📈 How are companies using AI?
➜ AI Bookkeeping Service, At Your Service. Fewer graduates pick accounting. And 75 percent of current CPAs will retire in the next 15 years, leaving a huge vacuum in the industry. David Phillips, a serial entrepreneur, saw this as an opportunity and funded Fondo, a bookkeeping platform aimed at startups and small- and medium-sized businesses. Fondo makes the most of software, AI, AND accounting experts. The 4-year-old startup reached annual recurring revenue of $6 million, and is profitable.
TechCrunch
➜ AI Agents Redefine Automation. Microsoft is doubling down on workplace automation with “Copilot Actions” – the company is finally “tying generative AI directly into the everyday workflows of the hundreds of millions of people who use Microsoft 365 every day,” notes Rudina Seseri, the founder of Glasswing Ventures. The new feature lets Microsoft’s corporate customers create customized digital workers for routine office tasks. AI Agents can operate in various contexts, from virtual assistants to complex financial trading or robotics systems.
PYMNTS
➜ How To Best Leverage AI Assistants. Netguru has just launched the most comprehensive guide on “AI Assistants for Process Optimization.” The ebook tells the difference between an AI agent, AI assistant, and AI copilot, categorizes ML models, talks about key areas of AI assistant’s practical application, and describes how to implement an AI assistant in your organization. Trying to nail down your AI implementation strategy? Grab the read.
AI Assistants for Process Optimization
➜ Digital Shopping Meets the Analog World. Google’s Shopping Lens just made retail smarter. Point your phone at a store shelf, and Lens will show you product reviews, online prices, and where else it’s available. Beauty giant Ulta is already experimenting with this. With 10 billion monthly searches using Lens, this could turn “window shopping” into an omnichannel superpower.
Retail Dive
➜ NASA’s AI-Driven Customer Copilot Called Earth Copilot. NASA embarked on a mission to make its data more accessible and user-friendly. How? They came together with Microsoft to develop an AI-driven customer copilot, called Earth Copilot, which would simplify data access and encourage a wider range of users to interact with its Earth Science data. The integration of conversational AI enables users to interact with NASA’s data repository through plain language queries. Love!
Microsoft
➜ Chinese Lab To Rival OpenAI’s o1. DeepSeek, an AI research company released a preview of DeepSeek-R1, which the firm claims is a reasoning model competitive with o1. The model appears to block some queries: In TechCrunch’s testing, the model refused to answer questions about Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Tiananmen Square, and the geopolitical implications of China invading Taiwan. “Sorry, I’m not sure how to approach this type of question yet. Let’s chat about math, coding, and logic problems instead!”
TechCrunch
