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  • Samsung opens ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex access after AI restrictions

    Samsung Electronics is expanding employee access to ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex, giving staff wider use of AI tools for technical and non-technical work.

    According to OpenAI, the deployment covers all Samsung Electronics employees in Korea and all Device eXperience employees worldwide. The DX division includes smartphones, consumer electronics, and home appliances.

    Samsung plans to use the tools in software development, marketing, product development, manufacturing, and other business functions. The tools will support tasks such as information search, document drafting, idea development, data interpretation, and code-related work.

    Samsung revisits employee AI use

    The rollout comes three years after Samsung restricted employee use of generative AI tools over data-security concerns. In 2023, the company limited the use of ChatGPT and similar tools after concerns that sensitive internal information had been uploaded to an external AI platform.

    The new deployment gives employees access to ChatGPT Enterprise, which includes controls for data protection, user access, and security management. OpenAI said the enterprise version allows organisations to manage users, apply access controls, and use AI tools within internal security requirements.

    Samsung’s earlier restrictions applied to employee use of ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools. The new rollout gives employees access through an enterprise product with data protection and access controls.

    Samsung has not limited the deployment to a single business unit or technical group. OpenAI said the tools will be used across a broad range of functions, including technical and non-technical teams.

    OpenAI said ChatGPT can support knowledge-based tasks such as searching for information, analysing material, drafting documents, developing ideas, and interpreting data.

    Codex for technical and non-technical work

    Codex will be used for software-related tasks such as writing, reviewing, and debugging code. OpenAI said the tool is also being used for internal tools, websites, software prototypes, and automated workflows.

    OpenAI said Codex can also support non-technical teams in day-to-day work, including by helping employees create internal tools and automated workflows.

    OpenAI said Codex now has more than five million weekly users across technical and non-technical workflows. In Korea, weekly active users of Codex have grown nearly 800% since February 1, 2026, according to the company.

    Harrison Kim, general manager of OpenAI Korea, said the agreement is one of OpenAI’s largest enterprise deployments. He said Samsung is using AI across teams and functions rather than limiting it to specific departments.

    In October 2025, Samsung said it would work with OpenAI as a strategic memory partner for the Stargate AI infrastructure initiative, with OpenAI’s memory demand projected to reach up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month.

    Samsung SDS also entered a potential partnership with OpenAI to jointly develop AI data centres and provide enterprise AI services. Samsung said the agreement would allow Samsung SDS to provide consulting, deployment, and management services for businesses integrating OpenAI models into internal systems.

    Samsung SDS also signed a reseller partnership to offer OpenAI services in Korea. Under that arrangement, Samsung SDS said it would support Korean companies adopting ChatGPT Enterprise and other OpenAI services.

    Reuters reported that Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix had signed letters of intent to supply memory chips for OpenAI’s Stargate project. The report said the two South Korean chipmakers together account for about 70% of the global DRAM market and nearly 80% of the high-bandwidth memory market.

    High-bandwidth memory supports fast data movement between memory and processors in AI systems. Reuters reported that OpenAI’s chip demand for Stargate may reach 900,000 wafers per month, citing South Korea’s presidential office.

    Samsung said its semiconductor businesses would support OpenAI’s demand with advanced memory solutions. The company also said its affiliates were exploring broader work with OpenAI in areas including data centres, enterprise services, and AI infrastructure.

    AI adoption and productivity

    Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report found that 66% of organisations reported productivity or efficiency gains from enterprise AI adoption. The same report found that 53% reported improved insights and decision-making.

    A Bpifrance survey reported by Reuters found that 77% of 534 French mid-sized company heads said their firms used generative AI, but only 17% of those using it reported time savings.

    Samsung has identified use cases across document work, information analysis, coding, product development, marketing, and manufacturing. The deployment gives employees access to ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex for those tasks under a company-wide agreement.

    OpenAI’s Korea partnerships

    OpenAI has also announced other partnerships in Korea. Seoul National University recently began providing ChatGPT Edu to 47,000 students, faculty, and staff.

    OpenAI has also worked with Kakao to bring ChatGPT responses into KakaoTalk group chats. The company said Korean organisations including LG Electronics, LG Uplus, LG CNS, GS E&C, Samsung SDS, TVING, Krafton, Toss, MUSINSA, Korea Zinc, Nexen Tire, and HanaTour are using ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI APIs, or Codex.

    (Photo by Zulfugar Karimov)

    See also: Omio scales travel product development using OpenAI models

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  • Omio scales travel product development using OpenAI models

    Omio integrates OpenAI models across its engineering operations to accelerate travel product development and launch booking interfaces.

    The multimodal travel platform coordinates operations with over 3,000 transportation providers across 47 countries. Omio explicitly rejects the superficial addition of technology to outdated internal processes. The company’s CTO, Tomas Vocetka, requires all internal functions to completely redesign their operational execution frameworks from the ground up to operate as a native AI enterprise.

    OpenAI Codex integration

    Vocetka initiated the internal deployment by providing base ChatGPT access to the workforce, establishing a baseline familiarity with generative models before executing the primary technical integration.

    Omio subsequently embedded OpenAI Codex directly into its engineering operations, mandating its application across the entire software development lifecycle. Engineers currently apply Codex to preliminary research, architectural planning, active coding, automated testing, code reviews, and ongoing system maintenance.

    The engineering division constructs custom internal connectors to link proprietary data environments directly with these tools. This setup allows developers to bypass basic information retrieval and proceed directly to active task execution within their integrated development environments.

    Vocetka categorises the initial ChatGPT rollout as a preliminary introduction, emphasising that Codex handles the actual production workload. The deployment execution matured beyond the technical divisions. Management actively expands the use of Codex into non-technical corporate functions across the wider organisation. This expansion ensures standard operational procedures adapt to the new capabilities introduced by the engineering team.

    Internal analysis indicates the technical effort required to build specific products now sits at approximately 20 percent of previous levels. Delivery timelines show corresponding compression. Projects demanding the attention of multiple developers over an entire fiscal quarter now require a single engineer operating for roughly one month.

    Faster cycle times allow the engineering teams to test experimental concepts and validate consumer demand with minimal resource expenditure. Management allocates capital and engineering hours with greater precision, relying on prototyping to eliminate unviable features before committing to full-scale production.

    Lowering the time and cost barrier for software creation enables quicker internal decision-making. The technical teams iterate on existing products at a much higher velocity, pushing updates and new interface elements to the live environment at accelerated pace.

    Conversational commerce built on real-time transport data

    Omio launched one of the earliest conversational travel booking interfaces in 2023 by connecting OpenAI models to its proprietary transportation inventory.

    The system processes natural language queries regarding complex multimodal routes. Travelers input natural language requests asking for the fastest route from Rome to Florence, or comparing flights and trains between Paris and Barcelona.

    Omio aggregates services spanning trains, buses, ferries, and flights. Legacy travel booking required users to navigate multiple websites, manually compare modes of transport, and independently aggregate itineraries across multiple providers. Omio replaces this fractured process with a unified interface capable of parsing consumer intent.

    The generative models analyse text inputs and ping the booking systems to construct viable travel paths. The application functions by grounding the model responses in live pricing and availability data. The architecture prevents the generation of travel options based on static or outdated training data. The resulting output provides consumers with directly bookable itineraries.

    Omio expanded its initial integration into a dedicated ChatGPT experience. This dedicated application directly accesses the global transportation network maintained by the company. By grounding the user interaction in verified data, the technical team ensures high-fidelity responses. Consumers receive highly-personalised journey options rather than generic travel advice.

    Omio defines this structural setup as a new category of conversational commerce. The AI operates as the primary interface layer mediating the interaction between the consumer and the underlying global transportation network. The company views this as a broader departure from legacy search-based interfaces toward native generative customer experiences.

    The deployment points to a future where travel planning relies entirely on interacting with intelligent systems connected directly to live transportation networks.

    Omio’s corporate policy explicitly mandates that human personnel retain full accountability for all deployed code and final business outcomes. Generative tools function strictly as acceleration engines for development, analysis, and decision-making.

    “The responsibility and accountability stay with people. AI helps us develop faster, analyse faster, and make decisions faster, but people stay in charge,” explains Vocetka.

    This governance structure prevents automated systems from independently executing irreversible changes to the booking infrastructure or the core multimodal routing algorithms. The combination of broad employee access to OpenAI tools and rigorous oversight models creates an environment prioritising both speed and systemic stability.

    See also: Mitigating vendor lock-in with Sakana AI Fugu multi-agent models

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  • SAP and Google Cloud deploy agentic commerce architecture

    SAP and Google Cloud are deploying agentic commerce architecture to automate multi-agent marketing and retail operations at enterprise scale.

    SAP research indicates 78 percent of businesses consider AI essential for retaining customers in 2026. However, the same data reveals fewer than two in five companies share customer data across customer experience (37%) or CRM (39%) platforms. 

    Addressing this structural data failure requires direct infrastructure intervention. SAP and Google Cloud expanded their partnership to build an agentic customer experience architecture, connecting data, AI, engagement, and commerce operations.

    The deployment relies on restructuring how AI interacts with backend commercial platforms. Most digital commerce infrastructures rely on fragmented APIs. SAP Commerce Cloud adopts the Universal Commerce Protocol to standardise data exchange among retailers, payment gateways, and autonomous agents. This framework allows software to independently execute the full retail sequence, spanning initial search, transaction processing, and post-sale resolution.

    Deploying the Universal Commerce Protocol

    Engineering teams integrating the Universal Commerce Protocol facilitate direct interactions between intelligent agents and commerce platforms. The standardisation lowers integration costs and accelerates onboarding into AI-driven channels.

    SAP plans to collaborate with Google to ensure merchant products surface organically across the Gemini application and Google Search, specifically incorporating AI Mode functionalities. Consumers interact with these interfaces while the backend architecture processes inventory checks, cart management, and payment processing without requiring retailers to rebuild existing infrastructure.

    SAP Commerce Cloud integrates Google Gemini capabilities to power a designated Shopping Assistant. Brands deploy the assistant directly to their consumers to facilitate chat, voice, and text engagements. State retention remains active throughout the complete shopping cycle. The deployment ingests live behavioural inputs, current warehouse capacities, and active marketing data to assemble distinct merchandise pairings, including full event configurations. By continuously refining recommendations, the application ensures high relevance and strict physical fulfilment capability.

    Enterprise systems often fail when promotional campaigns trigger demand that physical inventory cannot satisfy. Frontend interfaces failing to synchronise with backend warehouse systems frequently halt digital purchases. Users regularly click promotional emails, load the associated mobile application, and face sudden out-of-stock notices during checkout. Fulfilment updates experience severe delays, leaving support agents without a complete operational picture. SAP and Google Cloud engineered their joint solution to correct these specific systemic customer experience failures.

    Instead of managing disconnected points of contact, the architecture unifies the entire sequence. Traditional commercial setups require consumers to repeatedly input previously shared information. Support staff frequently lack access to unified records, preventing them from resolving issues efficiently. The integration targets these operational breakdowns, ensuring the system recognises the user and their precise context instantly across all digital properties.

    Bidirectional data flows

    Marketing execution demands highly accurate data pipelines. SAP Engagement Cloud partners with Google Cloud to formulate an autonomous multi-agent framework. The technical foundation relies on SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery. The deployment relies on bidirectional, zero-copy data linking secured by strict administrative controls. Leaving vast data stores in place rather than duplicating them drops storage expenses and network latency.

    BigQuery ingests live variables like weather conditions, precise locations, and active advertising interaction rates. SAP Customer Experience solutions supply the internal behavioural context, tracking customer profiles, exact transaction histories, specific service interactions, and consented engagement records. SAP Engagement Cloud activates the combined intelligence, deploying autonomous agents to orchestrate personalised interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.

    Routing information through the Business Data Cloud while BigQuery handles the logic forces immediate inventory synchronisation. The Shopping Assistant actively queries live warehouse records before displaying any product. Software checks physical supply against consumer requests, verifying availability prior to making the suggestion.

    Generative execution in production environments

    Advanced generative models dictate the localised output of the marketing campaigns. Google Gemini models, specifically including the Nano Banana 2 iteration, provide specialised agentic skills. The models dynamically generate localised messaging, customised imagery, and campaign variations based on the exact specifications provided by the bidirectional data flow.

    The deployment upgrades standard text messages into immersive and interactive interfaces via Google Rich Communication Services. Advertising creatives evolve continuously based on incoming engagement data. The system processes the interaction, evaluates the response against the user profile, and instructs the Nano Banana 2 model to adjust the subsequent communication.

    Marketing departments achieve high efficiency by abandoning manual execution. Instead of configuring rigid campaign parameters, teams establish business goals and provide enterprise data access to the SAP Engagement Cloud. The autonomous agents coordinate the necessary steps, segmenting audiences based on Google BigQuery analytics and generating specific content variations through Google Gemini models.

    Evaluating the infrastructure impact

    Deploying the architecture restructures standard commerce operations. Consumers dictate their purchasing intent to search engines and conversational interfaces. The embedded AI agents process the intent, navigate the Universal Commerce Protocol connections, and complete the purchase directly against the enterprise backend.

    Retailers retain full ownership of the customer relationship despite the transaction occurring within a third-party environment. The architecture captures the consented engagement data, feeding the transaction history back into the SAP Customer Experience solutions. The system updates the localised customer profile, providing the Google Gemini models with fresh context prior to the next engagement cycle.

    The system continuously improves campaign performance without requiring direct human intervention. The multi-agent framework evaluates the success of a generated Rich Communication Services text message, adjusting the variables prior to the next automated dispatch.

    See also: Computer vision deployments drive retail productivity gains

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  • Google Cloud generative AI automates council planning operations

    Government ministries are deploying Google Cloud generative AI across municipal agencies to automate council planning operations.

    Public sector administration handles vast volumes of unstructured data that delay infrastructure development. The UK central government established a target to construct 1.5 million new homes by 2029. Local planning authorities encounter administrative backlogs caused by dense paperwork, delaying these development timelines.

    To address these constraints, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) expanded two machine learning tools designed to accelerate municipal processing. Speaking at the Google Cloud Summit London, officials confirmed the nationwide deployment of the ‘Extract’ application and the progression of the ‘Augmented Planning Decisions’ (APD) prototype.

    Lila Ibrahim, Chief AI Readiness Officer at Google DeepMind, said: “The UK has an opportunity to build the homes our communities need, but local councils face a mountain of paperwork. That’s why we’re co-creating a sophisticated planning tool directly with councils to solve real-world bottlenecks.

    “This will help significantly cut decision times, freeing up planners to focus on the future to get Britain building faster.”

    Householder applications – which include routine domestic modifications such as loft conversions or property extensions – account for nearly 70 percent of all planning applications submitted annually. Evaluating these standard submissions manually requires planning officers to spend hours cross-referencing regional policy documents, historical archives, and unstructured PDF files.

    Such a repetitive evaluation process consumes administrative hours that would otherwise support major infrastructure and commercial developments. The deployment of automation targets this administrative distribution, aiming to reduce application decision timelines by 50 percent.

    Core capabilities of the Google Cloud generative AI tools

    Engineers at MHCLG and the government’s applied AI team, the Incubator for AI (i.AI), built the Extract tool internally using Gemini foundation models. Following trials across more than 20 local planning authorities, administrators expanded the application to every council in England.

    Extract parses unstructured data locked within legacy PDF records, converting hundreds of pages of historical planning documentation into structured digital datasets within minutes. Operational data from the trial phases indicates that the tool will eliminate roughly 255 hours of manual data entry per council annually. This reduction allows local authorities to reallocate personnel to complex evaluation tasks.

    Integrating large language models into public sector workflows requires enterprise-grade security environments. Local authorities process sensitive civic records, requiring strict risk management protocols to prevent data exposure.

    The government hosted the Gemini models on Google Cloud to establish a protected operating environment where data sovereignty is maintained. The cloud environment features active security controls to block malicious inputs, including prompt injection attacks. This technical framework ensures that sensitive municipal data remains secure during both testing and production computing cycles.

    The APD system, meanwhile, acts as an analytical assistant for municipal planning officers by automating four primary administrative tasks:

    1. The system consolidates incoming documentation by pre-processing data backlogs, flagging missing information gaps, and extracting core geographical site data onto a unified user interface for officer review.
    2. The software identifies relevant national and local zoning laws, assesses compliance margins, and appends precise policy citations for manual verification.
    3. The application parses public consultation letters, summarising stakeholder objections or historical legal precedents.
    4. The model generates initial drafts of final evaluation reports, including the technical rationale and recommended approval conditions.

    Protocols dictate that human planning officers retain final decision-making authority over every application. The software does not automate final approvals or rejections independently. Staff members review every line of text generated by the machine learning models, modifying the analytical reasoning before validating the report.

    To maintain regulatory accountability, the APD prototype records its internal processing steps sequentially. This mechanism establishes an auditable chain of thought, creating a verification trail for every processed application to support the officer’s final determination.

    Local council planning trials and scaling timelines

    The development of the APD prototype relies on a collaborative framework linking public sector administrators with engineering teams from Google Cloud, Google DeepMind, and Faculty.

    The alpha version undergoes live testing within three local authorities: the London Borough of Barnet, Dorset Council, and the London Borough of Camden. Testing across these distinct regional jurisdictions provides developers with varied municipal datasets to test the software against diverse local policies. 

    Central planners intend to complete the alpha phase and deploy the APD tool to all 300-plus English local authorities by 2027. Google Cloud provides the elastic computing infrastructure required to manage the thousands of concurrent inferencing queries generated during daily operations.

    Paul Maltby, Director of Public Services at Faculty, commented: “The English planning system is clogged up. Planning officers are forced to spend half their time reviewing applications to convert an attic, putting those for housing estates and warehouses on hold.

    “Built with planning officers, our AI system will take the drudgery out of reviewing simple planning applications so they can make quick decisions. It will let planning officers focus on the major developments that matter, and crucially, let families improve their homes without months of delay and uncertainty.”

    Naisha Polaine, Executive Director for Growth at Barnet Council, added: “The tool’s ability to collect relevant information, undertake a provisional assessment, and draft the foundations of a report has the potential to save significant officer time spent working on the administration of planning applications and direct this to speeding up the decision-making process for residents. In turn, this will contribute significantly to delivering our house building growth targets in the borough.”

    The coordination between MHCLG, i.AI, Google DeepMind, and Faculty establishes a structured division of labour for enterprise software engineering. Public ministries define the policy guidelines and statutory boundaries, while external technical partners engineer and deploy the underlying model architectures.

    The successful integration of these systems demonstrates the feasibility of hosting advanced language models within a secured public cloud infrastructure to process core administrative workloads and modernise public service delivery.

    See also: EU publishes its AI content labelling playbook ahead of the AI Act’s August deadline

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  • The AI off switch: How Anthropic’s export controls sparked a global AI sovereignty scramble

    Anthropic export controls turned an abstract policy fear into a live one last week: as of June 13, 2026, one US government directive took the company’s two most powerful AI models offline for users everywhere, including, briefly, Anthropic’s own foreign-born employees, and set off alarm bells across Europe and Canada about who really controls the AI the world runs on.

    The mechanics were startling in their speed. The reaction abroad has been louder still.

    Launch to lockdown in four days

    On June 9, 2026, Anthropic made Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 generally available, the public face of a model class the company had developed under controlled access since April through a programme called Project Glasswing. Fable 5 was described as a Mythos-class model made safe for general use, state-of-the-art on nearly all tested benchmarks, with strong performance in software engineering, scientific research, and autonomous work. 

    Mythos 5, the more capable sibling, stayed restricted to Glasswing partners and selected biology researchers. Four days later, it was gone. Anthropic said it received an export control directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 at 5:21 pm ET on June 12, with the letter not explaining the specific security concern in detail. 

    Unable to filter users by nationality in real time, the company said it had to “abruptly disable” access for all customers to comply. The order, issued by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in a letter to CEO Dario Amodei, called for suspending all access by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States. 

    The jailbreak at the centre of it

    Washington cited national security, specifically, a method for “jailbreaking” Fable 5, or getting around its safety guardrails. Anthropic disputed the severity, saying the technique amounted to a limited capability to review programme code and identify errors, something rival models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, can also do. 

    The government’s account is sharper. David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, said on X that the administration asked Amodei to either fix the vulnerability or pull the model from deployment, and that Amodei refused. Sacks pressed the contradiction directly: “In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the US government believe; nor is that kind of minimising language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company.

    The Wall Street Journal reported the move was also shaped by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other officials that Amazon researchers had used Fable 5 prompts to obtain information that could aid cyberattacks. Amazon is one of Anthropic’s largest investors. A spokesperson said it is “not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks,” but declined to share details. 

    A fight that started months before

    None of this began last week. The dispute erupted earlier this year after Anthropic insisted its technology should not be used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons systems, infuriating Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth. President Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic’s technology, and Hegseth designated the company a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security“, a label, the company’s lawsuit notes, usually reserved for foreign adversary firms like Huawei. 

    Anthropic sued to reverse the blacklisting, warning it could jeopardise “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenue. The result is a company simultaneously deemed too dangerous for the US government’s own use and too dangerous for foreign use, a contradiction not lost on observers. Dean Ball, an AI policy expert who briefly served in the Trump administration, called the order “simply cartoonish,” noting that an administration willing to export advanced AI chips to China now wants to ban Britain and every other non-American from using Anthropic’s best models.

    The export controls heard around the world

    Outside the US, the response went straight past the jailbreak debate and landed on a single, uncomfortable realisation: a tool embedded in companies, research institutions, and public services worldwide had been switched off by a foreign government, with an email, in an afternoon.

    The European Commission confirmed it is examining the fallout. Spokesperson Thomas Regnier said the new generation of highly capable AI models offers real benefits, including for cyber-defence, but raises serious cybersecurity concerns that need addressing, adding that “contingency measures taken in this light should not be discriminatory against partners.” 

    European politicians were blunter. French commentary framed the decision as an accelerator of the geopolitical battle over AI, with the argument that “Europe cannot settle for being an open market dependent on technologies designed, funded, and controlled elsewhere.” Finnish MEP Aura Salla said Europe “cannot continue to increase its technical potential by relying on access that can be turned off by a foreign government overnight.” The timing sharpened the point: the Commission had published its Technological Sovereignty Package — including a Cloud and AI Development Act — on June 3, just nine days before the shutdown. euronews + 2

    The unease crossed the Atlantic. Speaking in Ireland ahead of the G7 summit, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the restrictions show the dangers of overreliance on a limited number of American providers, framing it as a lesson in diversification. “The situation we’re in collectively right now with Mythos and Fable is something that can happen with overreliance on certain models,” Carney said, flagging AI as a major topic for the summit. In Britain, AI and Online Safety Minister Kanishka Narayan said the episode should drive deeper investment in the country’s own AI industry. 

    What happens next

    Anthropic’s position has not moved. It maintains that applying this standard across the industry “would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.” The route back runs through the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, where a licence is now required for export, re-export or domestic transfer of the two models, with individually validated licences needed for reinstatement and civil penalties for non-compliance. 

    Sacks framed the off-ramp plainly: fix the jailbreak, lift the control. “The ball is in Anthropic’s court,” he wrote. For the governments now watching from outside, the patch is almost beside the point. The lesson many of them have already drawn is that access to frontier AI is no longer purely a matter of price or product; it is a matter of whose jurisdiction holds the switch. Last week, the answer turned out to be Washington’s, and a lot of capitals didn’t like how that felt.

    See also: Anthropic IPO filing marks AI maturing into enterprise utility

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  • Visa ChatGPT integration enables AI agent retail purchasing

    Visa has linked its payment infrastructure to ChatGPT, enabling AI agents to recommend retail products and execute financial transactions.

    The deployment removes human intervention from the final stages of the retail funnel. Autonomous agents will now process user prompts, evaluate merchant catalogues, and complete the checkout process using Visa’s payment rails at any supporting merchant.

    Previous retail AI integrations restricted automated purchasing to single-vendor environments. Retailers built proprietary chatbots confined entirely to their own inventory. Visa’s integration bypasses closed-loop architecture.

    The payment giant connects the open-web reasoning capabilities of a large language model directly to a universal transaction network. Users simply command the agent to procure an item, and the model handles the vendor selection, product comparison, and financial settlement.

    Enterprises should be aware that commercial transactions will increasingly execute without a human buyer ever seeing a retailer’s website, digital advertisement, or promotional email.

    Restructuring retail data for AI agent buyers

    Marketing departments design campaigns around human psychology, emotional triggers, and visual merchandising. AI agents operate on pure data evaluation.

    When ChatGPT receives a mandate to purchase a specific product type, it parses technical specifications, aggregated sentiment scores, and pricing structures. Display ads and user interface optimisations hold zero weight in the model’s selection criteria.

    Retailers will need to expose machine-readable inventory data. Search engine optimisation transitions into language model optimisation. The algorithms driving ChatGPT rely on structured data feeds, clear API documentation, and explicitly-formatted product attributes to evaluate whether an item meets the user’s parameters. Merchants failing to maintain high-quality, structured metadata will find their products invisible to the autonomous agent.

    Personalisation occurs entirely on the user’s device or within the user’s secure LLM profile. The AI retains the consumer’s past preferences, sizing requirements, budget constraints, and brand affinities. Instead of the retailer attempting to guess the consumer’s needs through tracking cookies and site behaviour, the agent arrives at the digital storefront with a highly-specific procurement mandate.

    Completing a transaction without human intervention requires a secure, automated handshake between the reasoning engine and the payment gateway. Visa provides the financial layer necessary to establish trust in an inherently untrusted agentic environment. Traditional checkout flows require manual data entry, CAPTCHA verification, and two-factor authentication loops. These mechanisms block autonomous agents.

    Visa implements programmatic tokenisation to solve the authentication problem. The user pre-authorises the ChatGPT environment with specific spending parameters. When the LLM decides on a purchase, it generates a single-use payment token through the Visa network. The agent transmits this token via API to the merchant’s backend systems. The transaction settles exactly like a standard digital wallet payment, bypassing the visual user interface completely.

    A digital storefront requiring multi-page navigation or mandatory account creation introduces failure points for the agent. Enterprises actively deploying headless commerce architectures possess an advantage. They can process the agent’s payload, confirm stock levels, and execute the payment token in milliseconds.

    Enterprises track bounce rates, session durations, and cart abandonment to understand consumer behaviour. An AI agent does not browse—it queries an endpoint, extracts the necessary data, and either executes the payment or terminates the connection.

    Retailers must develop new telemetry to measure agent interactions. Tracking the frequency of API queries from known LLM IP addresses replaces tracking unique human visitors. Understanding why an agent selected a competitor’s product will require analysing the structural differences in product data feeds rather than running A/B tests on website layouts.

    Customer retention strategies also need adjustment. An autonomous agent evaluates the market fresh with every prompt unless explicitly instructed by the user to reorder a specific brand. Loyalty programmes must be engineered into the payment token or the user’s LLM profile. If the AI cannot automatically apply a loyalty discount during its background calculation, the merchant loses the pricing advantage intended to secure the repeat purchase.

    Managing and securing the agentic AI supply chain

    Prompt injection attacks could theoretically manipulate an agent into purchasing from malicious vendors or authorising inflated transactions. Visa’s network acts as the final validation layer, applying fraud detection models to the incoming token requests.

    Businesses face the secondary challenge of managing automated returns and customer service queries initiated by the AI. If the delivered product fails to meet the parameters defined in the original prompt, the user can instruct the agent to reverse the transaction.

    In this scenario, the AI will autonomously navigate the merchant’s return policy, initiate the refund request, and generate the necessary shipping labels. Retail customer service operations must deploy their own automated systems capable of negotiating directly with the consumer’s agent.

    Visa’s ChatGPT integration confirms the enterprise transition from human-operated software interfaces to autonomous digital proxies. The customer is no longer necessarily a human navigating a web browser, but an algorithm executing a script.

    See also: Aviva deploys AI to stop £230M in sophisticated insurance fraud

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  • Aviva deploys AI to stop £230M in sophisticated insurance fraud

    Aviva has uncovered a record £230 million in insurance fraud claims and is using AI tools to counter the growing problem.

    The battleground has changed, and the culprits are also coming armed with a new generation of tools. We’re now in an environment where AI is being used not just to defend against fraud, but to perpetrate it.

    The insurance industry has long dealt with opportunistic dishonesty. A bumped car suddenly needs four new doors, or a minor slip becomes a life-altering injury. However, according to Aviva’s data, the nature of the deception is getting deeper, more sophisticated, and harder for the human eye to catch.

    Aviva is fighting fire with fire, deploying its own AI to uncover these elaborate schemes.

    Countering the AI-powered insurance fraud factories

    Aviva reports that scammers are now using AI to generate convincing fakes of car accident scenes. These aren’t clumsy photoshop jobs; they’re detailed, plausible images that can easily fool a claims handler working through a heavy caseload.

    The same generative AI tools are being used to create fake documents, from invoices for repairs that were never done, to medical reports that have no basis in fact. Fraudsters don’t need access to a network of corrupt garages or medical professionals to back up their story. They just need a subscription to an AI service and a bit of imagination. The AI handles the rest, producing official-looking documents that can pass a cursory inspection.

    An individual or small group can now generate the supporting evidence for dozens of high-value claims without ever leaving their desk. How do you validate reality when reality itself can be so easily and cheaply faked?

    Aviva’s response has been to build an AI-powered defence system that can operate at the same scale and speed as the threat. While the company is understandably tight-lipped about the exact architecture, you can piece together what a system like this needs to do.

    At its core, the AI detective carries out pattern recognition at scale. The AI sifts through millions of data points from current and past claims, learning what a legitimate claim looks like—and, more importantly, what it doesn’t.

    When a new claim comes in, the system is cross-referencing everything. Does the damage in the photo match the physics of the described accident? Do the timestamps on the documents make sense? Has this vehicle registration number appeared in other suspicious claims? Are the repair costs quoted on the invoice out of line with the thousands of other similar repairs in the database? It’s a level of forensic analysis that would be impossible to perform manually on every one of the thousands of claims filed each day.

    From organised crime to exaggerated claims

    It’s important to note that this isn’t all about organised criminal gangs. A portion of that £230 million figure comes from what the industry calls “claims inflation.”

    Claims inflation is the more common fraud where policyholders or service providers pad the bill. For instance, a garage might add unnecessary repairs to a quote, or an individual might exaggerate the value of items stolen in a burglary.

    Here, too, AI is proving to be a heavy-duty tool. By analysing vast datasets of repair costs and market values, the system can instantly flag when a quoted price is an outlier. It can compare the cost of a replacement part from one garage against the average from hundreds of others in the same region for the same make and model.

    The goal of Aviva’s AI isn’t to outright deny claims, it’s an augmentation tool for their human investigators. The AI acts as a filter, sifting through the noise to surface the most likely instances of fraud. This human-in-the-loop approach is essential for ensuring fairness and preventing the system from becoming a black box that makes decisions without oversight.

    What Aviva is doing provides a potential route for any customer-facing enterprise in the age of generative AI. The same technology that creates these threats is also the most effective way to combat them.

    As it becomes easier to fake everything from identities to invoices, the only viable defence is an intelligent system that can learn, adapt, and spot deception at a scale that humans alone can’t match.

    See also: Weis Markets adds Instacart AI-powered shopping carts to stores

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  • How C3 AI agents will automate predictive maintenance for Shell

    Shell will use agents from C3 AI to shift from basic anomaly detection towards fully-automated predictive maintenance.

    The global energy giant is building on their current use of the C3 AI Reliability Suite, which already keeps tabs on more than 30,000 crucial pieces of equipment across upstream and downstream operations. Shell now intends to lean heavily into autonomous AI agents, putting them in charge of the entire maintenance lifecycle.

    Going from that first warning sign all the way to a completed repair, this level of automation strips away the need for constant human oversight and makes sure the company’s resources are pointed exactly where they are needed most.

    “This expanded partnership with Shell proves what’s possible when enterprise AI is fully operationalised at global scale for predictive maintenance—reducing unplanned downtime and delivering hundreds of millions of dollars in economic value,” said Stephen Ehikian, President of C3 AI.

    “Shell has built mature AI predictive maintenance programs on our platform, and together we’re now pushing into agentic AI, advancing how this technology can further transform reliability, safety, efficiency, and operational performance.”

    C3’s AI agents help Shell move past basic anomaly detection

    In the beginning, Shell used machine learning simply to spot odd patterns in sensor data, giving engineers an early heads-up before things broke. To pull this off, the system ingests a massive amount of real-time operational technology (OT) data and mixes it with business context from ERP platforms such as SAP.

    The next step introduces AI agents built for actual reasoning and independent action. While older systems stopped at pinging an engineer when things looked unusual, this next-generation framework independently investigates why an alert fired in the first place.

    Once it pinpoints the root cause, the agent steps up to draft precise work orders, confirm part availability in the inventory, and generate procurement requests.

    C3 AI’s platform handles the heavy lifting, providing a model-driven space to easily integrate high-frequency sensor feeds with structured financial and maintenance logs. These AI capabilities are trained to learn the normal operating baselines for specific gear, like pumps, turbines, and compressors.

    The agentic layer sits on top of this foundation. Operators configure an individual agent for a given piece of equipment by defining its objectives and permitted responses. If the core machine learning models detect a deviation from normal operations, this agent activates, gathering extensive contextual data to build a complete picture of the situation. This context usually includes recent maintenance history, environmental conditions, and upstream process variables.

    Using all that information, it suggests a fix backed by solid evidence. Human operators can then easily approve or override the plan. As the system proves itself over time, Shell can fully automate its responses to certain types of alerts. Connecting straight into systems like SAP is critical here, allowing the agent to work inside the exact same workflows that human planners already use.

    The real impact of agentic AI for predictive maintenance

    Putting agentic AI to work at this scale tackles the classic “last mile” headache in predictive maintenance. Many industrial companies can predict failures just fine, but turning those insights into fast, efficient action remains a challenge. Usually, engineers still have to manually dig through alerts, investigate the causes, and write up the work orders themselves.

    Shell wants to shrink that timeline. By letting AI handle root cause analysis and work orders, the delay between a predicted failure and the actual fix drops. That directly improves equipment uptime and protects production.

    Moving to a model where repairs only happen when the equipment condition actually demands it naturally saves money, simply because nobody is wasting time tinkering with perfectly fine machinery. Leaving healthy hardware alone also means it lasts much longer.

    On top of the cost savings, stepping in before a catastrophe hits makes the whole operation much safer and cuts down on environmental risks, which is always top of mind in the energy sector.

    “What Shell and C3 AI have built on Azure over the past several years is exactly what enterprise AI should look like—real applications, running in production, delivering measurable value at global scale,” commented Sandy Gupta, VP GISV, Software Development Companies at Microsoft.

    This expanded rollout shows that we are finally talking about practical industrial AI production workflows instead of just algorithms. Rather than just the prediction itself, the real value comes from the system’s ability to act on it with barely any human oversight.

    See also: Meta Business Agent drives AI-powered conversational commerce

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    AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.

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