Derby City Council aims to save almost £12.5m a year in costs by rolling out artificial intelligence (AI) tools to its staff. The council, which covers the East Midlands city of some 264,000 people, has identified 261 tasks where officials believe AI can make improvements. Within that, the council is focusing on 54 areas where…
Derby City Council eyes £12.25m annual savings with AI and chatbot deployments Read More »
Today’s Microsoft outages, linked to a Crowdstrike update, shows the immense risk we face if we put all our eggs into one huge world-spanning basket. Some colleagues initially suggested this was part of a co-ordinated attack on Microsoft’s infrastructure which, though it turns out is most likely not the case, was a reasonable first guess…
What happens when the IT infrastructure is too big to fail? Read More »
On Friday 19 July 2024, the UK awoke to news of a fast-spreading IT outage, seemingly global in its nature, affecting hundreds – if not thousands – of organisations. The disruption began in the early hours of Friday morning in Australia, before spreading quickly across Asia, Europe and the Americas, with the travel industry among…
CrowdStrike update chaos explained: What you need to know Read More »
Microsoft is working to create a physical encrypting system that can encrypt and decrypt a document in real-time based on where the user’s eyes are looking. The technique is described in a new patent, which explains that it modifies letters in the text portion of the original document to help encrypt the content and keep…
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft claim their ability to accurately assess the Scope 3 emissions generated by their activities is being hampered by lacklustre embodied emissions data provided by the third parties that build and kit out their datacentres. The three hyperscale public cloud firms, along with Meta, Digital Realty and Schneider Electric,…
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has begun an initial investigation of Microsoft latest attempt to build out its artificial intelligence (AI ) strategy. In March, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the company had hired Inflection AI’s co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, with Simonyan also being the startup’s chief scientist. At the time, Nadella…
CMA looks deeper into Microsoft’s AI hirings Read More »
If you’re a Google Gemini user, it’s time to review the privacy settings for Google’s AI chatbot. It looks like Gemini might have access to documents in Google Drive that it shouldn’t be able to read. That’s what happened with one Gemini user who was stunned to discover that Gemini could summarize tax returns in…
Google Gemini AI might be reading your private Google Drive files Read More »
Back at Computex 2024, AMD unveiled their highly anticipated Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture during AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su’s opening keynote. AMD announced not one but two new client platforms that will utilize the latest Zen 5 cores. This includes AMD’s latest AI PC-focused chip family for the laptop market, the Ryzen AI 300 series. In…
Free Microsoft Office licences negotiated by the Scottish government for school pupils are set to end at the start of August, according to the Scottish Herald. The newspaper reported that the free A1 Plus licence will no longer be available to students. Glow, Scotland’s digital environment to support learning, has posted a notice stating that Microsoft…
Schools hit with cost hike as free Microsoft licences end Read More »
Howdens, which supplies kitchens to tradespeople, has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered app to provide technical knowledge. Chip uses Microsoft’s generative AI (GenAI) technologies, including Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure AI Search and Applied AI Services. Chip has been designed to provide Howdens’ trade customers with the information they need to do…
How Howdens used GenAI to power app user experience Read More »
