#automation

#automation

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?

What if you could create a cinematic ad so stunning, so polished, that viewers would swear it cost tens of thousands of dollars, only to reveal it was made for mere cents? Below, Robo Nuggets breaks down how AI is transforming ad production, making high-quality, professional-grade content accessible to everyone, regardless of budget or experience. Imagine producing a complete ad, complete with custom visuals, music, and voiceovers, for under $3.

"Our customers don't live in front of a laptop day in and day out; they live in the dirt," Hootman said. "The ability to get the insights and take the action that they need while they're doing the work is very important to them."

"It's hard to find a game company here today that isn't using AI in some way. At the very least, companies are using either ChatGPT or Gemini."

Many current gig economy jobs are at risk of automation as AI usage expands, Tim Fung, founder and CEO of Airtasker, said in an interview with Business Insider. Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash are already making some deliveries using self-driving vehicles. Fung estimated that human ride-hailing drivers could be eliminated within three to five years. AI is also likely to replace many data science, coding, and engineering workers in the near term, Fung said.

This notion masquerading as a truism sounds good. We like it. We want it to be true. It alleviates the need to worry about what AI is doing to our profession. It assures we will all have jobs in the future gazing out the window and thinking all day. And getting paid vast sums of money to do so. It's in every press release and white paper from vendors.

Programming with AI is still in its infancy, and yet it has already redefined what programming will be about in the immediate future. As a programmer, you are going to interact with a frigging robot that writes code on your behalf. What was science fiction yesterday is now a new reality, and it raises many questions. I won't pretend to have any answers here, just assorted thoughts.

With 93 percent of people checking their inboxes at least once a day, email is still one of the highest-ROI channels out there. But over the past few years, email marketing has become easier to do poorly. Artificial intelligence and automation have removed friction, but they've also made it easier to overlook the basics that mailbox providers now scrutinize more closely. Here are some of those basics, and the problems they bring.

Jain said he had tried to automate internal workflows at Glean, including an effort to use AI to automatically identify employees' top priorities for the week and document them for leadership. "It has all the context inside the company to make it happen," said Jain, adding that he thought AI would "magically" do the work. The idea seemed simple, but it hasn't worked.

Got a podcast idea but no time to produce it? Virtual assistant services now include full podcast management. Your VA can handle audio editing, write show notes, upload episodes to platforms, and even create short clips for social media. They use tools like Descript and Adobe Premiere Pro. This saves you almost 10 hours per episode. Many CEOs are using this service to build their personal brand without touching a microphone.

We are now at the point where automation, machine learning and agentic orchestration can genuinely work together. This is not theory. It is already happening in defense and civilian agencies that have moved past pilots and into production, using agents that bring context, consistency and speed to complex workflows while preserving accountability. These seven principles for an agentic government give leaders a practical framework for adopting automation and AI responsibly.

A few months ago, I went to a birthday party at a bar in Neepsend, an old industrial neighbourhood by the River Don in Sheffield. The bar had been a steelworks once, but now it was another example of the international style you find everywhere, from Portland, Oregon, to all the other Portlands in Canada, England, Australia, and New Zealand: exposed brick, steel beams, concrete floors, Edison bulbs. The steelworkers had been transformed into accountants and brand managers, the molten pig iron into £9 cocktails.

The goal was simple: allow teams to take a work item from Azure Boards and send it directly to GitHub Copilot so the coding agent could begin working on it, track progress, and generate a pull request. We are happy to announce that this integration is now being rolled out as generally available 🎉. Customers who participated in the preview helped us validate the experience, find issues, and shape improvements.

"The vast majority of Codex is built by Codex," OpenAI told us about its new AI coding agent. In interviews with Ars Technica this week, OpenAI employees revealed the extent to which the company now relies on its own AI coding agent, Codex, to build and improve the development tool. "I think the vast majority of Codex is built by Codex, so it's almost entirely just being used to improve itself," said Alexander Embiricos, product lead for Codex at OpenAI, in a conversation on Tuesday.