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UK carmakers on track to meet EV sales target despite intense lobbying to lower quota | Automotive industry

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Carmakers are on track to meet existing UK electric car sales targets despite having successfully lobbied the government to water them down.

Electric car sales made up 21.6% of sales in the first half of 2025, only marginally below the 22.06% share needed to meet existing rules once concessions are taken into account, according to an analysis by New AutoMotive, a thinktank.

The Conservative government under Rishi Sunak brought in the zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate. It forced carmakers to sell an increasing proportion of electric cars or face steep fines of up to £15,000 for every vehicle above their fossil fuel quota.

However, in April the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, confirmed the Labour government would relax the rules after an intensive lobbying campaign by the UK car industry against the policy.

The Vauxhall maker Stellantis blamed its decision to close its Luton van factory on the mandate, although earlier comments by executives appeared to undermine that argument.

Carmakers are aiming for a headline target of 28% electric sales to avoid fines this year, but “flexibilities” within the rules mean the effective target – as calculated by New AutoMotive – is much lower.

That is because manufacturers are allowed to borrow electric sales from later years and to gain credit for cutting emissions by selling more hybrids. After the government climbdown manufacturers are to be given more freedom on how they meet their yearly targets and to face lower fines.

Ben Nelmes, the chief executive of New AutoMotive, said: “Carmakers are within touching distance of their targets for 2025 before taking into account the government’s decision to weaken the targets for this year.

“This impressive progress should reassure ministers that ambitious targets spur the innovation and dynamism the UK needs to achieve net zero and get ahead in the global shift towards electric vehicles.”

Weakening the rules could benefit individual carmakers in particular. New AutoMotive’s analysis suggests the Japanese carmaker Nissan is the farthest away from what it needs to achieve in 2025, as it waits for its factory in Sunderland in northern England to start production of its new Leaf electric car.

Toyota and JLR, maker of the Jaguar and Land Rover brands, are also well behind their effective targets.

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The decision to weaken the targets is expected to mean significant extra carbon emissions, despite government claims that the impact would be “negligible”.

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders chief executive, Mike Hawes, said that with one in four new car buyers choosing an EV last month, the market was moving forward “but not at the pace needed”.

“The headline figures belie the fact that just 13% of private buyers have gone fully electric this year, with growth driven by fleets which benefit from compelling fiscal incentives,” said Hawes.

“The lack of natural demand among private consumers has forced manufacturers into unsustainable discounting and led them to seek increased regulatory flexibilities to avoid the double whammy of having to incentivise sales and pay punitive fines.”

Britons were wary of going electric for a number of reasons, including higher vehicle costs and an inconsistent and expensive array of public charge points, Hawes said, adding: “The best way to encourage drivers to trade in their older, more polluting vehicles for new zero emission ones would be for government to emulate other countries and reintroduce the compelling purchase incentives it once provided.”



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Business

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

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

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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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