The pandemic changed how people worked, shifting most professionals to remote or hybrid models. For the software company Atlassian, this flexible, distributed approach persists to this day. "We have 13,000 employees spread across the globe, and individuals can choose their working location every day," said Annie Dean, Head of Team Anywhere, Atlassian's distributed work policy. "It's about how we work, not where we work." The implementation of the flexible model has produced positive effects for employees and the company alike. Internal data reveals that even though only 34% of employees have opted to work from home, 92% of Atlassian employees reported that the ability to work from anywhere allows them to perform their best, and 91% said it's an important reason for staying at the company.

Google's Chrome browser for MacOS and Windows is receiving an infusion of new Gemini-powered capabilities, including an AI browsing assistant contextually sensitized to a user's browsing activities. Google made the announcement this week at Google I/O 2025. Dubbed Gemini-in-Chrome, the feature will be available May 21 to Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US as well as Chrome Beta, Dev, and Canary users. The general idea behind Gemini-in-Chrome is to reorganize, aggregate, and then more sensibly redisplay the data found on one or more browser tabs while also embellishing the final output with additional but relevant Gemini-generated information. For example, during a pre-event press briefing attended by ZDNET, Google director of Chrome product management Charmaine D'Silva demonstrated how Gemini-in-Chrome could not only organize a head-to-head feature comparison chart of individual sleeping bags -- to which multiple Chrome tabs (one tab per sleeping bag) were pointing -- but could respond to text prompts about each bag's suitability to the expected temperatures for an upcoming camping trip in Maine.

The Google I/O keynote took place earlier this week, and the company took the stage to unveil new features across all of its product offerings. This included AI upgrades to the Google Workspace suite of applications, which millions of users rely on every day to get their work done, including Google Docs, Meet, Slides, Gmail, and Vids. Also: Google's popular AI tool gets its own Android app - how to use NotebookLM on your phone The features unveiled this year focused on practicality. They embed AI features into the Google apps you already use every day to speed up your daily workflow by performing tedious and time-consuming tasks, such as cleaning out your inbox. Everyone can relate to being bombarded with emails.

AI can perform tasks such as writing, coding, reasoning, and researching with great accuracy -- all tasks that are key to starting your own company. That begs the question: Can AI help people start their very own billion-dollar business? Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes the answer is yes, and it's sooner than you may think. When asked at Anthropic's first developer conference, Code with Claude, when the first billion-dollar company with one human employee would happen, Amodei confidently responded, "2026." Also: Anthropic's latest Claude AI models are here - and you can try one for free today At the same event, Anthropic unveiled its most powerful family of models yet -- Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 -- which can code, reason, and support agentic capabilities better than ever before.

AI-generated video has been advancing rapidly, with leading tech developers racing to build and commercialize their own models. We're now seeing the rise of tools that can generate strikingly photorealistic video from a single prompt in natural language. For the most part, however, AI-generated video has had a glaring shortcoming: it's silent. At its annual I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google announced the release of Veo 3, the latest iteration of its video-generating AI model, which also comes with the ability to generate synchronized audio. Imagine you prompt the system to generate a video set inside a busy subway car, for example.

Fierce competition among some of the world's biggest tech companies has led to a profusion of AI tools that can generate humanlike prose and uncannily realistic images, audio, and video. While those companies promise productivity gains and an AI-powered creativity revolution, fears have also started to swirl around the possibility of an internet that's so thoroughly muddled by AI-generated content and misinformation that it's impossible to tell the real from the fake. Many leading AI developers have, in response, ramped up their efforts to promote AI transparency and detectability. Most recently, Google announced the launch of its SynthID Detector, a platform that can quickly spot AI-generated content created by one of the company's generative models: Gemini, Imagen, Lyria, and Veo. Originally released in 2023, SynthID is a technology that embeds invisible watermarks -- a kind of digital fingerprint that can be detected by machines but not by the human eye -- into AI-generated images.

Since its founding in 2021, Anthropic has quickly become one of the leading AI companies and a worthy competitor to OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft with its Claude models. Building on this momentum, the company held its first developer conference, Thursday, -- Code with Claude -- which showcased what the company has done so far and where it is going next. Also: I let Google's Jules AI agent into my code repo and it did four hours of work in an instant Anthropic used the event stage to unveil two highly anticipated models, Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. Both offer improvements over their preceding models, including better performance in coding and reasoning. Beyond that, the company launched new features and tools for its models that should improve the user experience. Keep reading to learn more about the new models.

I just added an entire new feature to my software, including UI and functionality, just by typing four paragraphs of instructions. I have screenshots, and I'll try to make sense of it in this article. I can't tell if we're living in the future or we've just descended to a new plane of hell (or both). Let's take a step back. Google's Jules is the latest in a flood of new coding agents released just this week. I wrote about OpenAI Codex and Microsoft's GitHub Copilot Coding Agent at the beginning of the week, and ZDNET's Webb Wright wrote about Google's Jules. All of these coding agents will perform coding operations on a GitHub repository.

OpenAI is officially getting into the hardware business. In a video posted to X on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former Apple designer Jony Ive, who worked on flagship products like the iPhone, revealed a partnership to create the next generation of AI-enabled devices. Also: I tried Google's XR glasses and they already beat my Meta Ray-Bans in 3 ways The AI software company announced it is merging with io, an under-the-radar startup focused on AI devices that Ive founded a year ago alongside several partners. In the video, Altman and Ive say they have been "quietly" collaborating for two years. As part of the deal, Ive and those at his design firm, LoveFrom, will remain independent but will take on creative roles at OpenAI.

Michael Dell is pitching a "decentralized" future for artificial intelligence that his company's devices will make possible. "The future of AI will be decentralized, low-latency, and hyper-efficient," predicted the Dell Technologies founder, chairman, and CEO in his Dell World keynote, which you can watch on YouTube. "AI will follow the data, not the other way around," Dell said at Monday's kickoff of the company's four-day customer conference in Las Vegas. Dell is betting that the complexity of deploying generative AI on-premise is driving companies to embrace a vendor with all of the parts, plus 24-hour-a-day service and support, including monitoring. On day two of the show, Dell chief operating officer Jeffrey Clarke noted that Dell's survey of enterprise customers shows 37% want an infrastructure vendor to "build their entire AI stack for them," adding, "We think Dell is becoming an enterprise's'one-stop shop' for all AI infrastructure."