NBA stars, mobsters, and marks with fat wallets are all part of an alleged ring of rigged poker games. Here's how these games are assembled, who attends, and how the purported cheating happens. Former NBA player and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups (center) exits the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse after his arraignment on October 23, 2025, in Portland, Oregon. To the uninitiated, the arrests of Chauncey Billups and Damon Jones last week for allegations of involvement in rigged illegal poker games may have appeared like an unusual collision of worlds. How could prosecutors claim that former NBA players (one a current coach), professional gamblers, and even mafia members all ended up rubbing elbows as part of the same high-tech cheating scheme that allegedly began in 2019 and ran for several years?

Many companies are stuck in dead-end pilots while an elite few have figured out how to make artificial intelligence (AI) work at scale, according to a new Accenture report. "AI: Built to Scale" shows how difficult this transformation is as well as what it takes to do it successfully. "In a nutshell, what our report found is that the majority of companies are really struggling to scale AI," said Bob Berkey, MD, Accenture Applied Intelligence. "They're stuck in the Proof of Concept Factory, conducting AI experiments and pilots but achieving a low scaling success rate and a low return on their AI investments." Accenture surveyed 1,500 C-level executives across 16 industries to determine what makes AI projects successful.