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Property prices flat in June amid signs UK job market may be ‘softening’ | Housing market

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The housing market was flat in June as signs emerge that the UK jobs market may be “softening”, one of Britain’s biggest mortgage lenders has said.

The average price for a house in the UK was £296,665 in June, according to Halifax, compared with £296,782 in May. It comes after a slight drop of 0.3% in May, although the average house price was still about 2.5% higher in June compared with a year earlier.

Amanda Bryden, the head of mortgages at Halifax, said the market was resilient thanks to wage growth and stable interest rates. However, she added that buyers and homeowners still had to dig deep.

“Affordability is still stretched, particularly for those coming to the end of fixed-rate deals,” she said. “The economic backdrop also remains uncertain; while inflation has eased, it’s still above target, and there are signs the job market may be softening.”

The unemployment rate in the UK hit its highest level in four years in the first three months of this year, at 4.5%. That was up 0.2% on the previous quarter, according to official figures.

However, the housing market could be supported by a lower cost of borrowing, with two more interest rate cuts expected this year, Bryden added. With the average rate on new mortgages now at its lowest since 2023, Halifax anticipates “modest” house price growth for the rest of the year.

The number of first-time buyers in the market has also fallen back to its normal level before the changes to stamp duty, Halifax said. Temporary cuts to the tax in England and Northern Ireland expired in April, adding thousands of pounds to the cost of many property transactions.

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Anthony Codling, of the broker RBC Capital Markets, said the end of the stamp duty holiday had followed its “usual playbook: a rush of transactions as the deadline approaches, a short lull, then back to business as usual”.

“In our view stamp duty holidays pull housing transactions forward rather than creating more transactions overall,” he said. “The return of first-time buyers is a positive sign, a key indicator of the health of the housing market and with wages still rising, and mortgage rates expected to fall, the housing market is in good health as we approach the summer holidays.”

Last week, rival lender Nationwide reported that house prices dropped by the most in two years in June. It calculated that the average price of a home dropped by 0.8% to £271,619, after a 0.4% gain in May.

However, analysts at the building society also said it expected activity to “pick up as the summer progresses, despite ongoing economic uncertainties in the global economy, since underlying conditions for potential homebuyers in the UK remain supportive”.



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Business

Can AI run a successful vending business? An AI startup tested it out

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3 hours ago

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July 7, 2025

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Because AI isn’t (yet) able to physically restock the machine, the AI model could email company employees who handled such tasks. Beyond that, however, the AI model, dubbed Claudius for the experiment, was tasked with many of the responsibilities of a traditional operator, including selecting and maintaining inventory, setting prices and maximizing profit.

The upshot: “If Anthropic were deciding today to expand into the in-office vending market, we would not hire Claudius,” the company wrote in its blog.

The experiment showed that while the AI model was effective at tasks such as identifying suppliers, adapting to users’ requests and “jailbreak resistance,” as Anthropic employees tried to trick Claudius into stock sensitive items, Claudius failed as a convenience service operator because it ignored profitable opportunities, instructed customers to make payments at a Venmo address it had imagined (instead of the one created), sold products at a loss, offered excessive discounts and mismanaged inventory.

Although version one of Project Vend wasn’t successful at the bottom line, Anthropic predicts that AI middle managers will come to pass. “It’s worth remembering that the AI won’t have to be perfect to be adopted; it will just have to be competitive with human performance at a lower cost in some cases,” the company wrote in its blog.

Read the full story here.



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Suntory Global Spirits chooses Globant to build a Commercial Insights AI Agent and unlock Business Intelligence at Scale

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4 hours ago

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July 7, 2025

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Suntory Global Spirits chooses Globant to build a Commercial Insights AI Agent and unlock Business Intelligence at Scale

Suntory Global Spirits chooses Globant to build a Commercial Insights AI Agent and unlock Business Intelligence at Scale

PR Newswire

NEW YORK, July 7, 2025


  • Globant is partnering with Suntory Global Spirits to build a generative AI-powered Commercial Insights Agent
  • With the Agent, Suntory Global Spirits employees can access data insights and self-service intelligence, speeding up decision-making across product development, marketing, sales and strategy

NEW YORK, July 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Globant (NYSE: GLOB), a digitally native company focused on reinventing businesses through innovative technology solutions, today announced a reinvention partnership with Suntory Global Spirits, the world leader in premium spirits, to build and deploy a generative AI-powered Commercial Insights Agent. By compressing days of work into seconds and supporting real-time decision-making for sales, marketing, and strategy, Globant’s Commercial Insights Agent is transforming operations for the beverage company.

The AI-powered agent can interpret complex business questions across dashboards, reports, and unstructured documentation for Suntory Global Spirits, eliminating the need for manual insight requests. By automating insight retrieval, the Commercial Insights Agent reduces operating costs tied to traditional business intelligence workflows and significantly reduces time-to-action. What once required multiple cycles of back-and-forth between business and analytics teams can now be executed on demand, freeing up employees to focus on higher-value strategic tasks.

“Our work with Suntory Global Spirits exemplifies how visionary companies can harness the power of agentic and generative AI to fundamentally transform the way they operate,” said Santiago Noziglia, Retail, CPG and Automotive AI Studio CEO at Globant. “The Commercial Insights Agent is more than a productivity tool; it’s a strategic enabler that redefines how teams access knowledge, make decisions, and unlock growth. Together, we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible when building an AI-powered enterprise.”

Additional benefits of the Commercial Insights Agent include:

  • Self-serve decision support at scale: Teams at Suntory Global Spirits, especially across marketing, sales and product management, can independently access data insights, ask questions, or generate reports without bottlenecks or dependencies on other teams.
  • Contextual recommendations powered by GenAI: The Commercial Insights Agent is trained on internal data to provide contextual GenAI recommendations that speed up decision-making.
  • AI Agent foundation: The Commercial Insights Agent is just the beginning for Suntory Global Spirits, which can now use the agent as a template for new use cases across brand planning, commercial forecasting and innovation pipelines.

To learn more about Globant’s AI-powered tools, visit https://www.globant.com/enterprise-ai.

About Globant

At Globant, we create the digitally-native products that people love. We bridge the gap between businesses and consumers through technology and creativity, leveraging our expertise in AI. We dare to digitally transform organizations and strive to delight their customers.

  • We have more than 31,100 employees and are present in 36 countries across 5 continents, working for companies like Google, Electronic Arts, and Santander, among others.
  • We were named a Worldwide Leader in AI Services (2023) and a Worldwide Leader in Media Consultation, Integration, and Business Operations Cloud Service Providers (2024) by IDC MarketScape report.
  • We are the fastest-growing IT brand and the 5th strongest IT brand globally (2024), according to Brand Finance.
  • We were featured as a business case study at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.
  • We are active members of The Green Software Foundation (GSF) and the Cybersecurity Tech Accord.

Contact: pr@globant.com
Sign up to get first dibs on press news and updates.
For more information, visit www.globant.com.

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SOURCE GLOBANT


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AI Company Buys Bitcoin Miner in $9 Billion Deal to Expand Data Power

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4 hours ago

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July 7, 2025

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AI cloud provider CoreWeave announced it will acquire bitcoin mining firm Core Scientific in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $9 billion, according to Reuters.

As AI workloads continue to surge, energy-hungry data centers have become a crucial asset. Firms like CoreWeave, which began as a crypto miner and later transitioned into AI infrastructure, are aggressively expanding their access to power and physical computing capacity. Per Reuters, the acquisition will give CoreWeave control of Core Scientific’s 1.3 gigawatts of contracted power and its development pipeline, a major boost in the race to scale AI operations.

Under the terms of the deal, Core Scientific shareholders will receive 0.1235 shares of newly issued CoreWeave stock for each Core Scientific share they hold. The offer values Core Scientific at $20.40 per share—a 66% premium over the stock’s price before deal discussions became public in late June, Reuters noted.

Despite the premium, Core Scientific’s stock dropped 22% in early trading Monday, while CoreWeave, which is backed by Nvidia, saw its shares decline 4.5%.

Related: Binance Advises Governments on Crypto Rules and Digital Asset Reserves

The acquisition is expected to help CoreWeave reduce more than $10 billion in projected future lease expenses tied to current site agreements over the next 12 years. The move not only expands CoreWeave’s energy footprint but also signals a broader trend of bitcoin miners diversifying into AI to remain viable in a rapidly shifting tech landscape.

“This acquisition accelerates our strategy to deploy AI and HPC (high-performance computing) workloads at scale,” said CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator, in a statement released alongside the announcement.

Industry analysts see the transaction as a potential inflection point. Gautam Chhugani of Bernstein told Reuters the deal could become a blueprint for other miners looking to reposition themselves in the AI economy. Power access, he emphasized, remains the chief bottleneck for the expansion of AI-focused data centers.

Founded in 2017 as an Ethereum mining operation, CoreWeave exited the crypto mining business following Ethereum’s 2022 shift to a proof-of-stake model, which dramatically reduced miner incentives. Since then, the company has grown rapidly, with revenue surging more than eightfold last year, per its IPO filing.

Source: Reuters



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