Business

32 otters and the rapid pace of AI change: Why business must gear up to embrace AI

Published

4 days ago

July 4, 2025

Barry Neethling, Chief Technology Officer at First Technology Group, (Image: Supplied)

Ethan Mollik, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies entrepreneurship, innovation and AI, recently wrote an eye-opening article illustrating the phenomenal progress being made by AI. Entitled: ‘The recent history of AI in 32 otters’, the article showcased how rapidly AI had evolved its ability to produce an illustration of an otter on an aeroplane, using WiFi.

For Barry Neethling, Chief Technology Officer at First Technology Group, the article encapsulates everything organisations should understand about AI progress. “It showcases how revolutionary and unstoppable AI is, and the progress made in just four years,” he says.

“Soon, we’re not only going to get immensely powerful AI processing systems running in gigantic data centres in the cloud, but we’re also going to have immensely powerful and intelligent AIs running on our local computers. These sovereign AIs are going to get really interesting, and at First Technology, we’re paying a lot of attention to working with sovereign AI models,” he says.

“Now, researchers are also testing AI for the glimmerings of human intelligence, and slowly but surely, you can see true intelligence is starting to develop. Potentially, five years from now, we might end up with sentience.”

He says: “AI is a superpower and it’s evolving rapidly. If you do not become part of it and embrace it, somebody else will.”

Neethling says while there is widespread interest in AI, many organisations are hesitant to embark on an AI journey, or don’t know where to start.

“But AI is starting to permeate our lives in every way and anyone who isn’t part of AI or using AI to enhance their lives will be excluded from the future where we are using AI to empower ourselves. If you persist in ignoring AI and leaving it to others, or convincing yourself that AI can do nothing for you in your life, I would suggest that you’re making a grave mistake,” he says.

Neethling notes that First Technology teams are mastering AI to help revolutionise their customers’ environments: “The different teams in First Technology are working to do amazing and impressive things with companies’ data, empowering people to access and gain insights from their data in ways that they never dreamed possible.” Take a look at First Technology’s AI that you can use to interrogate the company’s database of stories (you need to ask your admin to give you access).

He adds: “AI has a better memory than humans do, and it is able to connect the dots. So when you combine human ability with the ability of an AI, you can achieve something better or greater than what you would have been able to do by yourself. All organisations need to be focusing on ways to use it in their businesses.”

He notes, however, that data issues must be addressed before embarking on an AI journey. “Before you can start using AI, you need to actually have an idea of what control you have over your data. Is your data stored just on a company server as a Z drive shared to everybody? Have you categorised your data? Do you even know what data is confidential or data that is generally available? What do you know about your own data? And how do you know how effective you are in protecting your data? Before you can put an AI into your environment or an AI onto your data, you have to start figuring out what is going on with your data and how you will protect it.”

Neethling outlines how First Technology assists customers in harnessing AI: “First, we work with customers to categorise and protect their data using tools and licences that they probably have already paid for. And secondly, we help empower them in their environment by accessing that data with an AI to enable their users to be more productive and to be more effective.”

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Business

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

Published

54 minutes ago

July 7, 2025

Linda Becker

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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Business

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

Published

2 hours ago

July 7, 2025

The Editors

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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Business

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

Published

2 hours ago

July 7, 2025

CPI

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%.

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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