On this week’s Small Biz Breakdown, our expert panels debates artificial intelligence and its place in business. They talk about whether AI is the answer for any number of business processes or whether people are getting burned out by all the AI talk they hear day after day, especially lately. Also, check out the discussion the panel has over Trump’s tariffs and so much more on this week’s episode of Small Biz Breakdown …
Tag: AI
Zoho Unveils Projects Plus, a Unified AI-Driven Project Management Platform | Small Biz Trends
Zoho Corporation has launched Projects Plus, a new AI-powered project management platform designed to enhance efficiency and collaboration for mid-sized and enterprise organizations. The platform integrates four key Zoho applications—Projects, WorkDrive, Analytics, and Sprints—allowing businesses to leverage data-driven insights, streamline workflows, and facilitate collaboration in real-time.
The introduction of Projects Plus follows a year of substantial growth for Zoho Projects, which saw a 20% year-over-year revenue increase in 2024. Additionally, the company reported a threefold rise in user migration from third-party project management tools, with 55% of new users transitioning from Microsoft Projects and JIRA.
AI and Hospitality: How AI Is Creating Smart Hotels | AllBusiness.com
The hospitality industry is undergoing a significant transformation, making it increasingly dynamic. As guest preferences evolve and the demand for personalized experiences grows, hoteliers need to become more tech-savvy by integrating technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Tools that integrate these technologies, from smart thermostats to robots that guide guests throughout the day, allow hotel staff to become more efficient by streamlining their routine tasks.
In this article, we’ll dive into the future of AI in the hospitality industry, the role of AI in smart hotels, and the challenges faced during implementation.
UK drops ‘safety’ from its AI body, now called AI Security Institute, inks MOU with Anthropic | TechCrunch
The U.K. government wants to make a hard pivot into boosting its economy and industry with AI, and as part of that, it’s pivoting an institution that it founded a little over a year ago for a very different purpose. Today the Department of Science, Industry and Technology announced that it would be renaming the AI Safety Institute to the “AI Security Institute.” (Same first letters: same URL.) With that, the body will shift from primarily exploring areas like existential risk and bias in large language models, to a focus on cybersecurity, specifically “strengthening protections against the risks AI poses to national security and crime.”
Alongside this, the government also announced a new partnership with Anthropic. No firm services were announced but the MOU indicates the two will “explore” using Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude in public services; and Anthropic will aim to contribute to work in scientific research and economic modeling. And at the AI Security Institute, it will provide tools to evaluate AI capabilities in the context of identifying security risks.
Are AI features good for dating apps? | Mashable
Frustration with dating apps isn’t hard to find in 2025. Between talk of dating app fatigue and dating apps becoming increasingly similar online, you can hardly swipe on your FYP without some complaint about being on “the apps.”
Dating app executives seem to be aware of this. Both Hinge’s CEO and Bumble’s former CEO mentioned burnout and exhaustion, respectively, and Tinder is enlisting influencers to try to entice young adults into swiping.
What Companies Succeeding with AI Do Differently | HBR
Three years ago, when we asked companies how they were using artificial intelligence in their operations, the highest-performing companies (the leaders), stood out in five areas: governance, deployment, partnerships, people, and data availability. Since then, generative AI (gen AI) has burst on the scene. So, in late 2023, we followed up, surveying more than 100 companies in sectors from automotive to mining and conducting in-depth interviews with senior executives.
We saw three notable developments. First, the gap between the leaders and the rest has widened. The leaders — defined as the top 25% of respondents — now see performance levels 3.8x that of the bottom half of companies, up from 2.7x in 2021. One reason for this is that as leaders build differentiated capabilities, these have a compounding effect over time, widening the performance advantage.
Why AI Should Be a Core Part of Your Recruitment Strategy | The Startup Magazine
The recruitment landscape has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology seems to be taking the helm. Savvy companies are quickly turning to AI solutions in order to streamline their recruitment process, reduce bias, and significantly increase efficiency. If your organization is yet to integrate AI into its recruitment strategy, you might want to reconsider your stance.
Building a Competitive Edge
In an era where technology is revolutionizing many industries, recruitment is no exception. As the job market becomes increasingly competitive, leveraging technology to build your CV with AI can be extremely beneficial. With the ability to quickly analyze heaps of data, AI can help recruiters to identify the best potential candidates for specific roles.
However, AI’s capabilities go beyond just analyzing resumes. It aids in engaging promising candidates and providing insights to fine-tune recruitment strategies. Companies that have integrated AI into their process can afford to make more strategic decisions rather than work based on guesswork.
A test for AGI is closer to being solved — but it may be flawed | TechCrunch
A well-known test for artificial general intelligence (AGI) is closer to being solved. But the tests’s creators say this points to flaws in the test’s design, rather than a bonafide research breakthrough.
In 2019, Francois Chollet, a leading figure in the AI world, introduced the ARC-AGI benchmark, short for “Abstract and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence.” Designed to evaluate whether an AI system can efficiently acquire new skills outside the data it was trained on, ARC-AGI, Francois claims, remains the only AI test to measure progress towards general intelligence (although others have been proposed.)
Until this year, the best-performing AI could only solve just under a third of the tasks in ARC-AGI. Chollet blamed the industry’s focus on large language models (LLMs), which he believes aren’t capable of actual “reasoning.”
Amazon forms a new AI agent-focused lab led by Adept co-founder | TechCrunch
Amazon says that it’s establishing a new R&D lab in San Francisco, the Amazon AGI SF Lab, to focus on building “foundational” capabilities for AI agents.
The Amazon AGI SF Lab, which will be led by David Luan, the co-founder of AI startup Adept, will seek to build agents that can “take actions in the digital and physical worlds,” and “handle complex workflows” using computers, web browsers, and code interpreters.
“Our work will build on that of Amazon’s broader AGI team,” reads a post jointly written by Luan and Pieter Abbeel, a robotics research lead who joined Amazon by way of the company’s “license and hire” deal with Covariant. An Amazon spokesperson tells TechCrunch that Abbeel will be working “closely” with Luan and the AGI SF Lab going forward.
Apple Intelligence: AI features start to roll out to some iPhones | BBC News
After a long wait, Apple has finally released its artificial intelligence (AI) tools for iPhone – to a select few.
Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI tools announced in June, became available to owners of some iPhones around the world on Monday.
The new features include notification summaries, tools to assist users in writing messages, and a glowing new interface for virtual assistant Siri.
But they will only be available to people with the latest devices – including all iPhone 16 models, and the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.
Dispatches From The Front 