The $5 million lesson: Why accessibility should be part of your risk plan

The $5 million lesson: Why accessibility should be part of your risk plan

​ Presented by AudioEye In 2020, a blind customer named Juan Alcazar filed a lawsuit against Fashion Nova, alleging that the company’s website was inaccessible and denied blind customers the same access as everyone else. It was, in many ways, an ordinary web accessibility lawsuit. One of many filed in federal court that year. Most ended the same way: management distraction, a pledge to fix accessibility issues, legal fees and then a five-figure settlement. But this case didn’t settle. Fashion Nova fought it. Five years and more than 200 filings later, they agreed to pay $5.15 million to settle what…
Read More
Writer’s AI agents can actually do your work—not just chat about it

Writer’s AI agents can actually do your work—not just chat about it

​ Writer, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup, is launching a unified AI agent platform designed to let any employee automate complex business workflows without writing code — a capability the company says distinguishes it from consumer-oriented tools like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT. The platform, called Writer Agent, combines chat-based assistance with autonomous task execution in a single interface. Starting Tuesday, enterprise customers can use natural language to instruct the AI to create presentations, analyze financial data, generate marketing campaigns, or coordinate across multiple business systems like Salesforce, Slack, and Google Workspace—then save those workflows as reusable "Playbooks" that run…
Read More
Microsoft remakes Windows for an era of autonomous AI agents

Microsoft remakes Windows for an era of autonomous AI agents

​ Microsoft is fundamentally restructuring its Windows operating system to become what executives call the first "agentic OS," embedding the infrastructure needed for autonomous AI agents to operate securely at enterprise scale — a watershed moment in the evolution of personal computing that positions the 40-year-old platform as the foundation for a new era of human-machine collaboration. The company announced Tuesday at its Ignite conference that it is introducing native agent infrastructure directly into Windows 11, allowing AI agents — autonomous software programs that can perform complex, multi-step tasks on behalf of users — to discover tools, execute workflows, and…
Read More
How AI tax startup Blue J torched its entire business model for ChatGPT—and became a $300 million company

How AI tax startup Blue J torched its entire business model for ChatGPT—and became a $300 million company

​ In the winter of 2022, as the tech world was becoming mesmerized by the sudden, explosive arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Benjamin Alarie faced a pivotal choice. His legal tech startup, Blue J, had a respectable business built on the AI of a bygone era, serving hundreds of law firms with predictive models. But it had hit a ceiling. Alarie, a tenured tax law professor at the University of Toronto, saw the nascent, error-prone, yet powerful capabilities of large language models not as a curiosity, but as the future. He made a high-stakes decision: to pivot his entire company, which…
Read More
Upwork study shows AI agents excel with human partners but fail independently

Upwork study shows AI agents excel with human partners but fail independently

​ Artificial intelligence agents powered by the world's most advanced language models routinely fail to complete even straightforward professional tasks on their own, according to groundbreaking research released Thursday by Upwork, the largest online work marketplace. But the same study reveals a more promising path forward: When AI agents collaborate with human experts, project completion rates surge by up to 70%, suggesting the future of work may not pit humans against machines but rather pair them together in powerful new ways. The findings, drawn from more than 300 real client projects posted to Upwork's platform, marking the first systematic evaluation…
Read More
Deductive AI projects 1,000+ annual engineering hours saved at DoorDash

Deductive AI projects 1,000+ annual engineering hours saved at DoorDash

​ As software systems grow more complex and AI tools generate code faster than ever, a fundamental problem is getting worse: Engineers are drowning in debugging work, spending up to half their time hunting down the causes of software failures instead of building new products. The challenge has become so acute that it's creating a new category of tooling — AI agents that can diagnose production failures in minutes instead of hours. Deductive AI, a startup emerging from stealth mode Wednesday, believes it has found a solution by applying reinforcement learning — the same technology that powers game-playing AI systems…
Read More
How Deductive AI saved DoorDash 1,000 engineering hours by automating software debugging processes

How Deductive AI saved DoorDash 1,000 engineering hours by automating software debugging processes

​As software systems grow more complex and AI tools generate code faster than ever, a fundamental problem is getting worse: Engineers are drowning in debugging work, spending up to half their time hunting down the causes of software failures instead of building new products. The challenge has become so acute that it's creating a new category of tooling — AI agents that can diagnose production failures in minutes instead of hours.Deductive AI, a startup emerging from stealth mode Wednesday, believes it has found a solution by applying reinforcement learning — the same technology that powers game-playing AI systems — to…
Read More
Meet Denario, the AI ‘research assistant’ that is already getting its own papers published

Meet Denario, the AI ‘research assistant’ that is already getting its own papers published

​ An international team of researchers has released an artificial intelligence system capable of autonomously conducting scientific research across multiple disciplines — generating papers from initial concept to publication-ready manuscript in approximately 30 minutes for about $4 each. The system, called Denario, can formulate research ideas, review existing literature, develop methodologies, write and execute code, create visualizations, and draft complete academic papers. In a demonstration of its versatility, the team used Denario to generate papers spanning astrophysics, biology, chemistry, medicine, neuroscience, and other fields, with one AI-generated paper already accepted for publication at an academic conference. "The goal of Denario…
Read More
Microsoft Copilot now creates apps and automates tasks—discover how it functions

Microsoft Copilot now creates apps and automates tasks—discover how it functions

​Microsoft is launching a significant expansion of its Copilot AI assistant on Tuesday, introducing tools that let employees build applications, automate workflows, and create specialized AI agents using only conversational prompts — no coding required.The new capabilities, called App Builder and Workflows, mark Microsoft's most aggressive attempt yet to merge artificial intelligence with software development, enabling the estimated 100 million Microsoft 365 users to create business tools as easily as they currently draft emails or build spreadsheets."We really believe that a main part of an AI-forward employee, not just developers, will be to create agents, workflows and apps," Charles Lamanna,…
Read More
How Anthropic’s ‘Skills’ improve Claude’s speed, cost-effectiveness, and reliability in business workflows

How Anthropic’s ‘Skills’ improve Claude’s speed, cost-effectiveness, and reliability in business workflows

​Anthropic launched a new capability on Thursday that allows its Claude AI assistant to tap into specialized expertise on demand, marking the company's latest effort to make artificial intelligence more practical for enterprise workflows as it chases rival OpenAI in the intensifying competition over AI-powered software development.The feature, called Skills, enables users to create folders containing instructions, code scripts, and reference materials that Claude can automatically load when relevant to a task. The system marks a fundamental shift in how organizations can customize AI assistants, moving beyond one-off prompts to reusable packages of domain expertise that work consistently across an…
Read More