SolasAI announced Illumination, a new AI risk‑management platform that extends its Beacon suite with proactive, real‑time model monitoring and auditing. The solution combines advanced statistical drift detection, quality‑erosion alerts, and fairness‑risk scanning, while a human‑controlled agentic AI orchestrates remediation actions....
If OpenAI Is to Float on the Stock Market This Year, It Needs to Start Turning a Profit
OpenAI, valued at roughly $850 bn, is confronting a massive cash‑burn problem as it eyes a potential IPO before year‑end. The company plans to spend about $600 bn on compute infrastructure through 2030, yet its current annualised revenue sits near $25 bn, leaving...
PubMatic & Amnet Launch the First Agentic Advertising Campaign in France Using the Claude LLM
PubMatic and trading desk Amnet have launched France’s first Agentic advertising campaign, built on PubMatic’s AgenticOS and the Claude large‑language model, for client Interbev. The video‑focused effort targets cooking enthusiasts and consumers of responsibly sourced French meat, aiming for high...
Amid Rising Geopolitical Tensions and Trade Restrictions, AI Emerges as Key Driver of Global Trade Growth: McKinsey
Artificial intelligence is reshaping global commerce, with AI‑related hardware shipments surging nearly 40% in 2025 and accounting for roughly a third of worldwide trade growth. The United States emerged as the dominant demand hub, adding about half of all new...
Rakuten Mobile Extends Partnership with Netcracker for AI-Enabled Digital BSS to Support Its Mobile Network in Japan
Rakuten Mobile has extended its multi‑year partnership with Netcracker to continue using the AI‑enabled, cloud‑native Digital BSS platform for its nationwide 4G and 5G network. The renewal builds on a collaboration that began when Rakuten launched in 2019 and adds...
NCTA Launches I-485 Real-Time Data Pilot
North Carolina Turnpike Authority has launched a pilot of Valerann’s Lanternn AI‑enabled platform on the I‑485 Express Lanes around Charlotte. Lanternn ingests real‑time feeds from NCTA’s traffic cameras, navigation systems and third‑party sources to automatically identify incidents such as crashes,...
What If AI Was Already Working Before You Sat Down?
An executive training firm replaced manual admin work with a "Digital Chief of Staff"—a suite of eight AI agents handling email drafting, meeting preparation, follow‑up, CRM updates, and task prioritization. The system pre‑completes routine tasks overnight, allowing the owner to...
Government Datasets Are Poorly Labelled and Will Fail AI
The Open Data Institute’s four‑month NDL‑Lite prototype scanned more than 100,000 public datasets from six UK sources, exposing pervasive labeling gaps, outdated records, and accessibility hurdles. Notably, a major Home Office crime dataset has not been refreshed since 2018, while...
Advancing AI Literacy: A Faculty Course Refresh Institute at Indiana Wesleyan University
Indiana Wesleyan University’s National & Global unit launched a twelve‑week AI‑Enhanced Course Refresh Institute to help faculty redesign courses with embedded AI literacy. The pilot, begun in summer 2025, guided participants through data‑informed analysis, custom GenAI bots, and multimodal video...
Proactive AI for EV Charging
Denmark‑based Monta has embedded an AI layer into its EV charging platform, analyzing data from over 260,000 charge points and 3 million monthly sessions. The system continuously surfaces anomalies, recommends actions such as firmware updates, and even answers natural‑language queries about...
Google's 200M-Parameter Time-Series Foundation Model with 16k Context
Google Research released TimesFM 2.5, a decoder‑only time‑series foundation model with 200 million parameters, down from 500 million in version 2.0. The new model supports a 16 k context window, far exceeding the prior 2 048 limit, and adds an optional 30 million‑parameter quantile head for continuous...
LeapXpert’s Sofia Event Explores the Future of the Engineering Role
By early 2026, roughly two‑thirds of companies generate most code with AI, with some aiming for 90% within the year. LeapXpert, a US‑based enterprise communication platform, is hosting its inaugural Sofia event, “Same Title, New Job,” to discuss how AI...
Critical Manufacturing Brings Real-Time Intelligence to the Shopfloor
Critical Manufacturing is demonstrating its Industrial Operations Platform at Hannover Messe 2026, positioning the solution as more than a traditional Manufacturing Execution System (MES). The platform unites execution, an enterprise data layer, AI copilots and a partner ecosystem to create...
Why The Guardian’s First Reader-Facing AI Product Isn’t a Chatbot
The Guardian has introduced its first reader‑facing AI product, called Storylines, which surfaces AI‑generated narrative clusters on a handful of tag pages. Rather than a chatbot, the tool analyzes the latest 200 headlines per tag to identify three dominant storylines,...
Time Pitches GEO Insights Into a New Brand Offering
Time is launching a new GEO product that audits how AI search engines portray brands and sells tailored branded content to correct mismatches. The service leverages tools from TollBit, ScalePost and Mobian to analyze up to 100 prompts across ChatGPT,...