By the time California state senators took up a bill Thursday night to grant unemployment benefits to striking workers, labor unions had already scored several monumental wins in the state Legislature. They landed a major deal to raise fast food wages to $20 an hour. They convinced lawmakers to pass a bill requiring driverless trucks to have a human safety driver. They persuaded the Democratic-led Legislature to send Gov. Gavin Newsom a bill giving all workers in California a minimum of five paid sick days -- up from the current requirement of three. So when the time came to vote on allowing striking workers to receive unemployment benefits, an exasperated Republican state senator rose to make the case that businesses wouldn't be able to stay afloat if their employees could get paid while on the picket line.

At Adobe Summit on March 21, 2023, Adobe announced and delivered its generative AI offering known as Adobe Firefly. Adobe Firefly (In beta), is a collection of generative AI models built for creative applications. The offering joins the platform's AI services. Adobe plans to integrate Firefly into their Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Adobe Express product lines. Future models will target additional use cases and content types, potentially leveraging other technology and training data.

When Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it was the 21st search engine to enter the market. In 2022 Google generated over $200 billion in revenue off of search advertising and other digital advertising. MIcrosoft launched the Bing search engine in 2009, built from the assets of Live Search which was released in 2006. By all accounts, Microsoft Bing was the laggard among Google and Yahoo in the space. Round 1 of the search engine wars was won by Google which has dominate for almost two decades.

On June 29th, 2022, a venerable digital industrial and one of the leaders in the metaverse, announced a collaboration to create an industrial metaverse. The goal - accelerate the adoption and mainstream use of industrial automation. At the core of this relationship is Siemens digital transformation platform, Siemens Xcelerator, and NVIDIA's Omniverse, a 3D-design and collaboration platform. Siemens brings physics-based digital models to the partnership while NVIDIA brings its real-tie AI to increase decision velocity. As NVIDIA states, "Omniverse is a multi-GPU scalable virtual world engine that enables teams to connect 3D design and CAD applications for collaborative design workflows and allows users to build physically accurate virtual worlds for training, testing and operating AI agents such as robots and autonomous machines."

On November 30th, ServiceNow announced an estimated $500 (CAD) million acquisition of Montreal, Canada based startup, Element AI. Key products include an AI-assisted insurance underwriting workflow software known as Underwriting Partner and a data set management platform for manufacturers known as Knowledge Scout. In a blog post, Element AI"s co-founder and CEO noted "Element AI will help ServiceNow deliver workflows that learn more efficiently from smaller datasets, improve the quality of existing AI capabilities like content and language understanding, and expand new capabilities like image recognition and cognitive search." Gagné also pointed out this level of integration would help users "summarize information, make predictions and recommendations, and automate repetitive tasks," As ServiceNow's fourth AI acquisition in 2020, CEO Bill McDermott and Chief AI Officer, Vijay K Narayanan, has doubled down on the investment and future of the platform with the build out of Now Intelligence capabilities along with the acquisitions of Loom Systems, Passage AI, and Sweagle. For ServiceNow, that is on the quest to become the universal workflow platform for the enterprise, it is the game changer that will attract CxOs to its platform.

Commercial buildings are voracious consumers of energy. The buildings and building construction sectors contribute around 30% of global energy consumption and almost 40% of CO2 emissions (direct and indirect), according to the IEA. Sustainable buildings are more than trendy, they're key to reducing humans' carbon footprint on the planet. Building owners deploy smart building solutions and building-management systems to not only cut operations costs and comply with regulations but also to do their part in reducing carbon emissions without sacrificing occupant comfort in the process. So how do you make an already smart, efficient building smarter and more efficient?

There has been a lot of talk, as of late, that the cloud has become a resource to turn to when a company needs large amounts of digital storage, constantly updated SaaS (software-as-a-service), or high-performance computing capabilities. Couple this with the expansion of AI (artificial intelligence) in applications, even smaller companies can realize the full computing power available in the cloud. And while the cloud has been highly publicized as an option for everything digital, an even more powerful environment exists that hasn't gotten nearly as much coverage, at least not yet. Lookout world here comes quantum computing. A recent IDC (Intl Data Corp.) survey of IT (information technology) and business personnel responsible for quantum computing adoption has revealed that improved AI capabilities, accelerated BI (business intelligence), and increased productivity and efficiency are quickly proving to be the top expectations of organizations currently investing in cloud-based quantum computing.

The technology to power connected cities exists today--and continued growth is predicted. Will all our cities soon be connected? Or do hurdles stand in the way? Perhaps one of the biggest challenge will be overcoming regulatory hurdles that could slow the progress down. Technavio says the autonomous bus market, as an example, will grow by 2364 units during 2020 and 2024, which is a growth rate of 32%.

In an industry as dynamic and exciting as the IoT (Internet of Things), it can difficult to separate hype from reality. One sector that often falls victim to hype is AI (artificial intelligence). For many decades, machine intelligence and autonomous decisionmaking have grabbed ahold of people's imaginations, simultaneously bringing about utopian and dystopian predictions for the future AI-driven world. Practically speaking, the hype surrounding AI technologies can make it tough for investors and businesses to get a handle on exactly what to expect from this growing space and how they should try to harness it. How can companies avoid getting caught up in the AI hype cycle?

In 2019, smart speaker ownership in the U.S. surpassed 76 million, according to CIRP (Consumer Intelligence Research Partners), up from 66 million at the end of 2018. As voice-assistant technologies continue to advance in smartphones, smart speakers, and in vehicles, more consumers and businesses are exploring the benefits of using this technology to make tasks simpler. Tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all chomping at the bit, hoping customers will turn to their voice assistants for increasingly complex tasks. CIRP's research suggests Amazon is the current leader in smart speakers, with about 70% of the installed base being Amazon Echo devices, 25% being made up of Google Home devices, and 5% being made up of Apple HomePods. This remains relatively unchanged from the firm's previous year's research, with the exception of slight percentage growth from both Google and Apple in 2019 compared to 2018.