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Every CEO and executive enthusiastically slashing headcount in anticipation of an AI-driven productivity boom should read a new meta-analysis from the UK’s Royal Docks School of Business and Law. It suggests those decision-makers might be optimizing for the wrong thing.

While mass layoffs have an immediate measurable payoff, the study says the best use of AI is to boost human cognition and decision-making, not replace it. The research looks at how people can leverage AI to improve how knowledge is created and shared.

The study found that AI excels at tackling complex tasks quickly, while people excel at tasks involving judgment, meaning, and responsibility.  AI can also improve an organization’s “collective intelligence” by pulling together facts and ideas from various subjects into one clear picture.

For example: 

• A hospital where AI surfaces relevant research from specialties the treating physician doesn’t follow, but the doctor still makes the call
• A law firm where AI cross-references precedent across jurisdictions in minutes, while partners decide the best argument for the client
• A product team where AI synthesizes feedback from support tickets, sales calls, and app reviews — but humans decide what to build

AI use is far more effective than AI or people working independently. 

Despite huge gains in in the technology’s capabilities, AI still needs people for interpretation and making ethical choices, according to the study. And it warns that over-reliance on AI erodes irreplaceable human judgment. 

Instead of assuming AI can replace human expertise, organizations should focus on building “knowledge ecosystems” (the ways groups create, store, and share information) where AI supports human learning, innovation, and decision-making, according to the study. 

The goal shouldn’t be to ban AI or replace employees outright, but to use AI to cultivate a powerful knowledge ecosystem that captures knowledge, facilitates its movement, and creates new understanding. (Think Slack channels, wikis, tribal knowledge, onboarding docs, expert networks, and AI layers on top.)

While replacing employees with AI captures cost savings, it surrenders the collective-intelligence opportunity. 

On the cultivation of human talent

Initially, many organizations responded to the emergence of powerful AI chatbots and tools with a simplistic “we need more of this.” Now, it’s time to confront the “skills atrophy paradox.” 

Some companies are trying to replace junior employees with AI used by senior employees. But if that’s happening at scale, where do tomorrow’s senior employees come from? 

According to a new paper titled “AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance,” conducted by researchers from major US and UK universities, reliance on AI chatbots erodes human capability. 

The study tested the effects of AI assistants such as ChatGPT on tasks like math and reading comprehension with over 1,200 participants. It found that while AI improved performance, scores dropped sharply once it was removed, and users were more likely to give up on hard problems than those who didn’t use AI at all. 

These aren’t long-term effects. They appear after only about 10 to 15 minutes of using AI — about the same time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. 

The researchers don’t recommend banning AI, but argue it should be used to help people grow and learn. 

The takeaway from both studies: organizations benefit greatly by keeping people in authorship of decisions and avoid demoting them to rubber-stamping AI’s output. 

Another error is to focus too much on the narrow idea of “productivity” or output. Companies that keep people in charge will be more legally defensible, more trusted by customers, and better at catching the high-cost mistakes AI makes confidently, according to the Royal Docks study. 

How to build a strong ‘knowledge ecosystem’

The building blocks of a human-AI knowledge ecosystem are, according to the Royal Docks study: 

• Workflow redesign: map tasks by who (or what) is best suited — then design handoffs, not replacements
• New roles: hire or cultivate AI specialists
• Training shift: from domain skills alone to metacognition — knowing when and how to combine individual personal knowledge with AI input
• Documentation matters more, not less: Focus on high-quality, thorough documentation of everything knowing that AI can handle the complexity of it all
• Ethical guardrails baked in: use people to keep AI aligned with human- and business-centered goals

The new AI strategy

The uncomfortable truth in the Royal Docks findings isn’t that AI is less powerful than we thought. It’s that its power is wasted on the strategy most organizations have chosen for it. 

Replacement is a one-time cost saving. But using AI as part of a real knowledge ecosystem where AI makes humans smarter and humans keep AI honest delivered compounding advantages. 

To focus on the cost savings of cut salaries is to fall for the quantitative fallacy, which is to favor the measurable and believe the unmeasurable isn’t important or doesn’t exist. 

This will all play out over time. The companies replacing too many employees in the hopes AI will do their jobs will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage against those who invest in building those powerful knowledge ecosystems and a culture of partnership between people and AI. 

AI disclosure: I don’t use AI for writing. The words you see here are mine. I do use a variety of AI tools via Kagi Assistant (disclosure: my son works at Kagi) — backed up by both Kagi Search, Google Search, as well as phone calls to research and fact-check. I use a word processing application called Lex, which has AI tools, and after writing use Lex’s grammar checking tools to find typos and errors and suggest word changes. Here’s why I disclose my AI use and encourage you to do the same.

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a telecommunications fraud campaign that uses fake CAPTCHA verification tricks to dupe unsuspecting users into sending international text messages that incur charges on their mobile bills, generating illicit revenue for the threat actors who lease the phone numbers. According to a new report published by Infoblox, the operation is believed to Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Itron, Inc. has disclosed, via an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a cybersecurity incident in which an unauthorized third party accessed certain internal systems. [...]

Ještě před několika lety jsme bezpečnost vnímali především jako reakci na incident: narušení – poplach – zásah. Dnes se ale díky digitalizaci a AI posouváme do zcela jiné fáze. Bezpečnost je více proaktivní, řízená daty a spojená s provozem objektů. Jedním z klíčových trendů je využití AI a ...

Microsoft says it's rolling out a revamped Windows Insider Program experience as part of the broader plans to address performance and reliability concerns affecting Windows 11. [...]

A threat group tracked as UNC6692 uses social engineering to deploy a new, custom malware suite named 'Snow' which includes a browser extension, a tunneler, and a backdoor. [...]

When setting up network security systems, it is critical to ensure they work correctly and do not have flaws waiting to be exploited.

With the increasing pace and complexity of digital attacks, analysts are turning to AI threat detection to stretch IT resources and keep out cyber threats. No matter the size of a company's operations, AI-driven data analytics tools can provide threat intelligence and enable cybersecurity professionals to select appropriate protection measures.

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new Lua-based malware created years before the notorious Stuxnet worm that aimed to sabotage Iran's nuclear program by destroying uranium enrichment centrifuges. According to a new report published by SentinelOne, the previously undocumented cyber sabotage framework dates back to 2005, primarily targeting high-precision calculation software to tamper Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added four vulnerabilities impacting SimpleHelp, Samsung MagicINFO 9 Server, and D-Link DIR-823X series routers to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The list of vulnerabilities is below - CVE-2024-57726 (CVSS score: 9.9) - A missing authorization vulnerability in Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Home security giant ADT has confirmed a data breach after the ShinyHunters extortion group threatened to leak stolen data unless a ransom is paid. [...]

Meta is continuing its compute grab as the agentic AI race accelerates to a sprint.

Today, the company announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that will bring “tens of millions” of AWS Graviton5 cores (one chip contains 192 cores) into its compute portfolio, with the option to expand as its AI capabilities grow. This will make the Llama builder one of the largest Graviton customers in the world.

The move builds on Meta’s expansive partnerships with nearly every chip and compute provider in the business. It’s working with Nvidia, Arm, and AMD, as well as building its own internal training and inference accelerator chip.

“It feels very difficult to keep track of what Meta is doing, with all of these chip deals and announcements around in-house development,” said Matt Kimball, VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. This makes for “exciting times that tell us just how incredibly valuable silicon is right now.”

Controlling the system, not just scale

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are essential for large language model (LLM) training, but agentic AI requires a whole new workload capability. CPUs like Graviton5 are rising to this challenge, supporting intensive workloads like real-time reasoning, multi-step tasks, frontier model training, code generation, and deep research.

AWS says Graviton5 has the ability to handle “billions of interactions” and to coordinate complex, multi-stage agentic tasks. It is built on the AWS Nitro System to support high performance, availability, and security.

“This is really about control of the AI system, not just scale,” said Kimball. As AI evolves toward persistent, agentic workloads, the role of the CPU becomes “quite meaningful;” it serves as the control plane, handling orchestration, managing memory, scheduling, and other intensive tasks across accelerators.

“This is especially true in agentic environments, where the workloads will be less linear and more stateful,” he pointed out. So, ensuring a supply of these resources just makes sense.

Reflecting Meta’s diversified approach to hardware

The agreement builds on Meta’s long-standing partnership with AWS, but also reflects what the company calls its “diversified approach” to infrastructure. “No single chip architecture can efficiently serve every workload,” the company emphasized.

Proving the point, Meta recently announced four new generations of its MTIA training and inference accelerator chip and signed a massive deal with AMD to tap into 6GW worth of CPUs and AI accelerators. It also entered into a multi-year partnership with Nvidia to access millions of Blackwell and Rubin GPUs and to integrate Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet switches into its platform, and was also one of Arm’s first major CPU customers.

In the wake of all this, Nabeel Sherif, a principal advisory director at Info-Tech Research Group, posed the burning question: “What are they going to do with all this capacity?”

Primarily it will support Meta’s internal experimentation and innovation, he said, but it also lays the groundwork and provides the capacity for Meta to offer its own agentic AI services, for instance, its Llama AI model as an API, to the market.

“What those [services] will look like and what platforms and tools they’ll use, as well as what guardrails they’ll provide to users, is still unclear, but it’s going to be interesting to see it develop,” said Sherif.

The expanded capacity will enable a diversity of use cases and experimentation across various architectures and platforms, he said. Meta will have many options, and access to supply in an environment currently characterized not only by a wide variety of new CPU approaches, but by significant supply chain constraints. The AWS deal should be viewed as a complement to its partnerships and investments in other platforms like ARM, Nvidia, and AMD.

Kimball agreed that the move is “most definitely additive,” not a replacement or substitution. Meta isn’t moving off GPUs or accelerators, it’s building around them. “This is about assembling a heterogeneous system, not picking a single winner,” he said. “In fact, I think for most, heterogeneity is critical to long term success.”

Nvidia still dominates training and a lot of inference, while AMD is becoming “more and more relevant at scale,” Kimball noted. Arm, meanwhile, whether through CPU, custom silicon or other efforts, gives Meta architectural control, and Graviton5 fits into that mix as a “cost- and efficiency-optimized general-purpose compute layer.”

A question of strategy

The more interesting question is around strategy: Does this signal Meta is becoming a compute provider? Kimball doesn’t think so, noting that it’s likely the company isn’t looking to directly compete with hyperscalers as a general-purpose cloud. “This is more about vertical integration of their own AI stack,” he said.

The move gives them the ability to support internal workloads more efficiently, as well as providing the infrastructure foundation to expose more of that capability externally, whether through APIs, partnerships, or other means, he said.

And there’s a cost dynamic here, too, Kimball noted. As inference becomes persistent, especially with agentic systems, economics shift away from peak floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) (a measure of compute performance) and toward sustained efficiency and total cost of ownership (TCO).

CPUs like Graviton5 are well positioned for the parts of that workload that don’t require accelerators, but still need to run continuously. “At Meta’s scale, even small efficiency gains per workload compound quickly,” Kimball pointed out.

For developers and enterprise IT, the signal is pretty clear, he noted: The AI stack is getting more heterogeneous, not less so. Enterprises are going to see tighter coupling between CPUs, GPUs, and specialized accelerators, with workloads increasingly split across them based on behavior (prefill versus decode, stateless versus stateful, burst versus persistent).

“The implication is that infrastructure decisions have to become more workload-aware,” said Kimball. “It’s less about ‘which cloud?’ and more about ‘where does this specific part of the application run most efficiently?’”

This article originally appeared on NetworkWorld.

Cybersecurity agencies in the U.S. and U.K. are warning about a custom malware called Firestarter persisting on Cisco Firepower and Secure Firewall devices running Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) or Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) software. [...]

Microsoft is rolling out Windows Update improvements that give users more control over how updates are installed while reducing disruption from frequent or poorly timed restarts. [...]

Websites for some of the world’s most prestigious universities are serving explicit porn and malicious content after scammers exploited the shoddy record-keeping of the site administrators, a researcher found recently.

The sites included berkeley.edu, columbia.edu, and washu.edu, the official domains for the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Subdomains such as hXXps://causal.stat.berkeley.edu/ymy/video/xxx-porn-girl-and-boy-ej5210.html, hXXps://conversion-dev.svc.cul.columbia[.]edu/brazzers-gym-porn, and hXXps://provost.washu.edu/app/uploads/formidable/6/dmkcsex-10.pdf. All deliver explicit pornography and, in at least one case, a scam site falsely claiming a visitor’s computer is infected and advising the visitor to pay a fee for the non-existent malware to be removed. In all, researcher Alex Shakhov said, hundreds of subdomains for at least 34 universities are being abused. Search results returned by Google list thousands of hijacked pages.

A handful of hijacked columbia.edu subdomains listed by Google One of the sites redirected by a UC Berkeley subdomain. Hijacking a university's good name

Shakhov, founder of SH Consulting, said that the scammers—which a separate researcher has linked to a known group tracked as Hazy Hawk—are seizing on what amounts to a clerical error by site administrators of the affected universities. When they commission a subdomain such as provost.washu.edu, they create a CNAME record, which assignes a subdomain to a "canonical" domain. When the subdomain is eventually decommissioned—something that happens frequently for various reasons—the record is never removed. Scammers like Hazy Hawk then swoop in by hijacking the old record.

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As Europe seeks to assert its technological independence from the US vendors Aleph Alpha, once seen as Germany’s sovereign AI hope, is the target of a transatlantic takeover.

Aleph Alpha is set to merge with Canada’s Cohere in a deal that will bring together Cohere’s global AI clout and Aleph Alpha’s background in research. The two companies hope they will be able to develop an AI powerhouse, with backing from their Canadian and German ecosystems

“Organizations globally are demanding uncompromising control over their AI stack. This transatlantic partnership unlocks the massive scale, robust infrastructure, and world-class R&D talent required to meet that demand,” said ” said Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez in a news release that artfully presents the deal as a merger of equals but that, according to a footnote, only requires the approval of the German company’s shareholders, a sure sign of a one-sided takeover.

The combined companies will be looking to offer customized AI in highly-regulated sectors including finance, defense and healthcare. By pooling their talents and offerings, theu hope to offer AI solutions to organizations according to local laws, cultural contexts, and institutional requirements.

The move comes at a time when businesses across the word are looking at non-US options as a reaction to the Trump administration’s policy on tariffs and the uncertainty caused by the war with Iran.

There have been several initiatives within Europe to counteract the US dominance. The EU’s Eurostack plan looked to make sure that major projects had a European option. Aleph Alpha was one of the companies highlighted within the scheme. The EU also launched Open  Euro LLM, an attempt to slow down the US and China’s lead in AI.

This article first appeared on CIO.

A new financially motivated hacking group tracked as BlackFile has been linked to a wave of data theft and extortion attacks against retail and hospitality organizations since February 2026. [...]

Microsoft will roll out passkey support for phishing-resistant passwordless authentication to Microsoft Entra‑protected resources from Windows devices starting late April. [...]

Microsoft has beefed up Copilot’s capabilities in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, claiming its Agent Mode will help speed up workers’ output.

The new features, announced last year, mean that Copilot can work more efficiently with Office applications, for example, understanding the richness of a pivot table in Excel or the use of animations in PowerPoint.

In tests with customers and researchers, Microsoft has learned a few things about how to improve the way Copilot is deployed, and laid out some of them in a post to a company blog. Now, it said, Copilot takes action rather than just suggesting steps — although ensuring that users maintain control. Other improvements include the ability to work with different models and better integration of Work IQ to deliver higher quality output.

Further developments are in the pipeline, Microsoft said, including improved editing for complex workflows such as finance spreadsheets and legal documents, more visibility on changes, and a more seamless integration of Copilot into the software, so that the experience for users is the same for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The updates are available now and are the default experience for customers with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Premium subscriptions, the company said.

See PCWorld’s first impressions of the new Copilot agents in Word and PowerPoint.