Clear, reliable audio is no longer optional, say Genevieve Juillard, CEO of IDC, and Chris Schyvinck, president and CEO at Shure. When business leaders talk about digital transformation, their focus often jumps straight to cloud platforms, AI tools, or collaboration software. Yet, one of the most fundamental enablers of how organizations now work, and how employees experience that work, is often overlooked: audio. As Genevieve Juillard, CEO of IDC, notes, the shift to hybrid collaboration made every space, from corporate boardrooms to kitchen tables, meeting-ready almost overnight. In the scramble, audio quality often lagged, creating what research now shows is more than a nuisance. Poor sound can alter how speakers are perceived, making them seem less credible or even less trustworthy. Audio is the gatekeeper of meaning," stresses Julliard. "If people can't hear clearly, they can't understand you. And if they can't understand you, they can't trust you, and they can't act on what you said. And no amount of sharp video can fix that. For Shure, which has spent a century advancing sound technology, the implications extend far beyond convenience.

With the deepening of digital transformation, business process optimisation has become the key to improve the competitiveness of enterprises. This study constructs a business process optimisation model integrating artificial intelligence and big data to achieve intelligent management of the whole life cycle of processes. The model adopts a three-layer architecture incorporating data processing, AI algorithms, and business logic to enable real-time process monitoring and optimization. Through distributed computing and deep learning techniques, the system can handle complex business scenarios while maintaining high performance and reliability. Experimental validation across multiple enterprise scenarios shows that the model shortens process processing time by 42%, improves resource utilisation by 28%, and reduces operating costs by 35%. The system maintained 99.9% availability under high concurrent loads. The research results have important theoretical and practical value for promoting the digital transformation of enterprises, and provide new ideas for improving the operational efficiency of enterprises.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing today's business practices; however, their adoption within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) raises serious trust, ethical, and technical issues. In this perspective paper, we introduce a structured, multi-phased framework, "SME-TEAM" for the secure and responsible use of these technologies in SMEs. Based on a conceptual structure of four key pillars, i.e., Data, Algorithms, Human Oversight, and Model Architecture, SME-TEAM bridges theoretical ethical principles with operational practice, enhancing AI capabilities across a wide range of applications in SMEs. Ultimately, this paper provides a structured roadmap for the adoption of these emerging technologies, positioning trust and ethics as a driving force for resilience, competitiveness, and sustainable innovation within the area of business analytics and SMEs.

Many organisations pursue digital transformation to enhance operational efficiency, reduce manual efforts, and optimise processes by automation and digital tools. To achieve this, a comprehensive understanding of their unique needs is required. However, traditional methods, such as expert interviews, while effective, face several challenges, including scheduling conflicts, resource constraints, inconsistency, etc. To tackle these issues, we investigate the use of a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered chatbot to acquire organisations' digital transformation needs. Specifically, the chatbot integrates workflow-based instruction with LLM's planning and reasoning capabilities, enabling it to function as a virtual expert and conduct interviews. We detail the chatbot's features and its implementation. Our preliminary evaluation indicates that the chatbot performs as designed, effectively following predefined workflows and supporting user interactions with areas for improvement. We conclude by discussing the implications of employing chatbots to elicit user information, emphasizing their potential and limitations.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review's editorial staff. Modern integration platforms are helping enterprises streamline fragmented IT environments and prepare their data pipelines for AI-driven transformation. Enterprise IT ecosystems are often akin to sprawling metropolises--multi-layered environments where aging infrastructure intersects with sleek new technologies against a backdrop of constantly ballooning traffic. Similarly to how driving through a centuries-old city that's been retrofitted for automobiles and skyscrapers can cause gridlock, enterprise IT systems frequently experience data bottlenecks.

A quick internet search on this topic will usually produce images of smiling, or perplexed, people looking into a computer. Often these people are surrounded by an array of intimidating holograms associated with spatial computing that barely yet exist in our real working lives. In many cases, images of a white, male hand – one finger extended – meets the elegant finger of a white, humanoid robot. But this is not what really happens at work. We know that visualising the future is hard, because we've used some of these images at the Digit Centre ourselves in the past.

The past few decades have been marked by the ever-increasing presence of digital technology. This growth, often called digital transformation, places a heavy burden on our environment. We are now facing a potential new phase of digital transformation,6 represented by the emergence of generative AI (GenAI), a subfield of artificial intelligence focused on generating content, such as human-like text, code, and images.14 In particular, the deployment of GenAI as a service, such as ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion, is raising questions around sustainability. The sustainability of any computing technology, however, cannot be addressed without a way to evaluate its environmental impact.

The explosion in artificial intelligence (AI) applications is pushing the development of AI-dedicated data centers (AIDCs), creating management challenges that traditional methods and standalone AI solutions struggle to address. While digital twins are beneficial for AI-based design validation and operational optimization, current AI methods for their creation face limitations. Specifically, physical AI (PhyAI) aims to capture the underlying physical laws, which demands extensive, case-specific customization, and generative AI (GenAI) can produce inaccurate or hallucinated results. We propose Fusion Intelligence, a novel framework synergizing GenAI's automation with PhyAI's domain grounding. In this dual-agent collaboration, GenAI interprets natural language prompts to generate tokenized AIDC digital twins. Subsequently, PhyAI optimizes these generated twins by enforcing physical constraints and assimilating real-time data. Case studies demonstrate the advantages of our framework in automating the creation and validation of AIDC digital twins. These twins deliver predictive analytics to support power usage effectiveness (PUE) optimization in the design stage. With operational data collected, the digital twin accuracy is further improved compared with pure physics-based models developed by human experts. Fusion Intelligence offers a promising pathway to accelerate digital transformation. It enables more reliable and efficient AI-driven digital transformation for a broad range of mission-critical infrastructures.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) are recognized to have significant effects on industry and business dynamics, not least because of their impact on the preconditions for entrepreneurship. There is still a lack of knowledge of GenAI as a theme in entrepreneurship research. This paper presents a systematic literature review aimed at identifying and analyzing the evolving landscape of research on the effects of GenAI on entrepreneurship. We analyze 83 peer-reviewed articles obtained from leading academic databases: Web of Science and Scopus. Using natural language processing and unsupervised machine learning techniques with TF-IDF vectorization, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and hierarchical clustering, five major thematic clusters are identified: (1) Digital Transformation and Behavioral Models, (2) GenAI-Enhanced Education and Learning Systems, (3) Sustainable Innovation and Strategic AI Impact, (4) Business Models and Market Trends, and (5) Data-Driven Technological Trends in Entrepreneurship. Based on the review, we discuss future research directions, gaps in the current literature, as well as ethical concerns raised in the literature. We highlight the need for more macro-level research on GenAI and LLMs as external enablers for entrepreneurship and for research on effective regulatory frameworks that facilitate business experimentation, innovation, and further technology development.

The ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit) and Better Images of AI (BIoAI) are delighted to announce a competition to reimagine the visual communication of how work is changing in the digital age, including through the adoption of AI. Digit has undertaken a significant five-year research programme culminating in insights about real-world digital transformations currently impacting people's daily lives. The research undertaken by Digit between 2020 and 2025 points to the fact that adoption of technologies like AI is still patchy across the UK, and investment in digital skills is low. There are examples of AI being used to substitute or automate repetitive tasks, but this has not, as yet, resulted in significant job losses. Furthermore, technology adoption is facilitating experimentation with how, when, and where people work which presents new opportunities, but also challenges to our existing institutional and regulatory governance frameworks.