Deliveries in 30 minutes or less coming to Manchester and Birmingham and fresh groceries service to start in London Amazon is expanding fast-track deliveries in the UK, including adding fresh fruit and vegetables to same-day services, after closing its standalone grocery stores.The firm said it would expand Amazon Now, its ultra-fast delivery service that already delivers goods in less than 30 minutes to parts of London, to also serve Manchester and Birmingham this year. Continue reading...
Nothing does more for your ego than realising you can make a better decision than a bot with all of human knowledge at its digital fingertipsI am not, by nature, an early adopter. There comes a point in our lives where change becomes more irritating than exciting and, I suspect, I reached it sooner than most. But when a workplace recently tasked me with exploring practical applications for AI, I spotted an opportunity to cast off my luddite inclinations.It turned out AI was very good at mimicking most of the things I could already do. Irrespective of quality, it could churn out articles, reports, presentations, fiction, even podcasts with stammering hosts. That was no use to me. What I wanted help with was all the stuff I was useless at. There was an obvious target: DIY. Continue reading...
The UK’s competition watchdog has ruled that Google must provide online publishers and news organisations with the ability to opt out of their work being summarised by artificial intelligence, or otherwise used to train the company’s models
The IT chief went from implementing Workday software at one of the firm’s largest customers to leading technology at the supplier – she discusses what she learned
A major initiative to introduce a standard digital identity scheme for house buying and selling has been shelved due to political uncertainty and lack of clear benefits
Stronger checks likely to be needed in England to safeguard reputation of GCSEs and A-levels, says Ian BauckhamCheating in exams could be magnified by the new generation of wearable hi-tech devices such as smartglasses or invisible earpieces, according to England’s qualifications watchdog.Ian Bauckham, the head of the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual), also revealed that GCSEs and A-level courses in England were being scrutinised over potential AI use in students’ coursework, after teachers said they were struggling to detect it. Continue reading...
In 2025, the tech journalist invited artificial intelligence to do nearly everything for her, including editing the book she was writing about the experiment. Some of it was useful, some not – but it was her time with a chatbot companion that really shook herFor a year, Joanna Stern decided to turn herself into a “lab rat” – the object of her own experiment. Throughout 2025, she invited artificial intelligence into “every corner” of her life. She let AI answer her texts, decide what she ate and cooked, mow her lawn, fold her washing, drive her places, parse her mammograms and even, in the darkness of a burner phone, be her lover. The resulting book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything, asks all the big questions, including: what happens when AI can do everything humans can do? And what comes after that?If anyone can produce answers, surely it’s Stern. Last February, she ended a 12-year stint as a personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal. During her tenure, she won an Emmy for her short documentary E-Ternal: A Tech Quest to “Live” Forever, which explored digital legacies, and built a reputation for product reviews that were outlandishly creative and fiendishly stringent. She once took an Apple watch jetskiing on the Hudson river to evaluate its connectivity. Continue reading...
Measure in Amazon and Microsoft’s backyard expected to succeed next week in blow to big tech amid AI boomSeattle’s city government is on the verge of passing a year-long ban on the construction of new datacenters, the largest city yet in the US to consider such a moratorium as nationwide backlash grows.Four companies sought to build five large datacenters in areas serviced by Seattle’s public utility; if approved, they would have consumed approximately a third of the city’s current daily demand for electricity. Continue reading...
The director defends investment in and use of AI-generated storyboards, saying the immediacy of communicating his vision to cast and crew is ‘creatively freeing’Martin Scorsese’s announcement that he has invested in an AI company and uses the technology to create storyboards has triggered a backlash from fellow members of the film industry.The New York Times reported that Scorsese had been appointed in 2025 as a partner and adviser to Black Forest Labs, a German-based venture that specialises in text-to-image generative AI. Continue reading...
A Science, Innovation and Technology Committee report contains recommendations that would radically alter UK public sector IT, procurement and relationship with hyperscalers if adopted
This particular deal is for contact centre as a service, which sees artificial intelligence being deployed to streamline processes
While the technology is set to play a growing role in modern warfare, there remains an unresolved ethical challengeShould the AI-powered drones of the future have a licence to kill? The question is becoming ever more pressing as governments and the defence industry acknowledge that drone systems will play an increasingly crucial role in future warfare.With drones being deployed in huge numbers in the Ukraine war and AI being used to assist bombing missions in the Iran conflict, there is an expectation among some observers that weapons will have to operate with increased operational autonomy, which means they will need something approximating a moral framework. Continue reading...
Norway-headquartered Kitron Group is on a growth path and relies on local-market nous and partners
National Federation of Subpostmasters suffered a ransomware attack in April after hackers exploited a bug in the web hosting software it uses
Watchdog makes ruling on search summaries after publishers complain about drop in click-through traffic and revenueBusiness live – latest updatesOnline publishers and news organisations are now able to block their content from appearing in Google’s AI summaries in UK search results, the British competition watchdog has announced.The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said the new requirement would “put publishers, like news organisations, in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with Google”. Continue reading...
As Gulf governments accelerate tax digitisation initiatives, organisations face growing pressure to modernise financial systems, improve data quality and prepare for a future of continuous compliance