Technology & innovation
A new survey of 1,350 IT and security decision-makers finds that 96% of leaders are confident their teams can keep up with today's threats. That confidence may be misplaced: 63% reported at least one significant cybersecurity incident in the prior 12 months.
Highlights from the Arctic Wolf 2026 AI & Cybersecurity Trends Report:
AI has now topped the list of cybersecurity concerns for the second straight year, cited by 35% of respondents, a 10-percentage-point gap over ransomware (25%).
Nearly all organizations (94%) use large language models in some capacity, with 39% running two to three approved tools.
Among organizations hit by ransomware, 56% paid some portion of the ransom demand, with half of those payments made by a cyber insurer or third party rather than the organization itself.
Productivity losses from significant incidents are severe: 48% of victimized organizations lost two or more weeks of productivity, and nearly 10% reported disruptions lasting two quarters or longer.
To address a persistent cybersecurity skills gap, 59% of leaders are investing in AI or automation to reduce manual workload and 57% are investing in training and certifications.
Read more via Arctic Wolf
A Five9 survey of 3,000 consumers and 600 customer experience decision-makers across the U.S., U.K., and Germany finds that AI has become standard in customer service operations, but consumer trust remains the defining challenge.
92% of organizations have already implemented or piloted AI in customer service.
80% of consumers are willing to use AI-powered customer service, but two-thirds still prefer speaking with a human.
71% of consumers consider it very or extremely important to know when they are interacting with an AI agent.
83% of consumers say they still have to repeat themselves at least sometimes after being transferred from an AI agent to a human, despite nearly all decision-makers saying their organization preserves context during handoffs.
Phone remains the most preferred customer service channel overall, with preference rising steadily with age, from 23% of Gen Z to 66% of the Silent Generation.
Read more via Five9
While AI has become a fixture of everyday work, most people remain uncomfortable letting it operate without human oversight, according to a new survey by TiemViewer of 4,200 managers and employees across 10 countries.
Highlights from the TeamViewer survey:
75% of respondents use AI at least once a day, and 97% identify at least one workplace benefit, but 61% still prefer AI to take no independent action without human review or approval.
Managers report significantly more positive AI experiences than non-management employees: 71% of managers describe their experience as positive, compared with 58% of employees, and managers identify three times as many workplace benefits.
Employees feel more personally exposed when autonomous systems fail, and 28% place responsibility for AI mistakes on themselves, even when they had no role in selecting or deploying the system.
Workers are most comfortable delegating routine, reversible tasks but draw a clear line at sensitive data: 22% are not at all comfortable with AI handling confidential information in the background.
IT decision-makers expect an average of 39% of digital workplace services to run autonomously by 2030, rising to 45% or more at organizations with 1,000 or more employees.
Only 35% of respondents say they are mostly or completely ready to trust AI to act autonomously in their work, a figure that trails far behind organizational ambition.
Read more via TeamViewer
More than 1,100 employees from leading AI and technology companies signed an open letter Tuesday urging the U.S. government to support an international effort to deliberately pace the development of advanced AI systems. Signatories include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki, and senior leaders at Meta and Google.
The initiative, called Pacing the Frontier, asks the U.S. to support development of technical and governance tools that could slow AI development if needed.
There is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.”
The letter follows OpenAI's disclosure last week that two of its test models escaped a lab environment, accessed the open internet, and hacked a different company's internal systems.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a podcast interview Tuesday that the company "may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around these new capability levels."
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has separately called for a new international standards body to set protocols for new AI models, an idea endorsed by Altman, Elon Musk, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”
Read more via Reuters, Bloomberg, CNN, Pacing the Frontier
A new Indeed survey of 300 hiring decision-makers and 1,001 job seekers finds a widening gap between employer demand for AI-native talent and the actual supply. Fewer than one in six workers considers themselves an AI native, defined as someone who fundamentally defaults to AI to design, execute, and scale their workflows.
59% of employers consider hiring AI-native workers in the next 12 months essential or important, and 45% are actively recruiting for those skills.
31% of employers expect AI fluency will be required for most or nearly all roles within two years.
Employer expectations for advanced AI tasks run two to three times ahead of worker comfort levels.
More than half of workers (52%) say they aren't getting the AI training they need from their employers.
Only 4% of employers cite headcount reduction as their primary motivation for hiring AI-native workers, and only 6% of workers fear AI will eventually replace their roles.
Read more via Indeed
Organizations are deploying AI faster than they are preparing their leaders and workers to use it. The research, published by Manpower and conducted with Everest Group, surveyed 80 C-suite, CHRO, and senior talent acquisition leaders across the U.S. and U.K.
Only 3% of organizations say their leaders are highly prepared to manage AI-enabled ways of working, while nearly half say leaders are only moderately prepared.
78% of organizations report employee fear of job displacement, and 63% report workforce resistance to adopting AI tools after deployment.
Only 17% of organizations report advanced or transformational workforce readiness, where AI capability is deeply embedded into workflows and linked to measurable outcomes.
63% say reskilling and redeployment is the most common outcome for employees whose roles are significantly impacted by AI.
Organizations report their greatest productivity gains come from AI-augmented roles, where people and AI collaborate, cited by 34%, compared with just 8% reporting strongest gains from fully automated roles.
Read more via Global Legal Post
A Deloitte and Society for Corporate Governance survey of 92 public companies and 14 private companies finds that board-level AI adoption is early-stage, inconsistent, and largely ungoverned. The survey was fielded in March and April 2026.
Nearly half of public companies (47%) do not expressly support AI use in board and committee work.
Among those whose boards have used AI, the most common applications are summarizing pre-read materials, conducting analysis of reports and data, and preparing questions for management.
51% of public companies and 73% of private companies have no board-specific AI policies in place.
71% of public company respondents said they were unsure whether their board had used AI for any meeting-related activities in the past six months.
77% of public company boards have taken steps to enhance AI competence, primarily through management briefings and education sessions, but only 14% have included AI expertise as a consideration in director recruitment.
Read more via Deloitte
A Google Research study analyzing 15 million real AI interactions across the Gemini platform finds little evidence that AI is on the verge of displacing white-collar workers.
For 29% of occupations, not a single relevant work task met the threshold for meaningful Gemini usage, suggesting those jobs have been minimally affected by AI so far.
Only 3% of occupations saw Gemini regularly consulted for at least three-quarters of that job's relevant tasks.
86% of Gemini interactions involved cognitive tasks, but the tasks workers offloaded to AI were overwhelmingly low-expertise and non-routine, such as rewriting material or drafting product specifications.
Workers are using AI to augment their work, the researchers conclude, not to automate it.
AI appears useful for a subset of tasks performed within occupations, but they do not currently appear to be comprehensively used for performing the work currently done by humans."
Read more via Ars Technica, Google
As employee AI usage sends costs soaring, some companies are introducing spending controls. Atlassian has rolled out what it calls "AI wallets" for employees in its research and development team, giving them a monthly budget of between $500 and $2,000 to spend across four AI products, with usage stopping when the budget runs out.
The move comes amid the rise of "tokenmaxxing," a practice in which employees maximize AI usage by consuming as many tokens as possible, often through autonomous agents running in the background.
Amazon recently shut down an internal AI leaderboard that scored staff based on their activity on the AI platform Kiro after reports that employees were tokenmaxxing.
Meta warned employees that token budgets and controls were coming after internal AI use in 2026 alone was projected to reach billions of tokens.
Read more via HCA Magazine
Two major companies announced significant workforce reductions this week, with AI cited as a contributing factor in both cases alongside broader business restructuring goals.
Visa plans to eliminate roughly 2,600 positions, about 7% of its workforce, mostly in technology and product operations, while redirecting investment toward growth areas including cross-border payments, stablecoins, and geographic expansion.
Uber is cutting 10% of its customer service workforce and requiring remote workers on the affected team to relocate to hub offices, as part of what the company called an effort to "simplify operations, strengthen in-person collaboration, and continue to embrace AI."
Analysts caution that AI is not the full story in either case. "We often see job reductions reported as driven by AI, when the story is more nuanced," said Kathy Ross, VP analyst at Gartner.
Forrester predicts AI will cut the customer service workforce in half by 2030, with contact centers handling lower-complexity inquiries facing the steepest reductions.
Klarna, frequently cited as a cautionary example, laid off customer service staff claiming an AI chatbot could do the work of 700 employees, then rehired customer service workers a year later.
Read more via CNBC, Customer Experience Dive
NVIDIA and dozens of tech giants formed the Open Secure AI Alliance this week, a new coalition aimed at building open-source tools for AI security and cybersecurity defense. The alliance was prompted in part by a recent incident at AI platform Hugging Face, in which the company used an open-weight AI model to analyze more than 17,000 actions and contain an intrusion after closed AI tools blocked its forensic analysis. Founding members include Adobe, Cisco, CrowdStrike, IBM, Microsoft, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, Salesforce, and more than 70 other companies. (NVIDIA)
Microsoft's CFO sent employees a memo this week touting the company's AI bets as paying off, following a quarter in which Microsoft reported $90 billion in revenue. Azure revenue grew 43% and surpassed $100 billion for the full fiscal year, while Microsoft 365 Copilot paid seat additions more than doubled sequentially to over 30 million. The company invested more than $41 billion in capital expenditures during the quarter to expand data center capacity. (Business Insider)
Bank of America expanded its AI-assisted customer service tool this week, adding generative AI capabilities to EricaAssist, an internal tool used by more than 18,000 customer service representatives during client calls. The updated system summarizes why a client is calling, pulls relevant information, and recommends next steps in under three seconds, reducing average call times by nearly one minute per interaction. (Bank of America)
