Matt Garman took the helm at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of the U.S. tech giant, in June, but he joined the business around 19 years ago as an intern. He went on to become AWS's first product manager and helped to build and launch many of its core services, before eventually becoming the CEO last year. Like many other tech companies, AWS, which is Amazon's most profitable unit, is betting big on AI. In April 2023, the company launched Amazon Bedrock, which gives cloud customers access to foundation models built by AI companies including Anthropic and Mistral. At its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas in December, the AWS made a series of announcements, including a new generation of foundation AI models, called Nova. It also said that it's building one of the world's most powerful AI supercomputers with Anthropic, which it has a strategic partnership with, using a giant cluster of AWS's Trainium 2 training chips. TIME spoke with Garman a few days after the re:Invent conference, about his AI ambitions, how he's thinking about ensuring the technology is safe, and how the company is balancing its energy needs with its emissions targets.

If you think embedded insurance is the only hot thing in insurtech these days, we've got a surprise in store for you: While it's true that startups that help sell insurance together with other products and services are enjoying tailwinds, there are plenty of other opportunities in the space, several investors told TechCrunch . You see, insurtech startups often need to take into account the myriad rules and regulations in place when they seek to innovate and embed insurance into products, which might make it difficult to pull it off. Given the current emphasis on achieving cost efficiency to extend runways in the broader startup ecosystem, it appears investors are open to insurtech startups that can build a sustainable business model, regardless of it including embedded insurance. "Insurtech startups that do not offer embedded insurance, and rather provide other innovative solutions will still attract VC funding this year, especially if they can show cost-efficient and sustainable growth," said Nina Mayer, a principal at Earlybird. And according to David Wechsler, a principal at OMERS Ventures, "having an embedded strategy is not required for venture funding."

If you think embedded insurance is the only hot thing in insurtech these days, we've got a surprise in store for you: While it's true that startups that help sell insurance together with other products and services are enjoying tailwinds, there are plenty of other opportunities in the space, several investors told TechCrunch . You see, insurtech startups often need to take into account the myriad rules and regulations in place when they seek to innovate and embed insurance into products, which might make it difficult to pull it off. Given the current emphasis on achieving cost efficiency to extend runways in the broader startup ecosystem, it appears investors are open to insurtech startups that can build a sustainable business model, regardless of it including embedded insurance. "Insurtech startups that do not offer embedded insurance, and rather provide other innovative solutions will still attract VC funding this year, especially if they can show cost-efficient and sustainable growth," said Nina Mayer, a principal at Earlybird. And according to David Wechsler, a principal at OMERS Ventures, "having an embedded strategy is not required for venture funding."

The cybersecurity firm Darktrace has warned that since the release of ChatGPT it has seen an increase in criminals using artificial intelligence to create more sophisticated scams to con employees and hack into businesses. The Cambridge-based company, which reported a 92% drop in operating profits in the half year to the end of December, said AI was further enabling "hacktivist" cyber-attacks using ransomware to extort money from businesses. The company said it had seen the emergence of more convincing and complex scams by hackers since the launch of the hugely popular Microsoft-backed AI tool ChatGPT last November. "Darktrace has found that while the number of email attacks across its own customer base remained steady since ChatGPT's release, those that rely on tricking victims into clicking malicious links have declined while linguistic complexity, including text volume, punctuation and sentence length among others, have increased," the company said. "This indicates that cybercriminals may be redirecting their focus to crafting more sophisticated social engineering scams that exploit user trust." However, Darktrace said that the phenomenon had not yet resulted in a new wave of cybercriminals emerging, merely changing the tactics of the existing cohort.

In an increasingly customer-centric business environment, effective communication between marketing and senior management is crucial for success. With the rise of globalization and increased competition, utilizing new data mining techniques to identify potential customers is essential for direct marketing efforts. This paper proposes a data mining preprocessing method for developing a customer profiling system to improve sales performance, including customer equity estimation and customer action prediction. The RFM-analysis methodology is used to evaluate client capital and a boosting tree for prediction. The study highlights the importance of customer segmentation methods and algorithms to increase the accuracy of the prediction. The main result of this study is the creation of a customer profile and forecast for the sale of goods.

The financial revolution is here. Here, we take a deep dive with one of the world's top FinTech venture capitalists, Spiros Margaris, founder of Margaris Ventures, into the way AI and related technologies are transforming a key industry. Spiros is a senior advisor to, and investor in, several fintech, insurtech, cybersecurity, health care, and AI sector companies, including two FinTech start-ups with valuations of over $1 billion. Q: What issues, shortcomings, or inequities with financial systems are potential areas for transformation? Margaris: The financial technology industry -- FinTech -- seems to originate from the need to provide for a democratized financial system, at least, the FinTech companies that interest me.

With 80 per cent of company data being unstructured, including text, images and video, getting the most possible value from rising amounts of these assets is proving a challenge across all business sectors. Businesses often meet pitfalls in keyword search capabilities that fail to properly take context, formats or languages into account, leaving users with insufficient results. To solve this challenge, Barcelona-headquartered data startup Nuclia is delivering an API that leverages what company CEO and co-founder Eudald Camprubi has named'AI search as a service', capable of finding and indexing data across any source. An end-to-end solution, it can extract data from file repositories, audio, video, URLs and databases, split it into paragraphs, and present an index that shows exactly where any chosen piece of information is in the file. This is based on continuously trained language models, the creation of which owes much to data annotation.

Mihup is a platform where it enables developers to create customized voice interfaces with full control over brand identity and privacy. TimesTech interacted with Bhaskar Mishra, Head of Product, Mihup to know about Future of Conversation Intelligence in India, rising importance of AI and much more. Bhasker: Founded in June 2016 and headquartered in Kolkata, Mihup is a leading Conversation Intelligence platform for boosting contact center performance. Built on the industry's most accurate AI engine, Mihup channelizes contact center performance leading to seamless customer-agent call interaction. With a focus on end-to-end performance enhancement of enterprises, Mihup offers services across industries like BFSI, Ecommerce, Retail, and BPO.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rapidly advancing technology, and thanks to companies like C3.ai (NYSE: AI), it's gradually becoming accessible to all businesses in all industries. The company is blazing a trail in a brand-new sector it calls enterprise AI, where it sells ready-made and customizable AI applications to customers wanting to supercharge their operations. Estimates suggest that by 2030, up to 70% of all organizations will be implementing AI in one way or another, adding $13 trillion in output to the global economy. It's a sizable opportunity for a company like C3.ai, and it already has a leadership position in the industry. The largest technology companies in the world have established partnerships with C3.ai, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google parent Alphabet, validating the quality of what the company is building.

"We are building this company because we are enjoying the process and because we want to have an impact on this industry," Toth said. "We are not building this company for a quick sale." The company employs just under 60 people and is hiring aggressively, with expectations that a good 25% of its workforce will be new within the next few months. Plans also call for using the money to build up the brand. "We will be investing heavily into sales and marketing [and] hiring additional salespeople," Toth said, with potential marketing areas including thought leadership, content and channel partnerships.