Lightfield, an AI-native CRM startup, raised early-stage funding to build an AI agent-ready replacement for Salesforce and other legacy CRMs. The Series A round raised $47 million. Lightfield plans to ship a rebuilt CRM architecture that continuously ingests interaction data and structures it for AI agents, aiming to replace or reduce the need for traditional Salesforce-style systems of record.
Visiby launched as a tool for brands to measure and improve visibility across AI search platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. It offers up to 2 years free for startups. Brands can track their mentions, recommendations, and citations in AI-generated answers and spot competitor gaps to target improvements.
TheCUBE Research is framing its Sept. 11 “AI ROI in Contact Centers Summit” around whether contact center AI produces measurable economic value instead of broad automation claims. 92% of organizations now have AI integrated into at least one stage of operations, up from 71% in early 2024. Coverage will focus on tying deployments to KPIs like cost-to-serve, resolution quality, and customer experience, plus the operational steps needed to avoid false savings.
Estee Lauder appointed Brian Franz to a newly expanded chief technology and transformation officer role to broaden AI use across the company and support its turnaround plan. Franz’s mandate includes giving all 14,000 employees access to AI productivity tools such as Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT. The move expands partnerships and adds AI use cases in manufacturing, formulation, demand forecasting, and consumer shopping while also tasking Franz with enterprise initiatives to improve productivity and revenue growth.
Apple updated its product lineup on an events page for an event covering a foldable “iPhone Duo,” iPhone 18 Pro, Watch Series 12, Watch Ultra 4, and AirPods 5.
Apple started preorders for the Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 with a new Health Sensing System and the S11 chip. The watches measure heart rate every 5 seconds. This adds higher-frequency heart rate and HRV readings and a real-time heart rate complication to the watch face.
John Ternus said Apple’s iPhone is already the best AI device and emphasized Apple’s privacy-first approach for its AI strategy. He described an “intelligent personal hub” that should have powerful on-device AI processing plus an internet connection to reach cloud models. Apple’s focus shifts to positioning the iPhone as the core interface for AI rather than launching separate AI-focused hardware.
Anomalo launched an “Analyst” product that monitors Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery data, flags trends and anomalies, and lets users investigate using plain-language follow-up questions. It says it is launching today and shows 133 followers on the page. The change is that users get proactive, data-verified insights intended to separate real business changes from broken data.
Shipt, the Target-owned same-day delivery app, launched “Ask Shipt,” an AI shopping assistant that turns customer prompts and photos into ready-to-buy grocery carts. The tool is available now in the Shipt app and on Shipt.com. This adds an AI-guided cart-building and ingredient-identification feature and puts Shipt alongside other delivery and shopping apps adding similar assistants.
Insilico Medicine’s co-CEO Feng Ren said early results from its experimental fibrosis drug trial suggest biology-linked aging could slow. The company reported that patients’ predicted biological age declined by roughly 3 years on average, and up to 6 years on one measure. That supports an AI drug-discovery push toward extending healthspan and potentially making aging-related outcomes easier to target.
Igor Tulchinsky is backing the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum. He donated £5m ($6.8m) to support the show. The funding ties the exhibit to WorldQuant’s push for applied AI and education, aiming to give people long-lasting skills alongside viewing history.
CFOs are shifting entry-level finance roles away from cohort hiring for routine tasks as generative AI automates more of the work. A Harvard working paper cited in the article says generative AI adoption can reduce hiring of junior workers, particularly in AI-exposed jobs. Companies respond by concentrating junior roles on judgment and quality control over AI-built systems, while updating hiring criteria and emphasizing apprenticeship-style development.
Luum deployed eyelash-extension robots built on a safety-focused wearable-robot background and began running them in salons and select Nordstrom and Ulta stores, while CEO Jo Lawson said the system is being trained to shorten visits. Luum’s setup trains on about 150 terabytes of session data. The service shifts from a human-by-human process to faster, more automated lash work where the robot can handle both eyes at once, cutting appointment time toward about 30 minutes.
Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max at its Wednesday event.
The A20 Pro chip uses a 2nm “brand new architecture.”
The phones add a dynamic-aperture main camera and are positioned to support Apple Intelligence and updated Siri voices.
Instacart launched Clementine, an AI grocery shopping assistant that converts a conversation, grocery list, or recipe into a ready-to-buy cart. It is available in the U.S. and Canada as of Wednesday’s announcement. The platform shifts from just delivering groceries to helping plan meals and generate carts inside its own app, competing with similar AI assistants from other delivery services.
MSK Innovation Accelerator opened applications for its fourth six-month programme dedicated to musculoskeletal innovation in the UK. Each fully funded venture receives more than £80,000 of specialist support, and applications close on 4 October 2026. The accelerator adds a focus area that welcomes AI-related work and offers pitching for investment, with continued support to move technologies from research toward commercialisation.
IFA Berlin 2026 featured 9 high-profile hardware launches as companies move AI into appliances and everyday devices rather than only software screens. The Miele G8 Diamond dishwasher will start arriving in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in April 2027. As a result, more products are adding onboard sensing, camera or radar-based recognition, and app-controlled automation that adapts to what’s in a room or machine (and in some cases to people or pets).
Actionable, a Paris startup, raised a $10 million round to expand its predictive customer experience platform beyond survey-based scoring. It found that waiting 6 minutes and 12 seconds at a click-and-collect counter lowered Net Promoter Score, and stores now monitor that metric. The funding will be used to hire product, engineering, and sales staff and expand into the US through reseller partners, shifting customers toward more actionable customer intelligence.
The pricing consultancy hy Consulting Group, OMR Reviews, and Appinio released the SaaS & AI Pricing Report 2027, mapping how AI-driven compute costs are changing software companies’ pricing plans.
Implicity raised €35M from IRIS and Five Arrows to scale its AI platform for cardiac monitoring, which ties to a patient mortality reduction. The funding follows a reported 26% reduction in patient mortality. The company plans to expand in the United States and pursue acquisitions, while adding teams in the US and Germany.
The article argues that most people have not yet felt AI’s impact because everyday touchpoints are small, indirect, or confusing, unlike prior industrial revolutions. It says society may look largely the same for the next 50 years for the average citizen. It concludes that early AI will stay politically and economically contentious until the benefits diffuse more widely, potentially becoming more tangible later through linked robotics and self-driving.
An author spent an hour riding inside Tesla’s steering-wheel-free Cybercab and got stuck partially blocking a narrow road outside an Austin swimming hole. The Cybercab is a two-seater. The experience left pool-goers and nearby drivers annoyed and highlighted how the still-incomplete public rollout can disrupt normal outings.
China’s expert professionals, including architects and software engineers, are taking gig work on data-annotation platforms to train AI models on real work tasks as government support for “high quality data sets” grows.
Prime Video is launching an AI feature that synchronizes an actor’s mouth movements with dubbed, translated audio. It is available first on the English dub of the German series Maxton Hall. The rollout will be expanded to additional titles over time using AI plus visual effects to match lip movements to speech.
CloudNC raised $20m in new investment capital for its precision machining software and AI-powered CAM automation platform CAMAssist. The funding round totals $20m and includes support from Nimble Ventures alongside Calculus Venture Capital, Entrepreneur First, and Lockheed Martin’s corporate venture fund LM Ventures. CloudNC plans to use the money to expand CAMAssist adoption, enter new markets, and launch new AI products including Quote Agent this year.
ReSO AI launched a generative engine optimization platform aimed at helping brands appear in AI search results. It is positioned as an optimization tool for visibility, citations, and traffic in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI. The change is that brands can turn analysis of intent, competitors, content gaps, and technical issues into priority actions rather than only tracking rankings.
The OECD’s PISA report found that students who use AI to help them study generally score worse than students who do not. The 2025-collected data for this PISA round is the first since AI use went mainstream. The results also suggest some AI uses—especially for critically assessing AI tool performance—can slightly improve outcomes, making the overall picture more complex than the headline claim.
Business leaders at the Fortune Leaders Forum argued that executives should stop trying to predict turbulence and instead build organizations that adapt quickly.
Actionable raised $10 million to expand its platform that predicts customer behaviour and the operational factors behind churn, satisfaction, complaint risk, and repeat purchases. The funding round was led by Hi Inov with participation from existing investor Axeleo Capital. The company will use the money to grow product, engineering, and sales teams and push international expansion, including into the US.
Fundcraft secured €12 million in growth financing to expand its European fund operations platform and technology for alternative investment funds. The round adds to a total of €40 million in capital secured since the company’s founding. Fundcraft plans to use the funding to grow into more jurisdictions and expand AI-enabled workflow automation across investor, fund, and portfolio operations.
Naoma AI Demo Agent V2 was launched to replace B2B SaaS “book a demo” forms with an in-browser video AI agent that runs live, personalized product demos and routes qualified leads to CRM, sales scheduling, or checkout. The agent is available as a self-serve option and the product claims 50,000+ demos have already run for B2B SaaS teams. As a result, SaaS teams can deploy the demo agent without custom setup and prospects can get a demo immediately in any language while it logs sessions back to their CRM.
Wall Street research finds AI exposure has mostly not led to job losses, while wage growth has slowed most for lower-paid workers and data-center backlash reflects public concern about local costs. A Morgan Stanley analysis reports that workers in high-exposure jobs face median pay of $97,000 versus $46,000 in low-exposure work, alongside a model where a top household needs portfolio gains of about 4% to offset a 1% labor-income drop. The net result is that AI appears to reinforce existing class advantages through reduced raises and easier price-and-profit gains, while data-center conflicts expand and investment returns continue to concentrate with equity holders.
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