Rather than replacing workers, AI is being used by small businesses to help their employees work better. Rather than replacing workers, AI is being used by small businesses to help their employees work better. Reports of wide-scale replacement of workers by AI are overblown. I recently met the owner of a company that sells windows and doors. He told me he invested about $10,000 in an AI application that is used by his salespeople in his showroom.

Primark's new'supermarket tactic' to woo customers in online price war It is something I keep hearing shoppers say when I ask them whether they shop at the fast-fashion giant. It's definitely got more expensive, says 19-year-old student Eshal Malik as she browses the jewellery at Primark with a friend. But that might be about to change. Primark said on Monday that it was lowering prices on hundreds of clothing items, including jeans, jumpers and socks. It's the kind of headline you'd expect from M&S or Next, says retail analyst Natalie Berg, explaining that price cuts like this from such a low-cost retailer are surprising.

Chick-fil-A customers in 10 states and D.C. experienced a data breach where hackers accessed accounts using stolen credentials from other sites through "credential stuffing." The attack exposed names, email addresses, and partial payment details, but wasn't due to Chick-fil-A's security being compromised directly. PCWorld recommends affected users change passwords immediately and use password managers to create unique, strong passwords for preventing future credential stuffing attacks. Sometimes you want a quick bite to eat. So you hop online, create an account for your favorite joint, and get to ordering. But a lot of people make a major mistake while doing this--which some Chick-fil-A customers just found out the hard way. On Wednesday, news broke about a Chick-fil-A data breach, with customers in ten states and the District of Columbia affected.

The lenders to Thames Water are preparing a legal challenge in case a Burnham-led government attempts to nationalise the UK's biggest water company. Burnham - who takes over as PM on Monday - has previously said he wants to see greater public control of the water and energy sectors and has called for Thames Water to be nationalised. Thames Water is about £20bn in debt. Its lenders had proposed a deal to write off nearly half of that and inject new cash in return for some leniency from future pollution fines, but this deal has previously been rejected by the government as being weak and bad for consumers and the environment. Sources close to the creditors have told the BBC that in the event of full nationalisation, they would pursue payment in full of the outstanding debts as has happened in previous cases, which could leave the government with a multi-billion-pound bill. Fears first emerged three years ago that Thames Water could collapse and on Thursday, the firm warned it has enough cash to last until the end of this year .

An error with the cloud computing giant's billing operation caused some customers' monthly bills to rise from a few cents to billions of dollars. A glitch with Amazon Web Services' billing operation led some customers to believe they owed the world's fifth most valuable company billions of dollars. Bill Radjewski, who runs CollegeFootballData.com, was one of the affected customers. This morning, he woke up to a jarring email alert from AWS: He had racked up more than $1.5 billion in usage fees, and his August 1 bill was on track to be upwards of $3 billion. "I've had this account for 6+ years and in that time my monthly spend has never exceeded $0.02," Radjewski tells WIRED.

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Tech companies' renewed emphasis on cost coincides with business customers scrutinizing AI spending. Three prominent artificial intelligence developers released new models over the past week. They all promise to be more advanced, but their biggest immediate selling point may not be what they can do, but how little they charge to do it. OpenAI said its most advanced offering, GPT-5.6, is designed to complete more work while using significantly fewer tokens, a unit of data processed by AI models. This will make the software far more cost efficient for customers. Grok 4.5, from Elon Musk's SpaceXAI, is billed as having twice the token efficiency as comparable models from other firms.

Seeking out a better deal from your broadband, pay TV and energy suppliers? While you know it could save hundreds of pounds, you might be wondering if it's worth the hassle. But often it only needs one call or a couple of clicks - and banks even pay an incentive to people who switch their main current accounts. Regulators have made the switching process easier in recent years, encouraging people to shop around when cost of living pressures have intensified. Which deals are the best for you still depends on your circumstances, but here are some of the ways that switching works.

In a closed-door simulation, insurers played out their response to a mass disruption by China's Volt Typhoon hackers--and found a nightmare scenario. It's around an hour and 10 minutes into the role-playing game I've been invited to observe, a simulated catastrophic cyberattack on US water utilities, when the whole thing begins to feel less like a fun afternoon playing Dungeons & Dragons and more like a plausible threat to civilization. A full 24 hours of in-game time have passed since hackers disrupted 5,000 water utilities across the United States in this imagined scenario. Joshua Corman, the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency strategist serving as our dungeon master, stands at the front of a conference space in an office tower high above Times Square, narrating the latest updates to the game's participants, a few dozen insurance executives set up in six teams. All of them have gone disturbingly silent. It's about to get harder," Corman says. "I'm going to share a few things, and it's going to hurt." It is, of course, still the same April afternoon as when we started--but in game time, the second-order effects of widespread water outages have started to become clear. Food refrigeration systems are failing at cold storage warehouses. Water-dependent drug and chemical manufacturing has been bottlenecked, leading to insulin shortages. Data centers' cooling systems are failing, causing outages of cloud services. Most critically, 2,000 hospitals are without water, hampering patient care and in some cases leading to evacuations as HVAC systems shut down and the July heat--the game takes place just before Independence Day in 2027--bakes facilities. Worse yet, Corman is playing a looping video onscreen, at the front of the room, showing a burst water main: The hackers have managed to trigger not just IT disruption but also, in at least some cases, real physical destruction that will take far longer to fix. "Everyone downstream is without water pressure," Corman says. "There are no breaks in real incident response," Corman explains just before the giant water pipe starts gushing onscreen. "If you have to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom.

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