He took a few stabs at starting new AI businesses, but nothing really stuck until he got a call from a friend who wanted help filling out customs paperwork. Basu got "very curious" and started cold-calling customs brokers in the Los Angeles area. He learned that many are mom-and-pop affairs still deeply reliant on fax machines and paper. When his first customer showed him stacks of manila folders during a FaceTime tour of her office, everything clicked, Basu told TechCrunch.
Hoang: My background sits at the intersection of enterprise IT, data protection, and cybersecurity. I've spent much of my career working with CIOs and CISOs on resilience - how organizations protect, recover, and govern their most critical data in the face of cyber threats, outages, and operational risk. Today, as CIO at Commvault, I see security not as a standalone function, but as a core business capability.
While automation and AI solutions differ technically in many ways, the core distinction comes down to determinism versus probability. Deterministic systems behave the same every time A deterministic system produces the same output every time for a given input: Input → fixed logic → output No interpretation No ambiguity If two people run the same input through the system, they get the same result
The tweaks to Sonnet 4.6 have taken it past the pricier Opus 4.6 in two of 13 benchmark categories: agentic financial analysis (Finance Agent v1.1, 63.3 percent vs. 60.1 percent) and office tasks (GDPVal-AA Elo, 1633 vs. 1606). Opus 4.6 wins in six of the 13 categories, in tests that show rival Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.2 each leading in 2 of 13 categories. But benchmark tests should not be taken too seriously.
Since being named a Rising Star, my role as vice president at Systato has continued to expand alongside the company's growth. Over the past year, we've nearly doubled our company roster and tripled the size of our technology and software development organization. My focus, alongside growing a world-class group of technical real estate specialists, has increasingly centered on building scalable platforms, leading cross-functional teams, and helping organizations translate automation and data into real operational and financial outcomes.
WordPress plays a key role in this strategy. The content management system (CMS) and its ecosystem are vehicles for helping us adapt to what's next. Features like connecting to third-party APIs and implementing artificial intelligence (AI) come to mind. It all adds up to an exciting time to build websites and related applications. However, it's possible to go a little too far with technology - particularly when it comes to customer service.
Scroll through social media and it feels like everyone has the next big side hustle figured out. Dropshipping. AI services. Crypto. Faceless YouTube channels. But when real people compare notes after months or years of trying, the tone changes fast. Boring Beats Hype Every Time "I've tried so many side hustles and most were trash," one Redditor wrote in a recent discussion about long-term income ideas. That comment captured the mood of the entire thread.
Most American dairy cows are milked by immigrants. On Dale Hemminger's farm in upstate New York, the cows are milked by robots. When a cow wants to be milked, it walks up to a machine that cleans its udder, attaches cups to its teats, draws the milk and dispenses a treat. In a barn that Hemminger plans to open this year, other robots will roam the floor like little automated pooper scoopers, picking up manure.
Bash scripts are a great way to automate all sorts of repetitive tasks -- you can run backups, clear temporary files/logs, rename or batch-rename files, install or update software, and much more. Although writing such scripts isn't nearly as hard as you might think, it does take some time to learn the ins and outs of bash scripting. Also: 6 hidden Android features that are seriously useful (and how they made my life easier) Good news: If you have an Android device, you can enable the Linux terminal, which means you can create or practice your bash scripting on the go.
There's no shortage of anxiety surrounding the future of work. It's an unfortunate fact surrounding the younger generation that's slowly entering the workforce. From whispers of automation-fueled job losses to the growing complexity of hybrid collaboration, fear is becoming more common than clarity. But amidst all the change headed our way in 2026 and beyond, it's not all unpredictable. As I've long taught through my Hard Trend Methodology, the key to reducing fear is .
Imagine uploading a YouTube video today and having 100 perfectly clipped, captioned, and platform-optimized shorts ready to post by tomorrow. Below, RoboNuggets breaks down how Antigravity, a innovative AI-powered platform, is transforming content creation by automating this entire process. From identifying the most engaging moments to formatting clips for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, Antigravity is reshaping how creators and businesses repurpose their content.
Last month I sat with the operations manager of a 40-person London firm and watched her spend an entire morning copying order data from one spreadsheet into another. She'd done this every Friday for two years. Nobody had questioned it because that's just how we do things. UK workers waste 11.3 billion hours a year on administrative tasks like emailing, scheduling, and data entry, according to research from Dropbox.
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.
Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to Be Rich and host of the Netflix series How to Get Rich, has built a following around one central claim: automation beats budgeting. His approach centers on setting up automatic transfers for bills, savings, and investments rather than manually tracking every dollar. The advice resonates because it simplifies money management and removes the emotional burden of constant decision-making.
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.