Critics took aim at President Biden's Middle East policy after three Americans service members were killed in an attack on a base in Jordan near the border with Syria. "Hit Iran now," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a statement after the Sunday attack. Graham's comment comes after three U.S. service members were killed and 25 more were injured in a drone attack on northeast Jordan that sits close to the border with Syria, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed. "On Jan. 28, three U.S. service members were killed and 25 injured from a one-way attack UAS that impacted at a base in northeast Jordan, near the Syria border. As a matter of respect for the families and in accordance with DoD policy, the identities of the servicemembers will be withheld until 24 hours after their next of kin have been notified," CENTCOM said in a statement. "Updates will be provided as they become available."

Microsoft shares rose 12.4% last week on word of the release of Copilot, a generative artificial intelligence tool to be integrated into its Office suite. That's huge news from the tech giant because it hands AI to the masses via highly familiar, everyday interfaces such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Copilot will swiftly bring significant efficiencies and improvements to common tasks including email, analyses, business cases, presentations and performance reviews. With streamlined workflows and automated administrative functions, companies will be challenged to rethink business models, talent needs and resource usage. Very quickly, it will spur creativity, shorten work timelines and improve results.

Kellogg's is perhaps best known for its breakfast cereals from its Corn Flakes to Frosties to Fruit Loops and more, and before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the APAC region, its dominant positioning was within the quick prework/school breakfast consumption occasion. But with the onset of the pandemic and most consumers having to stay home for both work and school, this consumption occasion became less attractive, and the company rightly realised a need to interpret consumer behaviour in a new light to pivot and operate accordingly. "We saw a big transformation where most consumers started to increase their at-home consumption significantly, which also included a lot more cooking at home as many found their inner chef – so we wanted to find a way to offer them more options to use our products in a way closer to their culture and habits," Kellogg's South East Asia Chief Marketing Officer Sanjib Bose told FoodNavigator-Asia. "Before COVID-19, we would have done this via normal interviews with consumers but realised this was now not possible, and we also wanted to go deeper to understand them better by finding out what they wanted directly from conversations they were leading online. "We felt that AI technology was a good way forward for this as it also helped us solve challenges such as language barriers, as most consumers will post on social media in different languages especially in Asia where there are so many different languages; and also to make sense of the huge volume of data from all of these online conversations." Kellogg's partnered with AI-specialist firm Ai Palette to do this, and apart from the use of AI to process data, the firm's technology is also language agnostic, which allowed it to help with the language challenge. "Our language agnostic model allowed us to gather and process data from various locations and across various diverse languages such as Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu, whereas image analytics also helped to accurately identify data relevant to Kellogg's," Ai Palette CEO Somsubhra GanChoudhuri told us. "The big data found that now new consumption occasions for cereals have gone beyond breakfast – these are being used in proper recipes for cooking and baking, as a result of increased interest in home cooking and home baking during the pandemic.

Originally published on the Salesforce "360 blog" Customers care about end-to-end experiences, not how your company is organized. Business leaders are quick to say that a connected customer experience is a major business priority. But the truth is that they are struggling to do it well. New data captures the gap between business and digital transformation and the integrated experiences customers desire. Countless growing departments, new services abound, and the truth remains: Customers have to see you as one company.

Machine learning tools are used in a variety of fields, from sales to medicine. But getting tech into the workplace is just one step -- these tools are only successful if they're integrated into workflows, and if people trust them enough to depend on them. A key to successful adoption is back-and-forth dialogue between technology developers and end users, according to new research from MIT Sloan professorKate Kellogg,Sara Singer of Stanford University, Ari Galper of Columbia University, and Deborah Viola of Westchester Medical Center. The paper was published in Health Care Management Review. Deploying workplace tools is often seen as one-directional -- developers make them and hand them off to users.

When mandatory evacuation orders come, it's time to hit the road. Typically, you'll have some advance notice from authorities that an evacuation is possible. At the first sign that you might have to evacuate, get your things ready. "The earlier people leave, the better off they are," said Jessica Kellogg, an emergency management coordinator with the city of Los Angeles Emergency Management Department. Leaving quickly once you're ordered to evacuate means you have more time to get to safety, she said, and it helps firefighters keep roads clear of congestion.

Proper inventory management is a top concern for retailers. Out-of-stock items and inefficient replacement strategies can result in lost sales, reduced customer satisfaction, and lower loyalty levels. In response to these challenges, companies like Walmart and Kellogg's are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to improve real-time product substitutions and predict shortages weeks in advance. Artificial intelligence in the food and beverage market is expected to reach $29.94 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of over 45.77% during the forecast period, reported Research and Markets. This growth is largely attributed to consumer's increasing demand for fast, affordable, and easily accessible food options.

Where does your enterprise stand on the AI adoption curve? Take our AI survey to find out. In this era of evolving technology, organizations must be highly adaptive to succeed. A Statistics report reveals that before the pandemic over 4.7 million people in the U.S. were working remotely at least half the time -- a percentage that has since increased. And fully 75% of people using digital channels for the first time indicate that they'll continue to use them when things return to a post-pandemic "normal."

There've been years of hype about the invincible power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), but a substantial gap between what AI promises and its verity for business transformation still exists. Tech-companies have pitched AI's capabilities for a long-time however, for the majority of the organizations, the benefits of AI continue to be volatile. Artificial intelligence projects are indeed precedence for most of the companies though, there are several possible drawbacks for the unwary. It's not easy to gauge the proportion of businesses that leverage artificial intelligence today. Recent reports demonstrate that adoption rates fall somewhere between 20% and 30% – with adoption generally interpreted as'implementing AI in some form'. KPMG's survey among 30 of the global 500 companies showed that while 30% of respondents used AI for a particular range of purposes, only 17% of the companies implemented the technology at a large scale within the enterprise.

Despite years of hype (and plenty of worries) about the all-conquering power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), there still remains a significant gap between the promise of AI and its reality for business. Tech firms have pitched AI's capabilities for years, but for most organisations, the benefits of AI remain elusive. It's hard to gauge the proportion of businesses that are effectively using artificial intelligence today, and to what extent. Adoption rates shown in recent reports fall anywhere between 20% and 30%, with adoption typically loosely defined as "implementing AI in some form". A survey led by KPMG among 30 of the Global 500 companies found that although 30% of respondents reported using AI for a selective range of functions, only 17% of the companies were deploying the technology "at scale" within the enterprise.