Category Archives: Technology

Report: Companies Need a New Playbook to Unlock the Value of AI Agents

New York, September 24, 2026… As AI agents move beyond experimentation, companies must decide not just where to deploy them, but how work itself should change.

A new report from The Conference Board offers a five-stage framework for redesigning work around AI to produce measurable business value. The framework draws on interviews, focus groups, and hands-on research with senior HR, talent, and AI leaders.

The stakes are rising as AI investment accelerates. In The Conference Board C-Suite Outlook 2026, 43.6% of executives identified AI and technology as an investment priority, more than any other investment choice. But capturing value requires more than buying tools or launching pilots. Leaders must decide on the desired business outcomes, determine how work will be divided between people and AI, put the right governance in place, measure results, and decide how any gains will be used.

“AI agents can complete more and more work, but capability alone doesn’t create value,” said Allan Schweyer, Principal Researcher, Human Capital, The Conference Board. “Companies need to know what outcome they’re trying to improve, what the agent should—and shouldn’t—do, and whether the redesigned process actually performs better. Otherwise, more automation can simply mean doing the wrong work faster.” 

The report outlines five stages:

1. Start with the desired business outcome.

• Identify the outcome the organization wants to improve first, then determine where AI agents can add value.
• Avoid deploying agents simply because the technology is available.

2. Redesign and allocate work before deploying agents.

• Break workflows down task by task to determine what AI should handle, what people should handle, and where they should work together.
• Consider quality, judgment, accountability, the consequences of errors, employee impacts, and customer value.
• People should remain accountable for the results, even when agents perform work autonomously.
• Deliberately redesign the human role, including the skills, training, job level, and potentially compensation required for the work that remains.

3. Build the infrastructure, governance, and budget agents require.

• Leaders need to account for data, permissions, controls, monitoring, maintenance, and human supervision.
• The full cost of operating an agent can extend well beyond vendor or model fees. In one illustrative model, direct AI-model use represented just 9.4% of an agent’s recurring monthly cost.

4. Measure what people and agents produce together.

• Track whether redesigned work improves quality, speed, cost, or other business outcomes, not simply whether an agent completed a task.
• Time freed by AI should not automatically be counted as a financial gain; the organization should first demonstrate how that time was used and what measurable result it produced.
• The report recommends distinguishing among three types of gains:
• Cash savings: Spending that actually disappears, such as overtime, contractor costs, or other expenses.
• Avoided future costs: Planned spending or hiring that is no longer required.
• Higher-value work: Employee time redirected to other work that produces a measurable result.

5. Decide where the gains go.

• Verified gains can reduce costs, help organizations handle more work without equivalent hiring, support reinvestment, or deliver benefits to employees and customers.
• Leaders should clearly communicate how those gains will affect jobs, staffing, and employees.

Protect early-career talent pipelines.

• When AI takes over routine work, organizations risk eliminating tasks through which employees traditionally build judgment and experience.
• Leaders should replace that learning deliberately through mentoring, rotations, supervised practice, and progressively more complex work.

HR and IT need to work together.

• IT may own the technology, but HR should help shape roles, skills, staffing, training, and change management wherever AI alters how work gets done.

“Agentic AI is not simply an IT initiative, nor is it solely an HR initiative,” said Diana Scott, US Human Capital Center Leader, The Conference Board. “Business leaders need to own the outcome, technology needs to provide secure and dependable tools, finance needs to test the economic case, and HR needs to ensure roles, skills, staffing, and employee experience evolve along with the technology.”

This research was produced in collaboration with SkillsRight, a nonprofit organization that aligns workforce strategy, organizational capability, and change management to help employers translate skills-first commitments into scalable systems, practices, and talent pipelines.

Flir and MentorAPM Streamline Asset Condition Assessment with New iXX-Series App Integration

Sept 24: Flir announced the worldwide availability of the MentorLens® app by MentorAPM on its professional-grade iXX-Series thermal imaging cameras, bringing AI-driven asset condition assessment directly onto the camera.

Flir announced the worldwide availability of the MentorLens® app by MentorAPM on its professional-grade iXX-Series thermal imaging cameras, bringing AI-driven asset condition assessment directly onto the camera. Developed by MentorAPM, a provider of asset performance management software for critical infrastructure, the app allows maintenance and reliability teams to capture nameplate, condition and thermal imagery on a single device and send it straight to the asset record, without the file transfers and manual data entry that have long slowed condition monitoring programs.

In industrial operations, the value of a thermal inspection is determined less by the image itself than by what happens to it afterward. Files are moved from an SD card to a laptop, thermal metadata is altered or lost along the way, and findings end up in a folder rather than in the system where maintenance work is actually planned. Running natively on the iXX-Series, the MentorLens app removes that handoff. Images upload from the camera directly to the asset record with their thermal data intact, and technicians can create new assets or update existing ones without leaving the camera. All Flir imaging and hardware controls remain available, including MSX, palette selection, lamp and laser, so the same device that captures the thermogram also captures the nameplate photo and the condition photo.

Once the images are synced, MentorLens processes them automatically. Nameplate and tag data is transcribed into standard asset attributes, visual imagery is scored for condition, and thermal imagery is measured against operating baselines taken from the asset’s own nameplate data or from manufacturer manuals. Reports return observed anomalies, temperature readings and recommended actions, and because previous assessments for the same asset are carried into the analysis, degradation is tracked across inspections rather than judged one image at a time.

“Customers don’t need more inspection data. They need actionable information that helps them prevent downtime and make better maintenance decisions,” said John Gould, Sr. Director of Strategic Business Development, FLIR. “With MentorAPM integrated into the iXX-Series workflow, thermal findings become part of a broader asset health picture. Data is automatically evaluated against previous conditions and delivered to the teams responsible for maintenance planning, enabling earlier intervention and more effective predictive maintenance programs.”

For the wider organization, the benefits go beyond the inspection itself. Condition and thermal results feed the MentorLens platform, where rules can automatically trigger preventive work orders and where condition history, work history and SCADA events are held against the same asset record. Reports are exported as standardized PDFs, and the underlying data can be pushed by API into an existing CMMS or EAM system, so operators are not obliged to change their system of record in order to benefit. Every AI-assisted workflow keeps a human in the loop, with a person confirming what is committed against the asset.

“For most operators the hardest part of asset management is still the most basic one, which is knowing what you own and what condition it is in,” added Tacoma Zach, CEO of MentorAPM. “Putting our app on the iXX-Series means high-quality thermal data now enters that picture at the point of capture, from the same technician and the same device. In plants where downtime is measured in millions of dollars an hour, the payback on that is very quick.”

First proven in water and wastewater utilities, the combined solution is now being adopted in manufacturing, metals, and oil and gas, where thermographic inspection has typically been outsourced to specialist contractors at considerable expense. MentorAPM reports that customers using MentorLens achieve up to 10x faster field data collection and cost savings of more than 75 percent against conventional condition assessment methods. The MentorLens app is available worldwide now for Flir iXX-Series users with a MentorAPM subscription.

Both companies will present the integration at the SMRP 34th Annual Conference, held 28 September to 1 October 2026 at the Raleigh Convention Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. Tacoma Zach, CEO of MentorAPM, leads an Innovation Lab session titled “From Camera to Asset Intelligence: AI Workflows for Reliability Teams” on Tuesday 29 September, 1:15 to 2:15 PM ET, in Innovation Lab #3. The session walks through practical workflows using MentorLens with Flir thermal cameras to capture equipment information, analyze visual and thermal conditions and generate structured asset intelligence automatically. John Gould of Teledyne FLIR joins the session to discuss the iXX-Series. The solution will also be demonstrated at the Flir booth, 1307, and at the MentorAPM booth, 512.

MobileSphere Index Finds Mobile Numbers Are Becoming the New Digital Identity

Financial services account for 41.6% of identified verification activity, as messaging and global mobility highlight the expanding role of the mobile number

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Sept. 16, 2026 – MobileSphere, a leading provider of global mobile communications, today released its Mobile Identity Index for the first half of 2026, finding that the mobile number is evolving from a communications endpoint into an important digital identity credential used to access banking, payments, technology platforms, messaging services, and other parts of everyday digital life.

Powered by SLYNUMBER data, the research analyzes more than half a million aggregate and anonymized mobile verification events from January through June 2026. Financial services accounted for 41.6% of identified verification activity, more than twice the share of any other single vertical. Digital services, including platforms such as Google, Microsoft and AI services, represented 18.8%, while messaging accounted for 11.0%. Together, financial services, digital services, and messaging apps represented 71.4% of identified activity, rising to 81.2% when transportation was included. 

The findings show the mobile number functioning as more than a way to call or text. It is increasingly part of the identity layer consumers use to access money, activate digital services, communicate, recover accounts, and stay connected across devices, networks, and locations.

“The mobile number has quietly become a critical part of our digital life,” said Toufic Mobarak, founder and President of MobileSphere. “We depend on it to access our money, communicate, activate social and messaging apps, recover accounts, and confirm our identity. That role becomes even more critical when people travel, relocate, or live across borders.”

Financial services emerge as the leading mobile identity use case

Financial services led the identified verification mix across the first half and gained 9.7 percentage points in share from the beginning to the end of the period. Activity spanned banks, payment services, bank-linking platforms, credit products, and cash-flow tools, reinforcing how deeply the mobile number is embedded in financial authentication, account access, and customer continuity.

Additional Findings:

•  Messaging gained share. Messaging represented 11.0% of identified activity across the half and increased 4.4 percentage points, with higher aggregate activity across several international messaging services during major travel periods.

•  Mobile identity moves with consumers. Aggregate verification activity shifted around tax season, major travel periods, and global events, showing how aggregate demand for access to financial, communications, and mobility services can change alongside real-world events.

•  Connectivity and identity are different layers. For travelers and expatriates, eSIMs, roaming plans, Wi-Fi, and hotspots can provide connectivity, but continued access to a recognized mobile number may still matter for banking, payments, messaging, and account recovery.

•  Mobile identity is concentrated in essential digital services. Financial services, technology, and messaging accounted for 71.4% of identified activity, rising to 81.2% when transportation was included.

•  Emerging service trends are visible. AI services and international messaging produced some of the strongest growth signals in aggregate verification activity during the half, with OpenAI-related activity reaching record levels in May and June and multiple messaging services reaching record or near-record levels during major travel periods.

By tracking aggregate verification activity over time, the Mobile Identity Index is designed to detect emerging shifts in the digital services consumers rely on for identity and access. This report highlights these trends to underscore the critical importance of user digital identity. To download the full 1H 2026 report, visit:
https://slynumber.com/docs/MobileSphere_Mobile_Identity_Index_1H2026_Research_Report.pdf

Wordly Turns Live Event Translation into Revenue Generator

Organizers can now fund language access for multilingual events with high-visibility sponsor logo placements

LOS ALTOS, CA – September 23, 2026 – Wordly, the pioneer in AI translation and captions used across conferences, governments, schools, and enterprises, today announced the launch of Sponsor Logos, a new enhancement that allows event organizers to sell sponsor placement within the live translation and captioning experience for the first time. The release marks the beginning of a broader series of new features rolling out this fall, each designed to expand Wordly’s value for event teams. 

Sponsor Logos places a partner’s branding directly on the attendee screens, whether they are following captions on their phones or reading translated subtitles on the screen of the main stage. For multi-stage events, each session can carry its own sponsor, creating a new tier of high-visibility inventory that organizers can sell to partners. In addition to providing a new piece of sponsorship inventory while helping fund the language access that makes an event more inclusive, and potentially more valuable to sponsors and attendees alike. 

“Event organizers are constantly challenged to stretch budgets while providing inclusive, accessible experiences,” said Wordly Founder & CEO Lakshman Rathnam. “With Sponsor Logos, language access isn’t just a cost center anymore, it’s a high-visibility revenue stream.” 

Sponsor Logos builds on Wordly’s growing momentum across the events industry, where demand for real‑time captioning and translation continues to rise. Adoption of live AI translation and captions has pushed Wordly past the 1‑billion‑minutes and 6‑million‑users milestones, fueling 668% three‑year growth. 

“Event organizers have already saved more than $200 million by switching from traditional human interpretation to Wordly,” continued Rathnam. “Sponsor Logos takes that value even further by giving teams a powerful way to showcase sponsors and generate more revenue.”

Liquibase Secure Now Available on Snowflake Marketplace to Automate and Govern Change Across Data Platforms

AUSTIN, Texas, September 23, 2026 – Liquibase, the leader in Database Change Governance, today announced that Liquibase Secure is now available on Snowflake Marketplace, giving Snowflake customers a new way to automate and govern change.

Snowflake, the platform for the AI era, makes it easy for enterprises to innovate faster and get more value from data. As more critical workloads move to Snowflake, the scope and consequence of change grow with it.

Teams aren’t just changing tables and views. They’re changing roles, shares, stages, warehouses, tasks, and other objects that control how data is accessed, moved, and used. But the processes used to manage those changes haven’t always kept pace. Manual SQL scripts, direct changes, and disconnected workflows become harder to control as more teams, environments, and critical workloads build

Liquibase Secure brings those changes into a standardized, version-controlled delivery process. Teams can automate deployment through existing CI/CD and DataOps workflows, enforce policy before changes reach production, detect drift and out-of-band changes, maintain audit-ready evidence, and recover quickly when something goes wrong.

Govern Change Across the Snowflake Data Platform

Liquibase Secure extends governance beyond traditional schema change to changes that affect structure, access, data movement, and execution. This gives organizations a consistent way to manage change across teams and environments without requiring every team to build and maintain its own process.

With Liquibase Secure, Snowflake customers can:

• Automate change delivery through version-controlled workflows integrated with existing CI/CD and DataOps processes.
• Stop risky changes before production with automated policy checks that enforce organizational standards.
• Detect drift and out-of-band changes when customer environments differ from their expected state.
• Maintain audit-ready evidence with a traceable record of what changed, when it changed, and how it was deployed.
• Recover faster when changes fail with traceable, reversible changes and rollback procedures.

Liquibase Secure works alongside the development, CI/CD, infrastructure, and DataOps tools organizations already use. Teams get a consistent, governed path to production while existing tools continue doing the jobs they were designed to do.

“As organizations expand their use of Snowflake across critical data and AI initiatives, strong governance controls and operational consistency become top priorities” said Rodrigo Rocha, Vice President, Global ISV & Enterprise Technology Partnerships at Snowflake. “The availability of Liquibase Secure on Snowflake Marketplace gives customers another way to govern changes in their Snowflake environments.”

Available on Snowflake Marketplace

Liquibase Secure is available now on Snowflake Marketplace. Eligible customers can use Snowflake Marketplace Capacity Drawdown toward Liquibase Secure purchases, allowing them to use a reserved portion of their committed Snowflake capacity for eligible Marketplace purchases.

For enterprises operating across heterogeneous database environments, Liquibase Secure supports more than 65 database platforms, providing one approach to Database Change Governance across Snowflake and the rest of the database estate.

Red Sift launches BIMI Maker to help every brand get its logo into email inboxes

The free tool uses AI to prepare existing logos for BIMI, validate email authentication, and guide brands through certification in a single workflow.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – September 23, 2026 – Red Sift, the company making the internet fundamentally safer, today launched Red Sift BIMI Maker, a free self-service tool that uses AI to take brands from virtually any logo file to an inbox-ready Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) in a single session, eliminating the need for trademark registration, design work, or engineering resources.

The certificate enables a brand’s logo to appear alongside its emails in Gmail, Yahoo, and other inboxes that support BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification), helping organizations increase trust, visibility, and engagement. Organizations with BIMI see a 39% increase in email open rates, yet adoption remains stalled by deployment complexity. While roughly 50,000 domains publish BIMI records today, only about 6,500 organizations have obtained the certificate required for logos to display consistently in inboxes. Research indicates that nearly 87% of organizations that begin a BIMI deployment never complete it, largely because of logo-formatting and trademark-related requirements.

Red Sift BIMI Maker removes those barriers by using AI to prepare existing logos for BIMI compliance, validating email authentication readiness, and guiding users through the certification process from start to finish. The result is a faster path to inbox brand visibility, higher engagement, and increased revenue from email.

“Nobody sets out to spend three weeks learning about an SVG profile. They set out to get their logo in the inbox,” said Rahul Powar, Co-founder and CEO at Red Sift. “The standard has been ready for years. The path to using it hasn’t been. Most of the work between a brand’s logo and an issued certificate is work that software and modern AI should be doing, and CMCs mean the brands that were locked out by trademark rules now have a route in. That’s a much bigger market than the few thousand domains showing a logo today.”

BIMI Maker brings logo preparation, readiness checks and certificate application into one guided workflow. Users can start with their website address or upload an existing logo. AI helps convert the existing logo into the format BIMI requires and match it against branding on the company’s website and archived pages to gather evidence of prior use. Users can preview their logo in an inbox, check their domain’s email authentication and review potential blockers, like DMARC status, before applying for a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) or Common Mark Certificate (CMC). The tool packages the logo, domain checks and supporting evidence for certificate authority review, then guides users through payment and DNS setup.

“The key to any adoption is ease, and BIMI maker is removing the hurdles that we often see senders struggle with,” said Nick Schafer, Director of Deliverability and Compliance at Sinch Mailgun. “Anything that makes it easier for senders to achieve BIMI compliance is a win for the industry.”

Red Sift BIMI Maker is available now with no signup required to check a logo or generate a compliant SVG.

India’s GCCs Set to Become Agentic Transformation Engines by 2030, Finds Dell Technologies and Zinnov Report

Bengaluru, Sep 23: Dell Technologies, in partnership with Zinnov, today released a report at the Dell Technologies Forum 2026 that charts the next phase of India’s Global Capability Center evolution. Titled “India GCCs 2030: From Capability Centers to Agentic Transformation Engines”, the report draws on surveys and interviews with more than 50 senior GCC leaders across BFSI, retail, manufacturing, and software sectors, concluding that the GCCs poised to lead by 2030 will not be those running the most AI pilots, but those that have built the foundations to scale AI into measurable enterprise outcomes.

“The most influential GCCs of 2030 will not be measured by the number of AI initiatives they launch, but by their ability to industrialize AI responsibly and at scale. As they take on greater strategic ownership, robust foundations across data, infrastructure, and governance will become the bedrock of enterprise innovation. The GCCs that build these capabilities now will define how their organizations harness AI globally, and Dell Technologies is focused on enabling that journey from foundation to transformation.,” said Manish Gupta, President and Managing Director, Dell Technologies India. 

“The GCC model is reaching an inflection point. For the last two decades, the conversation was largely about scale, talent, and capability. The next decade will be about ownership. As AI and agentic systems become embedded into enterprise workflows, GCCs will increasingly be expected to own products, platforms, markets, and measurable business outcomes. Those that build the right data, technology, governance, and talent foundations now will move from being capability centers to becoming true transformation engines for the enterprise,” said Sidhant Rastogi, President, Zinnov.

A Sector at an Inflection Point

India hosts over 2,100 GCCs employing 2.36 million people and generating $98.4 billion in revenue in FY26. 64% of GCC leaders hold dual global mandates, running the India centre while owning a global function. 70% have a defined AI roadmap or charter, and Indian GCCs account for approximately 28% of global GCC AI talent, with over 1,200 centres having built AI and machine learning capabilities. Significantly, 66% of GCC leaders already rank top-line business impact as a high priority for their enterprise AI strategy, signalling that the conversation has moved well beyond cost and delivery.

The maturity curve is also compressing. 27% of new GCCs now reach Portfolio Hub maturity within five years, compared with nearly a decade historically. AI mandates are arriving earlier in the journey, and capabilities once expected at advanced stages are now becoming requirements at earlier ones. 

But scale and ambition alone are not enough. Nearly 70% of GCCs remain stuck at the pilot stage, unable to consistently move promising proofs of concept into sustained enterprise adoption. The constraint is foundational: fragmented data, legacy systems, unclear governance, immature security controls and talent models built for a pre-AI world.

The Pilot Problem and What It Will Take to Solve It

AI pilots stall for structural reasons: production data is messier than controlled environments, governance is addressed after the fact rather than built in, and use cases developed outside common enterprise platforms are difficult to integrate at scale. The economics shift significantly once token consumption, compute, tooling and reskilling costs are factored in at production volume. Agentic workflows can consume between 10,000 and 500,000 tokens per workflow, compared with 1,000 to 2,000 for a standard chat interaction. GCC leaders who do not make workload-level infrastructure decisions early often find themselves managing a budget problem rather than a business outcome.

Four Forces Reshaping the GCC Operating Model

The report identifies four levers that will define the next phase of GCC evolution. Building functional AI capabilities means moving beyond scattered experiments to repeatable, AI-enabled workflows embedded into core business functions. Planning AI architecture ahead of production means treating data readiness, compute, security, governance and economics as one integrated decision rather than a sequence of separate ones. Owning markets means taking genuine responsibility for products, regions and business outcomes rather than supporting them from a distance. And redesigning the workforce means restructuring roles so talent moves from repetitive execution toward engineering, product and business problem-solving where human judgment creates lasting value.

With 55% of routine GCC work already exposed to AI-driven automation and 60% of the workforce requiring reskilling by 2030, the imperative is not incremental AI training but a fundamental reinvention of work itself

Own It or Lease It: Making the Right Infrastructure Call

One of the report’s most actionable contributions is a framework for deciding which AI workloads to own and which to consume through leased or managed environments. Workloads involving sensitive data, regulatory exposure, business-critical processes or high and predictable usage increasingly require greater control. Lower-risk and exploratory workloads may be better served through flexible, leased models. The report also introduces a Sovereign Sandbox model for GCCs that need to experiment with regulated or proprietary data in a contained environment before those workloads progress toward production. As agentic AI moves from experimentation to always-on enterprise operation, getting these infrastructure decisions right early is what will determine whether GCCs can run autonomous workflows at scale or remain constrained by the foundations they failed to build.

Liberating force: How will AI enable our future profession?

By Venkkat Ramanan, FCMA, CGMA, Vice President -APAC, AICPA & CIMA

Artificial intelligence is not just a set of nifty time-saving tools or even a major technological advance. It is an exponential force that is disrupting our profession at a rapid rate. Accountancy and finance professionals have already embraced AI for a wide range of operational and strategic purposes from data entry and bank account reconciliation through to fraud detection, in-depth tax research and advanced financial analysis.

What’s more, despite all the gloomy predictions that AI is taking our jobs, the opposite is true. Accountancy and finance professionals remain highly sought after by employers, who believe they can better deploy their unique human skills and expertise by harnessing the power of AI. A survey by Deloitte found that finance departments globally are wrestling with a shortage of skilled staff, with 40% investing in AI and automation to address their productivity gaps. The research also found that 64% of finance leaders planned to infuse more technical skills and capabilities within their functions.

The truth is, rather than replacing us, AI is acting as a force multiplier for our profession. It is boosting our efficiency and productivity, allowing us to deliver even better results for our organisations than we could achieve as individuals or even as teams.

India offers a striking case in point. As one of the world’s fastest-moving AI markets, it is already seeing the technology reshape core finance functions. EY’s 2025 India Corporate Treasury Survey found that 82% of treasury leaders now view AI as important or critical, with applications emerging in cash forecasting, foreign-exchange risk and anomaly detection. For finance professionals, this points towards a future in which technology handles more of the processing and pattern recognition, while human judgement becomes ever more important in interpreting what the data means and what organisations should do next.

India is also moving quickly from experimentation to practical application. Deloitte’s 2025 Asia Pacific CFO Survey found that 69% of CFOs across the region are prioritising the upskilling and reskilling of their workforces for new technologies, while 49% expect generative AI to change their finance functions within two years. The opportunity for finance professionals, then, is not simply to operate these tools, but to lead with them.

Going forward, AI will continue to enable our profession by:

• Amplifying – but not replacing – our judgement. AI allows us to deliver significant new insights that can help to enhance the performance of our organisations. Nevertheless, we must avoid the temptation to give into ‘cognitive offloading’ – the practice of outsourcing our thinking and decision-making to AI tools. Instead, we should view intelligent systems as a collaborative partner – a partner that frees us up to better apply our critical thinking skills so that we find new solutions to problems and create more value through our work. 

• Helping us to anticipate the future. No one can perfectly predict what will happen next, but being able to look ahead, and plan for different scenarios, is key to success in a fast-changing world. AI tools will enable us to identify and analyse important market trends so that we can support our organisations to seize opportunities and pre-solve problems before they become crises. AI tools will also enable us to embrace systems thinking so we can assess the interconnections between issues and understand the ripple effects of decisions made across our organisations. 

• Showcasing our role as responsible stewards of AI technologies. By drawing on our high ethical standards and acute professional judgement, we can guide our organisations in the competent and responsible adoption of AI systems. We can also provide assurance that those systems are working reliably and as intended. It is not just at a day-to-day, operational level that we can make a difference either. We can also support our colleagues to navigate the complex moral questions created by AI and automation, to ensure our organisations retain public trust. 

• Acting as a catalyst for us to evolve into strategic advisers. Our profession is on a journey from the business partner of today to the strategic adviser of the future. This journey will be enabled by AI and other cutting-edge technological tools. AI will enable us to move upstream from recording what has happened to prescribing what should happen, making our role less scorekeeper and more futurist. 

AI as an enabler

Rise2040, a profession-wide research initiative launched by AICPA and CIMA, has highlighted the huge potential of AI as an enabler for the public accounting and finance profession. The initiative brings together 6,000 insights from across the globe to collectively explore, challenge and shape the future of the profession.

The research highlighted that AI can be a liberating force that automates repetitive tasks and frees up professionals to focus on higher-order advisory work, judgement and strategy. To fully harness its potential, however, we must also find ways to manage the risks it presents. These include training gaps for early-career professionals, overreliance on automation and the erosion of experiential learning.

AI will transform our profession, generating exciting opportunities for us to create new value for our organisations. To seize these opportunities, we must look forward with confidence and be prepared to continuously adapt. We should also remain mindful that AI is the entry point to the future – not the endpoint.

Zapata Introduces Quantum Pilot™ to Enable Systematic Discovery and Development of High-Value Quantum Applications

Drawing on Zapata’s pioneering quantum software expertise, the platform helps enterprises build a clear roadmap to commercial impact

BOSTON, Massachusetts – September 23, 2026 – Zapata Quantum, Inc. (OTCQB: ZPTA) (“Zapata,” “Zapata Quantum” or the “Company”), a leader in quantum computing algorithm and application development, today announced early access to Quantum Pilot, a hardware-agnostic, cloud-based software platform designed to close a growing gap between rapidly advancing quantum hardware capabilities and enterprises’ ability to determine where and how quantum computing can create business value.

Quantum Pilot builds a dynamic roadmap for enterprises that want to deploy quantum technology but are uncertain which applications are relevant to their business and sector, when those solutions will be practical, and what they could be worth. It gives organizations a systematic way to discover potential applications, weigh their technical and commercial potential, and focus resources on the opportunities with the strongest case for investment. Enterprises can then identify and develop applications without betting on a single quantum modality or provider, and reassess application readiness or change their approach as hardware capabilities and algorithms evolve.

“The critical on-ramp to quantum application development is the efficient and rigorous mapping of use cases to quantum computational solutions,” said Sumit Kapur, CEO of Zapata Quantum. “We built Quantum Pilot to make that on-ramp more accessible to enterprise leaders and ensure that quantum activity becomes a capability that compounds—with each experiment and development effort informing and accelerating the next.”

Delivering Quantum Application Intelligence™

Drawing on Zapata’s experience developing quantum algorithms and applications across industries and hardware architectures, Quantum Pilot combines a proprietary knowledge framework with advanced computational tools, including capabilities developed through its collaboration with NVIDIA to apply agentic AI to quantum resource estimation. The platform also builds on Zapata’s collaboration with the University of Maryland on formal methods for quantum software verification.

Together, these capabilities enable Quantum Pilot to deliver Quantum Application Intelligence (QAI)—helping enterprises identify, evaluate and develop quantum applications with scientific rigor and a clear focus on business value. The platform also continuously tracks and updates the global quantum ecosystem’s research, hardware roadmaps and software developments so that application roadmaps are current as the field advances and users are making application decisions based on the latest data.

“Most conversations about quantum readiness focus on the hardware roadmap. That is not where the real risk sits. It sits one layer up, in the applications and software that decide whether the hardware ever produces business value,” said Mark Hill, Chief Digital Information Officer at CSL Behring, a multibillion-dollar global biotech leader, and Advisor to the Company. “Quantum Pilot matters because it forces the harder question enterprises keep avoiding: which applications are worth building now, not just which processor is fastest.” 

Quantum Pilot is powered by three complementary systems:

• Quantum Graph, a proprietary knowledge layer that connects quantum applications, algorithms, research and hardware roadmaps, providing structured context for the platform and its AI agents as the field advances.
• Quantum Engine, a suite of computational tools and agents that supports algorithm selection, resource estimation, experiment design and hardware benchmarking, helping enterprises assess technical feasibility and guide application development.
• Quantum Assurance, a framework that combines formal verification methods with expert review to assess technical results and guide the development process, with Zapata’s scientists helping enterprises interpret evidence and determine next steps.

“Among the things that make Quantum Pilot’s approach to application development distinct is its use of formal verification, rather than after-the-fact validation alone,” said Runzhou Tao, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, and Fellow, Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS). “That’s the same principle we apply in our research with Zapata on verified quantum software, and it addresses a discipline quantum computing has largely developed without.”

Early Access

Quantum Pilot is initially available through an early access program for select enterprise and government customers. Organizations interested in participating can request a demo and learn more at zapataquantum.com/quantumpilot. 

Microsoft Expands India Cloud Footprint with Fourth Region as AI Demand Accelerates

HYDERABAD, September 21, 2026: Microsoft has expanded its cloud infrastructure presence in India with the launch of its fourth cloud region, strengthening its focus on the country’s rapidly growing demand for artificial intelligence, cloud computing and data-intensive digital services.

The new India South Central cloud region in Hyderabad adds another major infrastructure hub to Microsoft’s India network, which already includes cloud regions in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai. The expansion comes at a time when Indian enterprises are increasing investments in generative AI, machine learning, data analytics and cloud-based applications.

The Hyderabad region has been developed to support demanding enterprise and AI workloads while providing high availability and resilience. Its infrastructure is designed to help organisations deploy applications that require substantial computing resources, secure data environments and reliable access to cloud services.

Microsoft’s latest investment highlights the growing importance of India in the global AI infrastructure landscape. As businesses move beyond experimental AI projects toward large-scale deployment, demand is rising for computing power, data storage, networking infrastructure and specialised cloud capabilities.

India’s expanding digital economy is also creating significant pressure for additional data-centre capacity. The country generates a substantial share of global digital data, while its existing data-centre infrastructure remains comparatively smaller. This gap is creating opportunities for hyperscale technology companies and data-centre operators to invest heavily in new capacity.

Microsoft has committed billions of dollars toward expanding its cloud and AI infrastructure in India. The company’s investment programme also includes initiatives focused on developing AI skills and strengthening the broader ecosystem needed to support widespread adoption of artificial intelligence.

The Hyderabad facility is particularly significant because of its emphasis on supporting next-generation workloads. AI applications require considerably greater computing capacity than many traditional enterprise applications, making the availability of specialised and scalable infrastructure increasingly important for companies seeking to deploy AI at scale.

Sustainability is another component of Microsoft’s infrastructure strategy. The company has indicated that the new Hyderabad cloud region will use effectively zero water for cooling, an approach aimed at reducing the environmental impact associated with large-scale data-centre operations.

Microsoft is also expanding its efforts to develop India’s AI talent pool. The company has announced an ambitious goal of providing AI skills to millions of people in India over the coming years, reflecting the growing recognition that infrastructure expansion must be accompanied by a workforce capable of using and developing advanced technologies.

The company’s move comes amid a broader wave of investment in India’s data-centre and AI ecosystem. Government programmes, private-sector capital and technology investments are collectively helping build the computing infrastructure required for applications ranging from enterprise automation and financial services to healthcare, manufacturing and public services.

For Microsoft, the fourth cloud region represents a strategic expansion of its long-term presence in one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets. For India, the additional hyperscale infrastructure could provide greater capacity for businesses and institutions seeking to adopt cloud technologies and deploy AI applications.

The development also signals a shift in the country’s technology infrastructure priorities. With AI increasingly becoming a core component of business strategy, access to reliable, scalable and energy-efficient computing infrastructure is emerging as a critical requirement for India’s next phase of digital growth.