YPO Technology Network AI Brief

19:14

The Default Said Yes For You

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/10/03

On 21 September Shopify announced agentic checkout with Meta's new personal agent, Muse, "on all Shopify stores." Shopify's own help pages show how: a setting called "Allow Shopify to manage for me" is on by default, direct checkout for Meta is activated by default for eligible stores in the US, Canada and Mexico, stores are "auto-enrolled in new agentic storefronts channels," and "if you do not wish to participate, it is your responsibility to disable the features." The same evening Amazon blocked

en

9:49

The Hour-Seller Is Buying Its Way Out

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/10/02

Accenture reported fiscal 2026 on 1 October: $74.2 billion in revenue, up 5 percent in local currency, $84.5 billion in new bookings, and about 814,000 people. The shares jumped by double digits. On the call, CEO Julie Sweet said clients "remain at very different stages of readiness" and "many are just starting their AI journey," with more than 400 clients starting their first advanced AI work this year. She said "in Q4, we saw lower pricing in many areas of our business." The CFO said fixed price

en

10:59

The Algorithm Is Not A Defense

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/10/01

Connecticut's Public Act 26-15 takes effect today. Three sections reach ordinary companies: employers filing a federal layoff notice must tell the state whether the layoffs relate to their use of artificial intelligence; using an automated employment decision tool "shall not be a defense" against a discrimination complaint, though evidence of anti-bias testing may be weighed; and anyone selling an AI subscription to a Connecticut resident needs written notice of the terms and written acceptance

en

10:13

The Price And The Phone Line

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/30

Reuters reported on 29 September that McDonald's runs a pricing engine that analyzes millions of daily transactions across nearly 14,000 restaurants and generates what the company calls "the optimal price" for each item at each location, using among other things an estimate of how much local customers are willing to pay. Two company-run stores in Fresno, two miles apart, sell the Big Mac at $5.69 and $6.89. Five franchisees described pressure to follow the recommendations, a June document shows

en

17:12

Costco Let The Bots In

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/29

On its 24 September earnings call Costco's CFO said traffic from AI search grew triple digits for a second consecutive quarter, converts better than any other source, and sells the membership itself. He named Gemini, Anthropic and OpenAI as the sources, and said teams are cleaning up product data and pages so that Costco's value shows up correctly in the large language models. In May the CEO explained why: regular search never showed the all-in price; the models do.Then the map. Amazon's robots

en

14:06

Microsoft Gave The Agent A Badge

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/28

On Friday 25 September Microsoft rebuilt Copilot into one app with three tabs: Home, Code and Autopilot. Home puts Word, Excel and PowerPoint inside the assistant and adds a Today panel across mail, calendar, Teams and tasks. Code lets anyone build an app or workflow by describing it, hosted in the company's own tenant. Autopilot is a standing agent with, in Microsoft's words, its own identity, memory, computer and workspace, that colleagues can @mention like a coworker. Nothing is broadly available

en

16:10

Your Company Has No Bill Of Work

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/26

Every product a company makes has a bill of materials: every part, its cost, its supplier. The company that makes those products has no equivalent document for the work its people do. This weekend edition is about that missing document, the bill of work, why almost nobody has one, and how to build one for a single department in about three weeks.Nobody has done the counting: the Census Bureau finds 85 percent of US firms using generative AI use it for writing and editing, and nearly 65 percent

en

11:32

Italy Says Your Certificate Is No Defense

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/25

On 30 September, Italy's implementing decree for the EU AI Act takes effect, and it reads less like a compliance rulebook than a set of courtroom rules. In any damages claim involving an AI system, a judge can order the company to hand over the system's logs, its risk-management file, its technical documentation and its human-oversight settings. If the company cannot produce them without justified reason, the court treats the claimant's version of the facts as admitted. Once an AI Act obligation has

en

9:14

Nobody Cut The Old Bill

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/21

In one week, Salesforce and HubSpot both showed the mid-market what an AI agent will cost, and the answer is a second meter running next to the seats you already pay for. Salesforce shipped its own reasoning model, Koa, to pilot customers with general availability months away and no price. It paired user seats with preset credit allowances and gave its agents first names. A Salesforce plug-in opened to every paid plan of a frontier lab's assistant, with no combined price. HubSpot did the one thing

en

14:35

Nothing Broke. Check Anyway.

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/19

Weekend edition. For those who have been plumbing their own systems, this one is for you. Once a quarter, Stephen Forte's company reviews the systems it runs itself: the code, the logs all the way down, the mechanical parts, the memory systems, and every bill divided by what actually shipped. This quarter it was the turn of three digital employees behind the morning client briefing. Nothing was broken, and nobody made a mistake. The systems had drifted, which is what agents do when nobody is

en

7:04

They Had A Policy

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/18

On Tuesday the Supreme Court of Tasmania threw out a parole condition because the document justifying it cited case law that does not exist. The Parole Board has conceded its own secretary wrote that document with AI. Tasmania already had a twenty-page AI policy, approved two years and two days before the ruling, and it had warned that inappropriate use of AI in decision making could expose a decision to judicial review for being unreasonable or denying procedural fairness. Those are the court's

en

10:07

The Attacker Was An Agent

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/17

Spain's data protection agency has received the first notification of a personal-data breach in which the intruder was an AI agent rather than a person. By the notifying company's account, the agent searched for vulnerabilities, achieved a valid login, explored the application on its own, altered personal data and accessed invoices. The regulator's response is not a new rule but four changes to how every company must think about risk, response time, credentials and human oversight, with its own

en

11:33

225,000 Stars, Zero Security Audits

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/16

A free piece of software from DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab, is now one of the fastest-growing projects GitHub has ever hosted: published on 13 August, past 225,000 stars and nearly 27,000 forks by mid-September. It is not a model. It is an agent harness, the software that decides what an AI model is allowed to touch, and its architecture is the reason for the growth: every layer of it is a swappable plugin.Its own safety notice says it has not been audited and must not be treated as

en

9:43

Asia Just Answered Three AI Questions

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/15

Three institutions on one continent answered, in public and in one week, the questions most boardrooms are still debating. A bank in Tokyo let generative AI write the code for the system that holds every customer's balance. China's highest court told every judge in the country how to rule when an AI clones a voice. And one of India's largest outsourcers found it had the equivalent of twenty thousand people's time on its hands, and had to decide what to do with it.None of the three is a vendor

en

9:23

AI Does Not Install Itself, Google Admits

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/14

On Monday, Accenture and Google Cloud launched a new business group whose headline is not software but people: a planned workforce of a thousand "forward deployed engineers" who sit inside client companies and build the AI for them. The most capable software company in the world has just said, in its own press release, that its enterprise AI does not install itself.Yesterday's episode was about an airport that keeps its AI engineers in-house so the knowledge stays in the building. Today is the

en

10:36

Using AI In Your YPO Chapter

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/12

A weekend edition about your YPO chapter, the most important part of YPO, and exactly how an AI assistant fits into running it. Not the case for AI, but the plumbing that has to exist first and the things a chapter actually does with it once it does.Stephen is the Regional Learning Officer for the Pacific, has founded two chapters, has been chapter chair, and will facilitate the chapter chair workshops at GLC in San Diego and Thailand in 2027. Everything here is what his own chapter does. In this

en

8:58

The Worst Thing Our Agent Did Was Be Careful

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/11

A CEO in Atlanta posted this week about the worst thing an AI agent ever did to his company: it was careful. It hit a broken field, assumed it lacked permission, quietly skipped the last step, and a product shipped attached to nothing while every dashboard stayed green. His line: "A loud failure gets fixed in ten minutes. A quiet skip ships and waits."Field notes from one week of people running AI inside real companies, tiered honestly: one story on the record, one going around, one from a

en

9:09

Killing Projects Is Changi's Real AI Skill

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/08

A consultant closing out a healthcare technology conference in Singapore told the room something almost no vendor ever volunteers: his own employer, the group that runs Changi Airport, throws away more than six out of every ten AI projects it starts. Not after launch. Before one.Every applied-AI story usually gets told around what shipped. This one is about what got killed on purpose, and that turns out to be the more useful story. In this episode, Stephen Forte covers: Why Changi Airport Group's

en

10:16

It Came For The Judgment, Not The Job

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/04

On Wednesday, OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra and its president said it is "not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era." Two days earlier, an NPR reporter walked the floor of a GE Appliances oven plant in northwest Georgia, where a manufacturing vice president with nearly forty years on the floor gave his verdict on the AI running his line: "It can outthink me."The story of applied AI this week is not that it took somebody's job. It took somebody's judgment. In this episode, Stephen Forte

en

10:10

The Sticker Price Did Not Move

YPO Technology Network AI Brief ·

2026/09/03

Anthropic shipped two new frontier models this week and left the headline price exactly where it was: $10 per million input tokens, $50 output, unchanged. The number that moved is one almost nobody looks at. Cached input reads fell 75%, from $1.00 per million tokens to $0.25.The price you get quoted is the price of answering once. Your bill is set by re-reading. In this episode, Stephen Forte covers: What a cached read actually is, and why it decides agent economics: an agent is not answering one

en

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Expres Ráno

Expres FM

Quick Start

CBN News

Bloomberg News Now

Bloomberg

Israel Today: Ongoing War Report

Israel Today: Ongoing War Report

The Decibel

The Globe and Mail