AI Insights

How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Every Industry

Published

6 hours ago

July 8, 2025

Welcome to the Age of AI

Artificial Intelligence is no longer confined to labs and sci-fi scripts. It’s here—rewiring how we work, produce, and make decisions across every sector of the global economy. From predictive analytics to autonomous systems, AI is transforming industries at an unprecedented pace.

As CEO of Intermestic Partners—an international business advisory firm I founded in 2011—we work with top U.S. and global firms navigating the AI transition, especially in cross-border operations. With a career rooted in public service—from mayor of a U.S.-Mexico border city to Director of Arizona’s Commerce Department to Chief of Staff at U.S. Customs and Border Protection—I’ve seen how both governments and businesses adapt (or fall behind) in the face of technological revolutions.

Where AI Is Disrupting—and Redefining—Industry

Predictive maintenance reduces downtime
Robots enhance precision and safety
AI-driven supply chain optimization boosts efficiency

AI assists in early diagnosis through imaging and data modeling
Virtual assistants reduce administrative burden
Drug discovery is accelerated by machine learning simulations

Fraud detection in real time
Algorithmic trading increases market responsiveness
Chatbots streamline customer service at scale

AI drones monitor crop health
Smart irrigation saves water and increases yield
Data modeling helps farmers predict market demand

Route optimization reduces emissions and costs
Customs processing becomes smarter and faster
Cross-border visibility increases compliance and traceability

McKinsey estimates that AI could deliver up to $4.4 trillion in global economic value annually across industries.

What Business Leaders Must Do Now

Adapt or be disrupted: AI adoption is no longer optional—it’s existential.
Upskill teams: Human intelligence paired with AI is the real superpower.
Audit your data: Clean, accessible data is the lifeblood of effective AI.

At Intermestic Partners, we help businesses integrate AI into their strategy—especially those operating across borders where regulatory, cultural, and operational challenges can hinder innovation.

The Cross-Border Advantage

Companies working internationally must navigate complex rules, supply chains, and cultural landscapes. AI can make these systems smarter—but only with the right guidance and governance.

That’s where Intermestic Partners comes in. We help clients future-proof operations and seize AI’s cross-border potential.

Final Thought

AI is more than a tool—it’s the next infrastructure of business. The companies embracing it today will be the leaders of tomorrow.

Let’s connect if you’re exploring how to apply AI to your business model or international growth strategy. The transformation has already begun.

The future isn’t waiting. It’s learning, adapting—and already working.

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AI Insights

This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Is Surging After Joining the S&P 500. Can It Continue to Skyrocket?

Published

1 hour ago

July 9, 2025

The Editors

Datadog stock has gone parabolic in the past three months, and it recently shot up following the news of its inclusion in the S&P 500 index.
The stock is trading at an expensive valuation right now.
Datadog’s lucrative addressable opportunity suggests that it may be able to justify its valuation in the long run.
10 stocks we like better than Datadog ›

Shares of Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) shot up nearly 15% on July 3 after it was revealed that the provider of cloud-based observability, monitoring, and security solutions will join the S&P 500 index on July 9.

Datadog will be replacing Juniper Networks in the index after the latter was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It is easy to see why Datadog’s inclusion in the index has sent its stock soaring. To enter the index, a company needs to demonstrate solid profitability in the past four quarters, along with enough liquidity.

Datadog’s inclusion in the S&P 500 over other contenders is a positive for the stock, as it demonstrates the market’s confidence in the company. It’s also worth noting that the stock has shot up a remarkable 76% in the past three months following its latest surge. Does this mean it is too late to buy Datadog stock? Let’s find out.

Image source: Getty Images.

Datadog’s cloud-based observability platform allows customers to monitor their cloud activity across servers, databases, and applications to detect issues, while its security features scan for vulnerabilities so that they can be fixed quickly. The demand for Datadog’s cloud observability solutions has been rising at an impressive pace, thanks to the secular growth of the cloud market.

Now, the company is also providing tools for monitoring large language models (LLMs) and other artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The company is targeting lucrative end markets that are currently worth around $80 billion. This indicates that it has a lot of room for long-term growth. It has generated $2.8 billion in revenue in the trailing 12 months.

However, investors will now have to pay a rich premium to buy into Datadog’s potential growth. That’s because it is now trading at a whopping 330 times trailing earnings. Though the forward earnings multiple of 82 is significantly lower than the trailing multiple, it is still on the expensive side when compared to the S&P 500 index’s average earnings multiple of 24.

The price-to-sales ratio of 20 is over 6x the index’s average sales multiple. The only way Datadog stock can sustain its impressive stock market momentum is by delivering stronger-than-expected growth and outpacing Wall Street’s growth expectations. But can the company do that?

We have already seen that Datadog is scratching the surface of a massive end-market opportunity in the cloud observability market. The advent of AI is likely to help it corner a bigger portion of the addressable market on offer by opening up a cross-selling opportunity. Datadog had 30,500 customers at the end of the previous quarter, and 4,000 of them have been using one or more of its AI services.

Importantly, Datadog management says that this number doubled on a year-over-year basis in the previous quarter, and the good part is that this trend is likely to continue. After all, customers are flocking toward Datadog to improve the performance of their LLMs with its observability solutions. The company points out that “the number of companies using LLM Observability has more than doubled in the past 6 months.”

That’s the reason why Datadog is now pushing the envelope on the product development front by bringing new AI-focused solutions to customers. Its Bits AI platform helps customers investigate incidents, fix code, and review security alerts autonomously. All this should eventually allow Datadog to accelerate its growth rate in the future as the adoption of AI applications in the cloud increases.

For instance, the size of the LLM market is expected to jump by more than 6x by 2030, which should lead to an increase in the demand for Datadog’s offerings. Not surprisingly, analysts are forecasting an acceleration in Datadog’s growth going forward.

DDOG Revenue Estimates for Current Fiscal Year Chart — DDOG Revenue Estimates for Current Fiscal Year data by YCharts.

This improvement in the company’s top-line growth is expected to filter down to the bottom line as well, as shown in the chart below.

DDOG EPS Estimates for Current Fiscal Year Chart — DDOG EPS Estimates for Current Fiscal Year data by YCharts.

However, don’t be surprised to see Datadog’s earnings grow at a faster pace than Wall Street’s expectations as a large chunk of its existing customer base is yet to adopt its AI solutions. This huge cross-selling opportunity should enable the company to win a bigger share of existing customers’ wallets and improve its margin profile.

Datadog seems to be in a position to justify its expensive valuation by stepping on the gas. That’s why it could entice growth-oriented investors, even after the impressive gains that it has clocked in recent months.

Before you buy stock in Datadog, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Datadog wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

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Harsh Chauhan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Datadog. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Is Surging After Joining the S&P 500. Can It Continue to Skyrocket? was originally published by The Motley Fool

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AI Insights

Clarifai AI Runners connect local models to cloud

Published

1 hour ago

July 9, 2025

The Editors

AI platform company Clarifai has launched AI Runners, an offering designed to give developers and MLops engineers flexible options for deploying and managing AI models.

Unveiled July 8, AI Runners let users connect models running on local machines or private servers directly to Clarifai’s AI platform via a publicly accessible API, the company said. Noting the rise of agentic AI, Clarifai said AI Runners provide a cost-effective, secure solution for managing the escalating demands of AI workloads, describing them as “essentially ngrok for AI models, letting you build on your current setup and keep your models exactly where you want them, yet still get all the power and robustness of Clarifai’s API for your biggest agentic AI ideas.”

Clarifai said its platform allows developers to run their models or MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools on a local development machine, an on-premises server, or a private cloud cluster. Connection to the Clarifai API then can be done without complex networking, the company said. This means users can keep sensitive data and custom models within their own environment and leverage existing compute infrastructure without vendor lock-in. AI Runners enable serving of custom models through the Clarifai’s publicly accessible API, enabling integration into any application. Users can build multi-step AI workflows by chaining local models with thousands of models available on the Clarifai platform.

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AI Insights

AI is already making it harder for some to find a job

Published

4 hours ago

July 8, 2025

The Editors

Over the past three years, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates has exceeded the overall unemployment rate for the first time, research firm Oxford Economics reported.

“There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence,” the firm wrote in a report in May, noting that grads with programming and other tech degrees seemed to be particularly struggling in the job market. Other factors, including companies cutting back after over-hiring, could also be at play.

In June, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy warned that the growing use of AI inside his company — one of the Boston area’s largest tech employers — would require “fewer people” and “reduce our total corporate workforce.” And Dario Amodei, chief executive of AI firm Anthropic, predicted the technology will eliminate half of all white-collar jobs.

Brooke DeRenzis, head of the nonprofit National Skills Coalition, has described the arrival of AI in the workforce as a “jump ball” for the middle class.

The tech will create some new jobs, enhance some existing jobs, and eliminate others, but how that will impact ordinary workers is yet to be determined, she said. Government and business leaders need to invest in training programs to teach people how to incorporate AI skills and, at the same time, build a social safety net beyond just unemployment insurance for workers in industries completely displaced by AI, DeRenzis argued.

“We can shape a society that supports our workforce in adapting to an AI economy in a way that can actually grow our middle class,” DeRenzis said. “One of the potential risks is we could see inequality widen … if we are not fully investing in people’s ability to work alongside AI.“

Still, even the latest AI apps are riddled with mistakes and unable to fully replace human workers at many tasks. Less than three years after ChatGPT burst on the scene, researchers say there is a long way to go before anyone can definitively predict how the technology will affect employment, according to Morgan Frank, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies the impact of AI in jobs.

He says pronouncements from tech CEOs could just be scapegoating as they need to make layoffs because of over-hiring during the pandemic.

“There’s not a lot of evidence that there’s a huge disaster pending, but there are signs that people entering the workforce to do these kinds of jobs right now don’t have the same opportunity they had in the past,” he said. “The way AI operates and the way that people use it is constantly shifting, and we’re just in this transitory period…. The frontier is moving.”

Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.

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