Computerworld.com [Hacking News]

Google is suing SerpApi, a web-scraping company that provides its customers with an API that mimics human searching, the latest salvo in the battle over access to data for training and operating AI large language models.

Many of the large language models powering AI services today were trained on data scraped from websites, often without the knowledge or permission of the sites’ owners. Now, copyright holders are fighting back, suing AI companies or their suppliers, and striking licensing deals worth millions or even billions of dollars.

Google is on both sides of that fight: collecting and curating one of the world’s largest datasets, while simultaneously training its own family of LLMs, Gemini, and integrating them into its services — including search.

Now other companies are seeking to access that dataset to build competing AI products, and Google sees it as a threat.

SerpApi is “circumventing security measures protecting others’ copyrighted content that appears in Google search results,” Google General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado wrote in a blog post announcing the lawsuit. “We did this to ask a court to stop SerpApi’s bots and their malicious scraping, which violates the choices of websites and rightsholders about who should have access to their content,” she wrote.

While Google obtains most of its search results by scraping websites itself, Prado said Google’s lawsuit specifically targets SerpApi’s access to content Google has licensed or created. “SerpApi deceptively takes content that Google licenses from others (like images that appear in Knowledge Panels, real-time data in Search features and much more), and then resells it for a fee. In doing so, it willfully disregards the rights and directives of websites and providers whose content appears in Search,” she wrote.

SerpApI denied wrongdoing, saying that it provides developers, researchers, and businesses with access to public search data that is the same information anyone can access from their browser. “We believe this lawsuit is an effort to stifle competition from the innovators who rely on our services to build next-generation AI, security, browsers, productivity, and many other applications,” it said in a written statement. “As we state on our website, ‘The crawling and parsing of public data is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.’ We work closely with our attorneys to ensure our services comply with all applicable laws, including fair use principles. SerpApi stands firmly behind its business model and will vigorously defend itself in court.”

Google must be particularly concerned about the help that its competitors are receiving from SerpApi. In August, The Information reported that OpenAI and Perplexity were customers of SerpApi. 

No free ride

Some see the lawsuit as an indication that the free ride for AI firms is coming to an end.

“AI development is moving extremely fast precisely because the legal framework around content usage is unclear,” said Martin Jeffrey, founder of AI search optimization consultancy Harton Works. “Companies are optimizing for AI discovery now rather than waiting for permission or clarity, and maybe this is why Google is making these kinds of moves.”

Matt Hasan, CEO of AI marketing firm aiResults, concurs. “The period where AI developers could move quickly with little pushback from content providers is clearly ending. As legal and regulatory constraints tighten, we should expect a slowdown in experimentation, more cautious product development, and a shift toward defensible, licensed, or vertically integrated data strategies. That doesn’t stop AI progress, but it does reshape who can afford to participate and how fast they can move.”

Google’s action will certainly help the company with the continuing development of its own AI offering, said Jeffrey. “Google fell behind a bit with Gemini. They’re catching up now and are implementing Gemini into everything,” he said. He’s curious to see what Google does after its action against SerpApi: “If they win that, will they tackle larger firms? It looks like they’re going after the small guy first; it’s a shot across the bow.”

There are already signs that some of Gemini’s competitors are beginning to be impacted by Google’s strides in the AI market. Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a ‘Code Red’ alert in his attempt to maintain its market leading position against Google’s incursions into the market. 

The lawsuit against SerpApi is not Google’s first attempt to limit the use its AI rivals can make of its data. In October it limited search queries to just 10 results per request, where previously it would provide up to 100. This action forced companies scraping its site to considerably scale up their crawling efforts to achieve the same results.

The Italian competition authority, Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato, has fined Apple more than $116 million (€98.6 million) for abusing its dominant position in the market for app distribution to iOS users.

The authority considers that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, introduced in 2021, inhibits competition. The policy requires third-party developers to obtain double permission from users to collect and link data for advertising purposes, while Apple itself is not similarly affected.

The investigation, coordinated with the European Commission and other authorities, concluded that the rules are unilaterally imposed, disproportionate to Apple’s alleged privacy purpose, and harm app developers, advertisers and advertising networks by limiting their ability to use data for personalized advertising.

In a statement to Ars Technica, Apple writes that the company plans to appeal the fine and defend App Tracking Transparency as a protection of user privacy on iOS.

More Apple news and insights:

• The new Apple thinks different?
• Apple preps for iPhone diversification
• Memory efficiency: Apple’s new competitive advantage
  

In March, Computer Sweden reported that Google Assistant would be replaced by the AI tool Gemini in Android-based mobile phones before the new year.

With just over a week to go until the end of the year, it is clear that this will not be the case.

In a message on the Gemini support page, we learn that the transition is taking longer than expected, which means that the process will not be completed until next year at the earliest.

According to Engadget, the delay is probably because Gemini simply consumes more resources than Google Assistant at present, which means that a mobile phone with at least 2 gigabytes of working memory is currently required to be able to replace the assistant.

More on Gemini:

• Google releases fast AI model Gemini 3 Flash
• 21 ways Gemini can actually be useful on Android
• A beginner’s guide to Google Gemini Gems
• Gemini for Chrome gets a second AI agent to watch over it
  

Ah, the holidays. No matter what manner of winter celebration you prefer (I’m a Festivus man myself), late December is a fine time for kickin’ back and collecting your thoughts for the coming year.

That means it’s also a fine time for contemplating that crazy little computer in your pocket and the steps you can take to make it even more powerful — ’cause guess what? A few minutes of tuning up now will make your life measurably easier throughout all of 2026. Think of it as a gift to yourself — one that keeps on giving and, best of all, doesn’t cost you a single dime.

In case you missed any of ’em the first go-round or maybe just didn’t have the time to try everything out, here are some of my favorite productivity-boosting Android tips from Android Intelligence in 2025.

So pour yourself some cocoa, polish up the ol’ Festivus pole, and give yourself the gift of finely tuned technology — and be sure to sign yourself up for my free Android Intelligence newsletter, too, so you can get my best Android tips in your inbox all year round (and get a free copy of my awesome Android Notification Power-Pack the second you sign up!).

The best Android tips from 2025 10 advanced Android clipboard tricks

Paste these pro-level time-savers into your personal memory and start flying around your phone like never before.

6 advanced Gboard tricks for smarter Android typing

Google’s Gboard Android keyboard has some spectacular systems for improving your text input experience. Ready to become a total typing pro?

16 slick tricks for smarter Android voice typing

Time to embrace the full power of Android’s voice-to-text intelligence.

3 smart shortcuts for activating Do Not Disturb on Android

These power-user secrets will make it faster than ever to activate Android’s Do Not Disturb mode — anytime, anywhere.

7 smart ways Android’s Modes can help you

Your device’s Do Not Disturb setup is packing some powerful new punch — but it’s up to you to figure out how to embrace it.

11 advanced Android split-screen tricks

There’s so much more to Android’s split-screen system than what you see on the surface.

21 ways Gemini can actually be useful on Android

Forget all the generative-AI silliness for a second: Gemini has some genuinely practical purposes on Android — if you know what to ask.

22 pro Android security settings you shouldn’t overlook

Some of the most important Android security settings are also the most buried — and they’re well worth your while to uncover.

6 swift steps for a faster Android experience

Some simple adjustments can make your favorite phone feel even snappier.

14 ways Google Lens can save you time on Android

Prepare to become a total mobile-tech magician.

Bonus: 25 tips for your old Android devices 25 great uses for an old Android device 

We all love getting new gadgets, but what to do with the old ones? Here are 25 clever ways to put all your old Android phones and tablets to good use, too.

Thanks as always for reading, and happy holidays to you and yours!

Get even more Googley knowledge with my Android Intelligence newsletter. Three new things to try in your inbox every Friday and six powerful notification enhancements the second you sign up!

Something that appears to have started earlier than ever before, Apple is allegedly already test manufacturing of the next model of its basic smartphone, the iPhone 18.

This news follows speculation from multiple sources, including legendary Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who said, “Apple is expected to begin trial production of the iPhone 18 series in January, which is earlier than previous years.”

Apple seems right on target to do so. A report on 9-5Mac tells us test production of the iPhone 18 should begin next month, which suggests speculation Apple plans twin iPhone launches in 2026 may be correct. The intention will be to introduce Pro models next fall, with the entry-level and ‘e’-series models set to debut in the spring. It might simply be that the company wants to test production early, as it must make sure certain production processes are working correctly to support international rollout. The plan should help the company better manage component supply (particularly around memory), manufacturing, and logistics. 

The iPhone 17 series has been a huge success for Apple. And as the company widens the number of devices it sells, it must also diversify and expand its supply chain to meet demand, which is expected to rise. It should also widen the company’s addressable market, make its revenues more predictable, and enable it to offer a wider range of iPhones. 

The complex manufacturing supply chain

iPhones are currently manufactured in China and across India. Apple is accelerating the transition of manufacturing to India. Apple partner Foxconn has been investing deeply in the expansion of factories in India, hiring roughly 30,000 workers during the last nine months for its plant in Devanahalli. Apple is also looking to source more iPhone components locally.

Foxconn’s new factory is eventually expected to host up to a dozen iPhone assembly lines across its 250,000 square foot production floor. That’s interesting because the same factory first began testing iPhone 16 production in April and now also makes iPhone 17 Pro Max models.

We know a huge number of iPhones made in India (about 80%) are eventually sold in the US, and we can surmise a three- to six- month gap between test manufacture and shipping product. That timelines indicates a March or April introduction of the new iPhone 18, which also suggests Apple will introduce us to the other iPhone models it plans to launch then.

What iPhones will Apple introduce this spring?

Previous speculation claims Apple plans to introduce two Phones this coming spring: the iPhone 18 and the new iPhone ‘e’ models. These will be followed later by iPhone Pro models and the cutting-edge iPhone Fold. The new devices will be supported by Apple Intelligence and company partnerships with third-party AI services, and will be powered by Apple Silicon, which means iPhones can handle a growing number of tasks using AI on the device.

If Apple gets the mix right, it is likely that iPhones will continue to dominate the smartphone category on a global basis. It’s also clear that part of the company’s plan is to try and grab a bigger chunk of the mid-range market, driven by the high performance but affordable iPhone 18e device. (Many Android makers in the sector will struggle to maintain price and profitability as memory costs increase.)

“Apple’s introduction of a more affordable iPhone 18e is a strategic move to capture the mid-range market, especially as Android manufacturers face rising component costs,” said CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood.

Later on, it’s possible the iPhone Fold will prompt millions of iPhone users to upgrade their devices sooner than thought once it does ship, spurring further growth in the second-user markets as people sell their old iPhones to help purchase the foldable. 

Second user or newly acquired, Apple’s services arm will certainly benefit, as new second user iPhone owners explore the platform experience. In doing so, it becomes more likely they will upgrade to a new iPhone in future. This is the energy Apple will unleash as it diversifies its smartphone platform next year – an energy which, alongside new products and a (hopefully) functional Siri, will likely form the foundations for the company’s next decade in tech.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Google is now suing US data scraping company Serpapi for using hundreds of millions of fake search queries to bypass Google’s protection system and illegally obtain copyrighted material from search results, Reuters reports.

According to the lawsuit, Serpapi then resold the collected data to third-party customers. The company denies the allegations and says it will defend itself in court.

Serpapi says its service only provides information that is already publicly available through a standard web browser. According to the company, Google is trying to limit competition from companies building new AI and web services on open web data.

Earlier this year, Reddit also sued Serpapi, along with other data collectors, for scraping content for the purpose of training AI models. In a comment to Reuters, Reddit’s spokesperson said that the company supports Google’s lawsuit.

More Google news:

• Google is now the best at AI — but is it enough?
• Google releases fast AI model Gemini 3 Flash
• Google tests an AI productivity agent that lives in your inbox
• Google hit with $806M in penalties from US and French authorities over privacy issues
  

Recently, Mozilla’s new CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo promised that Firefox will be a “modern AI browser,” which attracted a lot of attention.

Fortunately, users who are not interested in the AI features will be able to turn it all off.

– There will be an option in Firefox to disable all AI features. We’ve internally called it the “AI kill switch” but I’m sure it will eventually have a less murderous name, writes Firefox developer Jake Archibald on Mastodon.

The ability to turn off all AI features in Firefox will be introduced in the first quarter of 2026, 9to5linux reports.

More on AI and browsers:

• Hands on: An early look at Comet — and how AI browsers could change the internet
• AI web browsers are cool, helpful, and utterly untrustworthy
• Perplexity’s AI browser Comet is now free to use
• Microsoft is turning Edge into an AI browser
  
  

When Austria’s Ministry of Economy, Energy, and Tourism set out to replace Skype for Business as its virtual meeting platform, Microsoft Teams was the obvious choice. The newer collaboration app is already used across other ministries, and it was widely  assumed that the Ministry of Economy would follow suit.

“From a management perspective, the path was clear to Teams,” said Martin Ollrom, the Ministry’s CIO. But when the IT, security, and legal leaders reviewed the cloud-hosted application, they reached a different conclusion.  

Teams, they argued, posed an unacceptable risk. Call and message data would be processed using software and infrastructure controlled by a US vendor and could therefore be subject to foreign government access requests.

“The point is that every voice message will be processed on external computer systems which are not under our full control,” said Florian Zinnagl, the Ministry’s CISO. “At the end of the day, if a security agency from the US wants to force a US vendor to pull out data, then they have to do this.”

Instead, the Ministry deployed an open-source collaboration suite on its own servers, rolling it out to 1,200 staff earlier this year. While opting for open-source software over a popular proprietary application such as Teams (which has 320 million monthly users worldwide, according to the most recent stats) may be uncommon, it reflects a growing shift in attitudes among European organizations, as some reassess where applications are hosted and who controls the underlying infrastructure and data.

Europe has been debating digital sovereignty for years, but the issue has gained new urgency amid rising geopolitical tensions. “The political environment is changing very fast,” said Ollrom.

Digital sovereignty is a strategy aimed at retaining control over data, applications, and infrastructure in accordance with local regulatory laws and requirements. It relates to where data is stored and processed, who can access it, and under which legal jurisdiction. Some definitions also extend to the development of a domestic technology industry and reducing reliance on foreign suppliers.

A combination of trade disputes, sanctions that affect access to technology, and the possibility of tariffs on digital services has prompted many European organizations to reconsider their reliance on US hyperscaler clouds.

“We have seen a significant second wave of interest on digital sovereignty in the last 12 to 18 months,” said Mauro Capo, digital sovereignty lead for EMEA at IT consultancy Accenture.

Geopolitics is already reshaping cloud strategies. A recent Gartner survey of 214 Western European CIOs and IT leaders showed that 61% intend to shift more workloads to local or regional providers for in response to geopolitical concerns. At the same time, 53% plan to restrict use of global hyperscalers, and 44% said they’ve already started.

How geopolitical factors are impacting the use of global providers and cloud solutions. Source: Gartner survey, Nov. 2025 (Western Europe responses).

Gartner

Artificial intelligence is a growing consideration too: 60% of European organizations plan to increase investment in sovereign AI technology in the next two years, according to an Accenture survey report published in November. 

What was once largely a public-sector concern now attracts growing interest across a wide range of private organizations as well. Accenture is currently working with around 50 large European organizations on digital-sovereignty-related projects, said Capo. This includes banks, telcos, and logistics companies alongside clients in government and defense.

That doesn’t mean European organizations plan to move away from hyperscalers entirely. Any widespread repatriation of cloud workloads is unlikely in the foreseeable future. Instead, many organizations are “revisiting their cloud strategies,” said René Buest, senior director analyst at Gartner, evaluating how they can mitigate risks and reduce dependencies on global cloud providers.

Europe’s reliance on US hyperscalers

The term digital sovereignty dates back to the early 2000s, but interest in the concept has accelerated since the late 2010s, as governments and regulators explored ways to reduce dependence on foreign cloud providers. This included initiatives such as the European Commission’s GAIA-X Framework and France’s SecNumCloud certification. At the same time, the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation compelled organizations to pay closer attention to  where data is stored, how it’s processed, and who has access to it.

Yet even as sovereignty concerns rise, Europe has remained deeply reliant on US cloud firms for access to cutting-edge technologies. Three hyperscalers — Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft — now account for 70% of the cloud market in the region, according to a Synergy Research Group report, with European providers making up just 15%.

US cloud providers power a range of vital services across the continent. In Germany, for instance, various federal authorities use US cloud providers, as do a wide range of UK organizations, from the National Health Service to GCHQ intelligence service, which hosts classified documents on AWS servers in the UK. The European Commission is one of many public bodies that use the Microsoft 365 office suite, having recently brought its use into compliance with EU data rules.

These cloud services have provided clear benefits to customers, including strong security, global scalability, lower infrastructure costs, and access to advanced AI and analytics tools.

So why would some European organizations be intent on limiting their use of these platforms?

A key concern, according to an IDC survey, is the possibility that a foreign government could compel access to their data even when it is stored in a hyperscaler’s European data center. Under US laws such as the 2018 CLOUD Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), US-headquartered cloud providers may be required to transfer data to US authorities, regardless of where the data is located.

Source: IDC’s 2025 Worldwide Digital Sovereignty Survey (Aug. 2025).

IDC

In a French Senate hearing this year, Microsoft France president Anton Carniaux said the company could not guarantee that customer data would never be transferred to US authorities under the CLOUD Act, though he said “it has never happened before” and the company would resist any such demands in future.

Another worry is the possibility that cloud services will be swept up in future trade disputes. If the EU imposes retaliatory tariffs on digital services, the cost of using hyperscaler cloud platforms could hike overnight, and organizations heavily dependent on them may find it hard to switch to a cheaper option.

There’s also the prospect that organizations could lose access to cloud services if sanctions or export restrictions are imposed, leaving them temporarily or permanently locked out of systems they rely on.

It’s a remote risk, said Dario Maisto, a senior analyst at Forrester, but a material one.  “We are talking of a worst-case scenario where IT gets leveraged as a weapon,” he said.

This may have been the case for the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. Staffers claim that he lost access to Microsoft services earlier this year, several months after US President Donald Trump placed sanctions on the organization. Microsoft has since denied it suspended services for the ICC.

Other examples include Adobe cutting off Venezuelan customers in compliance with US sanctions against that country in 2019, while Microsoft temporarily blocked access to apps such as Teams and Outlook for Indian energy firm Nayara earlier this year. 

It’s a threat that some European organizations are starting to take more seriously.

“It’s not only technically possible to deactivate our services, because of the political situation it’s becoming more and more likely,” said Ollrom from the Austrian Ministry of Economy. “Everybody says it’s just a theoretical scenario, but now they see it’s not only theoretical.”

Source: Accenture survey (Jul–Aug 2025).

Accenture

Open source as a sovereignty strategy

For some European organizations, a move to open-source software is central to their sovereignty strategies. This is particularly the case in the public sector, and likely to increase in the region: one of the commitments made during a digital sovereignty summit in Berlin led by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron was to “broaden the use of open-source tools in their administrations.”

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is one example, having completed the migration of 40,000 employee email accounts from Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook to Open-Xchange and Mozilla Thunderbird this year. It previously switched from Windows to Linux on desktops, and Microsoft Office to Libre Office.

In Denmark, the country’s Ministry of Digitalization has begun to phase out Office 365 in favor of LibreOffice, following similar moves by the municipalities of Copenhagen and Aarhus.

The Austrian Ministry of Economy is another example. With on-premises versions of Skype for Business and SharePoint approaching end of support, it migrated to a suite of open-source workplace applications from German software vendor Nextcloud this year, hosted on its own infrastructure. Nextcloud’s suite of applications includes tools for voice and video communication, document editing, wiki-like knowledge management, and project management.

A proof of concept began in autumn 2024, followed by a three-month pilot. A full launch to staff on desktop and mobile followed in April. Teams hasn’t been phased out entirely, however; the Ministry continues to use the application for external events.

From a technical perspective, it was a “very smooth project,” said Ollrom, helped by the fact that it was a greenfield migration and didn’t require migrating and integrating data.

There were challenges around change management, as staff adapted to a new and unfamiliar set of digital tools. Many wanted to use Teams, as they’ve used it at home and in other jobs, said Ollrom. For the most part, though, staff are happy to have more modern workplace tools and the ability to work on mobile devices. Employee adoption is high, Ollrom and Zinnagl said, in part due a pre-launch information campaign with short videos to introduce the application. The next steps are to optimize the deployment and focus on driving adoption across the remaining workforce.

As well control over data and technology, the shift to an open-source application suite has other benefits, such as around availability. “When there’s a major outage in a cloud service like Office 365, you have no control. In our own data center, we can manage and resolve issues ourselves,” said Zinnagl. Cost is another advantage — “Microsoft is way more expensive than Nextcloud,” said Ollrom — as is avoidance of vendor lock-in.

Following the digital workplace project, the Ministry will continue its open-source push. It’s considering VMware’s infrastructure virtualization with an open-source alternative from an Austrian vendor, as well as swapping Microsoft’s SQL Server for postgreSQL or MariaDB.

According to Gartner’s survey, 55% of CIOs and IT leaders said open-source technologies will be an important factor in their future cloud strategies.

Accenture’s Capo said the consultant has seen increased interest in open-source tools among clients — but noted that hosting open-source applications on-premises isn’t for everyone. Implementations and ongoing management can be a significant undertaking, requiring a “step up in terms of skills” for in-house staff and often the need for third-party support, he said.

“Above all, there is the topic around manageability of the solutions … you have to think carefully what it means operating and managing solutions that are based on a community, whether it’s security patches, updates, and so on,” he said.

A ‘hybrid’ model the likely result

As more organizations revisit their cloud strategies, many are landing on a hybrid model with a mix of European and non-European cloud services.

That’s the case for 57% of European organizations in Accenture’s survey, with decisions around sovereignty “based on the balance between performance, price, and sensitivity of the data they manage,” Capo said.

Source: IDC’s 2025 Worldwide Digital Sovereignty Survey (Aug. 2025).

IDC

That shift has forced vendors to respond. As interest in digital sovereignty has grown, European technology vendors have sought to capitalize on demand.

SAP has launched its own Sovereign Cloud service, with the option to use its cloud provider subsidiary, Delos, and plans to invest €20 billion (about $23.5 billion US) in its sovereign cloud. The German business software vendor has also partnered with European AI firm Mistral to create the “first full AI stack for Europe.”

Other software vendors are taking a similar approach. Nextcloud, for example, has partnered with German cloud provider IONOS to deliver what it describes as an open-source alternative to Microsoft 365 for European businesses.

“As demand is coming up, offerings are being developed in the market — something that we had not seen before up to one year ago,” said Maisto from Forrester.

European infrastructure providers such as OVHcloud, IONOS, and Scaleway are also keen to emphasize their digital sovereignty credentials, touting European ownership and operations as an alternative to US cloud providers.

Yet European cloud providers struggle to rival hyperscalers’ services, with trade-offs in areas such as functionality and scalability. Almost two thirds (65%) of respondents to the Accenture survey said they can’t remain competitive without non-European technology providers.

At the same time, US cloud providers have introduced their own sovereign-cloud variants to reassure customers with data residency services, as well as options for management by European citizens.

Microsoft expanded its Soveriegn Cloud plans this year, for example, introducing a Data Guardian service that ensures only Microsoft staff residing in European countries can access customer data. It launched a Sovereign Private Cloud option, as well as Microsoft 365 Local, essentially a version of Microsoft’s cloud productivity apps that can be installed locally on a customer’s own servers. AWS, Google, and Oracle have also announced plans to launch or expand sovereign cloud services in the region.

These sovereign cloud services offered by hyperscalers have the benefit of access to familiar technologies and some of the scale of public cloud, albeit with some constraints.

However, they typically cost significantly more than the standard public cloud option: between 10% and 20% more for Google Sovereign Cloud, for example, and 15% to 30% for Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud, according to Boston Consulting Group. And while these sovereign-cloud models may reduce the risk of data being subject to access or transfer requests by foreign governments, they do not eliminate it entirely, and questions remain over how sovereign such services are in practice.

Alongside these approaches, a third model has emerged that seeks to combine local control with access to hyperscaler technology. Here, US cloud providers’ software is delivered through infrastructure operated by local partners. In Germany, for instance, Google is working with StackIT to deliver its Workspace apps, while Microsoft offers Azure and Microsoft 365 services in France via Bleu (a joint venture between Orange and Capgemini), an example of Microsoft’s National Partner Cloud strategy.

How to make decisions around digital sovereignty

So how should organizations navigate this complex landscape? It’s best to start by taking a risk management approach, said Gartner’s Buest, and categorize workloads by placing them on a spectrum in terms of what’s most critical.

For applications where a high level of sovereignty is required, a local or regional provider may be preferable, he said. At the other end of the spectrum would be tools that pose less of a risk in a hyperscaler cloud — an office room-booking application, for instance.

“If it’s not available, well, it hurts, but it doesn’t have a very huge impact on your organization,” said Buest. “It’s different if your ecommerce website is down, or other types of processes you need to exist as an organization.”

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Source: 2025 Gartner report on digital sovereignty strategy

Gartner

It’s also important to consider how easy it is to move away from a particular vendor if necessary. This is where open standards and open source can be helpful, as well as technologies such as containers that make it easier to move if necessary. “Portability is something that becomes more and more important,” said Buest.

Adoption of cloud-native technologies can, generally-speaking, improve workload portability.

Craig Tivendale, Volvo Connected Solutions cloud provisioning manager, said the firm has used AWS for around a decade to store and process data locally in several regions where it operates — including Europe, the US, China, Japan, and South Korea — to meet data residency requirements and reduce latency. He said the company is satisfied with the service provided by AWS and wouldn’t seek to change this relationship (or move to the European Sovereign Cloud service that AWS has begun rolling out) unless new legal requirements were to emerge.

Should that need arise in the future, he said, the company’s cloud systems are architected to support portability. “We could move a lot of our workloads as they’re containerized,” he said. “From that perspective, it shouldn’t be too difficult.”

A bigger challenge would lie in the various external services the company depends on, such as mapping platforms and telecoms providers, which would need to be reconnected and tested in a new environment. “If you’re using provider-specific services, you need to figure out what the equivalent is elsewhere, and then go through the whole development and testing cycle again,” he said.

Alongside these technical considerations, there are organizational challenges to address too. For IT leaders who want to change their cloud strategy, it’s important to get senior executives and CEOs on board.

“Sovereignty was — and still is — mostly a topic relegated to compliance and technical managers,” said Accenture’s Capo, “while this transition towards a new set of ecosystem partners is really a board-level discussion. Moving this topic to the board and to the CEO is an imperative that we urge clients to proceed with.”

Senior leaders may be more willing to support a change in strategy once they are aware of both the risks associated with global cloud services and, importantly, the options that support digital sovereignty. “Give them alternatives,” suggested the Austrian Ministry’s CIO, Ollrom.

“They know the most common tools like Microsoft Teams; they don’t think about alternatives. If you give them a very clear and logical strategy why Microsoft Teams or any other cloud service is maybe an enterprise risk, I [have had the experience] that they never say no,” he said.

“You have to be open-minded. And you have to transport this open-mindedness to the next management level.”

Ultimately, it’s about shifting expectations, said Zinnagl, the Ministry’s CISO. “They didn’t believe before that it’s possible to use other tools than Microsoft here — we showed that it is,” he said. “There are a lot of other really cool enterprise tools out there: open source or not open source, but from a local or European vendor.”

More on digital sovereignty:

• An EU breakup with US cloud providers
• Why CIOs need to respond to digital sovereignty now
• M365 Copilot data processing goes local to meet sovereignty demands
• EuroStack: Europe’s path to digital independence?
• Local clouds shape Europe’s AI future
• End-to-end encryption is next frontline in governments’ data sovereignty war with hyperscalers
• Nvidia: ‘Sovereign AI’ will change digital work

Over the next few years, agentic AI is expected to bring not only rapid technological breakthroughs, but a societal transformation, redefining how we live, work and interact with the world. And this shift is happening quickly. “By 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously,” according to research firm Gartner.

Unlike traditional AI, which typically follows preset rules or algorithms, agentic AI adapts to new situations, learns from experiences, and operates independently to pursue goals without human intervention. In short, agentic AI empowers systems to act autonomously, making decisions and executing tasks — even communicating directly with other AI agents — with little or no human involvement.

Agentic AI will enable machines to interact with the physical world with unprecedented intelligence, allowing them to perform complex tasks in dynamic environments, which could be especially useful for industries facing labor shortages or hazardous conditions.However, the rise of agentic AI also brings security and ethical concerns. Ensuring these autonomous systems operate safely, transparently and responsibly will require governance frameworks and testing.

Follow this page for ongoing agentic AI coverage from Computerworld and Foundry’s other publications.

Agentic AI news and insights Managing agentic AI risk: Lessons from the OWASP Top 10

December 19, 2025: LLM-powered chatbots have risks that we see playing out in the headlines on a nearly daily basis. But chatbots are limited to answering questions. AI agents, however, access data and tools and carry out tasks, making them infinitely more capable – and more dangerous to enterprises.

Agentic AI in 2026: More mixed than mainstream

December 18, 2025: Agentic AI is having its everything, everywhere, all at once moment. Or is it? Data clarifies. While 39% of organizations surveyed by McKinsey say they are experimenting with agents, only 23% have begun scaling AI agents within one business function

Overcome governance and trust issues to drive agentic AI

December 18, 2025: Fully autonomous agentic AI is still way off but AI agents are making inroads within enterprise software and workflows. Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise software will feature task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026 as the current trend for embedded AI assistants evolves.

Nvidia bets on open infrastructure for the agentic AI era with Nemotron 3

Decenber 15, 2025: AI agents must be able to cooperate, coordinate, and execute across large contexts and long time periods, and this, says Nvidia, demands a new type of infrastructure, one that is open. The company says it has the answer with its new Nemotron 3 family of open models.

Microsoft drops M365 Copilot price for SMBs, upgrades free Copilot Chat

November 19, 2025: Microsoft announced that it reduce the price of Microsoft 365 Copilot for small and mid-sized firms beginning next month. Microsoft 365 Copilot for Business will cost $21 per user, per month for customers with any Microsoft 365 Business plan. That’s down from the current $30 monthly price.

Microsoft Fabric IQ adds ‘semantic intelligence’ layer to Fabric

November 19, 2025: Microsoft promises enterprises better understanding of their data for workers and autonomous agents alike, but analysts fear deployment hurdles and vendor lock-in.

Microsoft unveils Agent 365 to help IT manage AI ‘agent sprawl’

November 18, 2025: As businesses begin deploying AI agents in greater numbers, IT teams will need to manage and secure those AI systems as they connect to corporate data. That’s the idea behind Microsoft’s Agent 365 (A365), a new “control plane” that lets customers deploy and govern the use of agents. 

From chatbots to colleagues: How agentic AI is redefining enterprise automation

November 17, 2025: A new wave of agentic AI is taking shape: systems that not only converse but also reason, plan, and act within enterprise workflows. These agents are not assistants that talk; they are digital colleagues that think.

The enterprise IT overhaul: Architecting your stack for the agentic AI era

November 10, 2025: For the CIO, the conversation has officially moved past the large language model (LLM). The next critical chapter is agentic AI — autonomous systems capable of reasoning, planning and executing multi-step tasks across your enterprise. Agentic AI is here. Now, CIOs must orchestrate

October 23, 2025: Agentic AI is about to change how companies create value. Yet, most enterprises aren’t ready. The problem isn’t the technology — it’s the planning and execution. Too many pilots stall out because CIOs haven’t built the AI systems, guardrails and culture to move beyond experiments.

AI agents might smooth some of retail’s worst data problems

October 21, 2025: So many retail challenges hinge on unreliable product data. Can agentic AI clean up that data enough to make a difference? Can it do the same for other verticals?

The impact of agentic AI on SaaS and partner ecosystems

October 16, 2025: The enterprise technology landscape is entering a critical pivot point as agentic AI transforms partner ecosystems from human-mediated, application integration networks into autonomous, self-orchestrating and intelligent ecosystems.

Salesforce updates its agentic AI pitch with Agentforce 360

October 13 2025: Salesforce announced a new release of Agentforce that, it says, “gives teams the fastest path from AI prototypes to production-scale agents” — although with many of the new release’s features still to come, or yet to enter pilot phases or beta testing, some parts of that path will be much slower than others.

Gemini Enterprise is Google’s new ‘front door’ for agentic AI access at work

October 9, 2025: Google introduced an AI assistant to serve as a platform so users can access and coordinate AI agents that automate work tasks. Gemini Enterprise, which replaces the Agentspace app launched last year, also features new enterprise search functions to help customers tap into data from across an organization’s business apps. 

Oracle’s agentic AI push in Fusion Cloud CX offers embedded automation for CX leaders

October 7, 2025: Oracle is adding new pre-built agents to its Advertising and Customer Experience Cloud (Fusion Cloud CX) to help enterprises increase operational efficiency by automating sales, service, and marketing processes.

IBM touts agentic AI orchestration, cryptographic risk controls

October 7, 2025: IBM watsonx Orchestrate offers more than 500 tools and customizable, domain-specific agents from IBM and third-party contributors. Among the additions to watsonx Orchestrate are AgentOps capabilities that offer real-time monitoring and policy-based controls for observability and governance.

How self-learning AI agents will reshape operational workflows

October 6, 2025: Google’s recent whitepaper, “Welcome to the Era of Experience,” signals a shift in the way AI agents are trained. Google hypothesizes that allowing AI agents to learn from the experience of agents rather than solely from human-generated training data will enable autonomous AI to surpass its current capabilities.

Are your agentic AI projects driving toward success?

October 3, 2025: Anushree Verma, Gartner senior director analyst, says most agentic AI projects today are early-stage experiments or proofs of concept, fueled primarily by hype and often misapplied.

Microsoft unveils framework for building agentic AI apps

October 3. 2025: Microsoft has introduced the Microsoft Agent Framework, an open-source SDK and runtime for building, orchestrating, and deploying AI agents and multi-agent workflows, with full framework support for .NET and Python.

Salesforce Trusted AI Foundation seeks to power the agentic enterprise

October 2, 2025: As Salesforce pushes further into agentic AI, its aim is to evolve Salesforce Platform from an application for building AI to a foundational operating system for enterprise AI ecosystems. 

ServiceNow’s AI Experience is an agentic AI UI for the Now Platform

September 30, 2025: ServiceNow today launched the AI Experience (AIx), a contextually aware multimodal AI-driven use UI for its Now platform. Building on the ServiceNow AI Platform and with a foundation in Now Assist, the company describes it as “a unified, conversational front door to enterprise AI.”

How MCP is making AI agents actually do things in the real world

September 29, 2025: You’ve seen them: Those incredible large language models (LLMs) that can chat, write and even generate code. They’ve revolutionized how we interact with technology, but there’s a new, even more exciting chapter unfolding. Discover how MCP is turning chatbots into doers, and the future of work may never look the same.

Agentic AI in IT security: Where expectations meet reality

September 29, 2025: Agentic AI has shifted from lab demos to real-world SOC deployments. Unlike traditional automation scripts, software agents are designed to act on signals and execute security workflows intelligently, correlating logs, enriching alerts, and even take first-line containment actions.

Walmart looks to cash in on agentic AI

September 19, 2025: Walmart doesn’t intend to lose its retail crown anytime soon. And, according to US EVP and CTO Hari Vasudev, the $815B company’s artificial intelligence strategy will play a key role in preventing that from happening.

5 steps for deploying agentic AI red teaming

September 17, 2025: As more enterprises deploy agentic AI applications, the potential attack surface increases in complexity and reach. But there is still hope that AI agents can be harnessed for defensive purposes too, including using traditional red teaming and penetration testing techniques but updated for the AI world.

Google unveils payments protocol for AI agents with major financial firms

September 17. 2025: Google has introduced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open framework developed with more than 60 payments and technology companies to support secure, agent-led transactions across platforms and payment methods.

CrowdStrike bets big on agentic AI with new offerings after $290M Onum buy

September 16, 2025: At its Fal.Con conference, the cybersecurity giant launched its Agentic Security Platform and Agentic Security Workforce, aiming to outpace AI-driven adversaries with real-time intelligence, automation, and a common language for defense.

Adobe makes Agent Orchestrator and AI agents generally available

September 10, 2025: Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Agent Orchestrator and six new AI agents are designed to build, deliver, and optimize customer experience and marketing campaigns. The company also announced Experience Platform Agent Composer for customizing and configuring AI agents based on brand guidelines and organizational policy.

Rethinking the IT organization for the agentic AI era

September 2, 2025: With the advent of agentic AI, CIOs must be poised to adjust strategic IT priorities, mitigate new security risks, and reskill staff for a new era.

How to build a production-grade agentic AI platform

September 2, 2025: Modular orchestration, fail-safe design, hybrid memory management, and LLM integration with domain knowledge are essential to agentic AI systems that reason, act, and adapt at scale.

Agentic AI: A CISO’s security nightmare in the making?

September 2, 2025: Enterprises will no doubt be using agentic AI for a growing number of workflows and processes, including software development, customer support automation, and more. But what are the cybersecurity risks of agentic AI, and how much more work will it take for them to support their organizations’ agentic AI dreams?

Microsoft researchers develop new tech for video AI agents

September 2, 2025: Microsoft researchers are developing technologies for a new class of video AI agents to explore three-dimensional spaces before making decisions.The technology framework, called MindJourney, uses a range of AI technologies to understand and analyze 3D spaces, reason about the surroundings, and predict movement

Salesforce AI Research unveils new tools for AI agents

August 27, 2025: Salesforce announced a simulated enterprise environment, benchmark, and account data unification tool that are designed to help customers transform into agentic AI enterprises.

Agentic AI promises a cybersecurity revolution — with asterisks

August 18, 2025: The hottest topic at this year’s Black Hat conference was the meteoric emergence of AI tools for both cyber adversaries and defenders, particularly the use of agentic AI to strengthen cybersecurity programs.

4 thoughts on who should manage AI agents

August 11, 2025: As AI agents proliferate, we need to turn our attention beyond AI agent builder platforms to AI orchestration and AI GRC platforms. It also raises questions about which groups within the enterprise should manage AI agents and how they should be treated.

How bright are AI agents? Not very, recent reports suggest

July 31, 2025: Security researchers are adding more weight to a truth that infosec pros had already grasped: AI agents are not very bright, and are easily tricked into doing stupid or dangerous things

Will AI agents eat the SaaS market? Experts are split

July 31,2025: As hype about AI agents reaches new heights, an emerging theory suggests that the groundbreaking AI tools will kill the SaaS business model. The claim isn’t particularly new, but is resurfacing, with people like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella voicing this position. 

How agentic AI will change database management

July 28, 2025: Generative AI has already had a profound impact on the world of database management. And now, thanks to AI’s knack for pattern-recognition, teams can use generative AI to analyze data sets, detect anomalies, and access invaluable insights with record speed and precision. 

As AI agents go mainstream, companies lean into confidential computing for data security

July 21, 2025: Companies need to stop ignoring data security as AI agents take over internal data movement in IT environments, analysts and IT execs warn. To address that issue, some tech players are embracing the concept of “confidential computing.” While it’s existed for years, it;s now finding new life with the rise of genAI.

How agentic AI will transform mobile apps and field operations

July 15, 2015: Agentic AI will usher in new mobile AI experiences. Construction, manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries with significant field operations will benefit from mobile AI agents and the resulting operational agility. 

MCP is fueling agentic AI — and introducing new security risks

July 10, 2025: Model Context Protocol (MCP) has caught fire, with several thousand MCP servers now available from a wide range of vendors enabling AI assistants to connect to their data and services. And with agentic AI increasingly seen as the future of IT, MCP will only grow in use in the enterprise. But innovations like MCP also come with significant security risks.

3 industries where agentic AI is poised to make its mark

July 4, 2024:  IT leaders from finance, retail, and healthcare lend insights into what organizations are doing with AI agents today — and where they see the technology taking their organizations and industries in the future.

IFS rolls TheLoops agentic AI into industrial ERP

June 27, 2025: IFS is adding AI agent development and management capabilities to its ERP platform with the acquisition of software startup The acquisition brings TheLoops’ full Agent Development life cycle (ADLC) platform into IFS, enabling enterprises to design, test, deploy, monitor, and fine-tune AI agents with built-in support for versioning, compliance, and performance optimization.

How AI agents and agentic AI differ from each other

June 12, 2025: With agentic AI in its infancy and organizations rushing to adopt AI agents, there seems to be confusion about the difference between “agentic AI” and “AI agents” technologies, but experts say there’s growing understanding that the two are separate, but related, tools.

The future of RPA ties to AI agents

June 10, 2025: RPA is accelerating toward a crossroads, with IT leaders and experts debating its future. Some IT leaders say that more powerful and autonomous AI agents will replace the two-decade-old AI precursor technology, while others predict that AI agents and RPA will work hand-in-hand.

MCP is enabling agentic AI, but how secure is it?

June 2, 2025: Model context protocol (MCP) is becoming the plug-and-play standard for agentic AI apps to pull in data in real time from multiple sources. However, this also makes it more attractive for malicious actors looking to exploit weaknesses in how MCP has been deployed. 

The agentic AI assist Stanford University cancer care staff needed

May 30, 2025: At Microsoft Build 2025 earlier this month, Nigam Shah, CDO for Stanford Health Care, discussed agentic AI’s ability to redefine healthcare, especially in oncology, as physicians get overloaded with the administrative tasks of medicine, he said, which lead to burnout.

Agentic AI, LLMs and standards big focus of Red Hat Summit

May 26, 2025: Red Hat, announced a number of improvements in its core enterprise Linux product, including better security, better support for containers, better support for edge devices. But the one topic that dominated the conversation was AI.

Putting agentic AI to work in Firebase Studio

May 21, 2025: Putting agentic AI to work in software engineering can be done in a variety of ways. Some agents work independently of the developer’s environment, working essentially like a remote developer. Other agents directly within a developer’s own environment. Google’s Firebase Studio is an example of the latter, drawing on Google’s Gemini LLM o help developers prototype and build applications .

Why is Microsoft offering to turn websites into AI apps with NLWeb?

May 20. 2025: NLWeb, short for Natural Language Web, is designed to help enterprises build a natural language interface for their websites using the model of their choice and data to answer user queries about the contents of the website. Microsoft hopes to stake its claim on the agentic web before rivals Google and Amazon do.

Databricks to acquire open-source database startup Neon to build the next wave of AI agents

May 14, 2025: Agentic AI requires a new type of architecture because traditional workflows create gridlock, dragging down speed and performance. To get ahead in this next generation of app building, Databricks announced it will purchase Neon, an open-source serverless Postgres company.

Agentic mesh: The future of enterprise agent ecosystems

May 13, 2025: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts we’ll soon see “a couple of hundred million digital agents” inside the enterprise. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella takes it even further: “Agents will replace all software.”

Google to unveil AI agent for developers at I/O, expand Gemini integration

May 13, 2025: Google is expected to unveil a new AI agent aimed at helping software developers manage tasks across the coding lifecycle, including task execution and documentation. The tool has reportedly been demonstrated to employees and select external developers ahead of the company’s annual I/O conference.

Nvidia, ServiceNow engineer open-source model to create AI agents

May 6, 2025: Nvidia and ServiceNow have created an AI model that can help companies create learning AI agents to automate corporate workloads. The open-source Apriel model, available generally in the second quarter on HuggingFace, will help create AI agents that can make decisions around IT, human resources and customer-service functions.

How IT leaders use agentic AI for business workflows

April 30, 2025: Jay Upchurch, CIO at SAS, backs agentic AI to enhance sales, marketing, IT, and HR motions. “Agentic AI can make sales more effective by handling lead scoring, assisting with customer segmentation, and optimizing targeted outreach,” he says.

Microsoft sees AI agents shaking up org charts, eliminating traditional functions

April 28, 2025: As companies increasingly automate work processes using agents, traditional functions such as finance, marketing, and engineering may fall away, giving rise to an ‘agent boss’ era of delegation and orchestration of myriad bots.

Cisco automates AI-driven security across enterprise networks

April 28, 2025: Cisco announced a range of AI-driven security enhancements, including improved threat detection and response capabilities in Cisco XDR and Splunk Security, new AI agents, and integration between Cisco’s AI Defense platform and ServiceNow SecOps.

Hype versus execution in agentic AI

April 25, 2025: Agentic AI promises autonomous systems capable of reasoning, making decisions, and dynamically adapting to changing conditions. The allure lies in machines operating independently, free of human intervention, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency at unprecedented scales. But David Linthicum writes, don’t be swept up by ambitious promises. 

Agents are here — but can you see what they’re doing?

April 23, 2025: As the agentic AI models powering individual agents get smarter, the use cases for agentic AI systems get more ambitious — and the risks posed by these systems increase exponentially.A multicloud experiment in agentic AI: Lessons learned

Agentic AI might soon get into cryptocurrency trading — what could possibly go wron

April 15, 2025: Agentic AI promises to simplify complex tasks such as crypto trading or managing digital assets by automating decisions, enhancing accessibility, and masking technical complexity.

Agentic AI is both boon and bane for security pros

April 15, 2025: Cybersecurity is at a crossroads with agentic AI. It’s a powerful tool that can create reams of code in a blink of an eye, find and defuse threats, and be used so decisively and defensively. This has proved to be a huge force multiplier and productivity boon. But while powerful, agentic AI isn’t dependable, and that is the conundrum. 

AI agents vs. agentic AI: What do enterprises want?

April 15, 2025:  Now that this AI agent story has morphed into “agentic AI,” it seems to have taken on the same big-cloud-AI flavor that enteriprise already rejected. What do they want from AI agents, why is “agentic” thinking wrong, and where is this all headed?

A multicloud experiment in agentic AI: Lessons learned

April 11, 2025: Turns out you really can build a decentralized AI system that operates successfully across multiple public cloud providers. It’s both challenging and costly.

Google adds open source framework for building agents to Vertex AI

April 9, 2025: Google is adding a new open source framework for building agents to its AI and machine learning platform Vertex AI, along with other updates to help deploy and maintain these agents. The open source Agent Development Kit (ADK) will make it possible to build an AI agent in under 100 lines of Python code. It expects to add support for more languages later this year.

Google’s Agent2Agent open protocol aims to connect disparate agents

April 9, 2025: Google has taken the covers off a new open protocol — Agent2Agent (A2A) — that aims to connect agents across disparate ecosystems.. At its annual Cloud Next conference, Google said that the A2A protocol will enable enterprises to adopt agents more readily as it bypasses the challenge of agents that are built on different vendor ecosystems not being able to communicate with each other.

Riverbed bolsters AIOps platform with predictive and agentic AI

April 8, 2025: Riverbed unveiled updates to its AIOps and observability platform that the company says will transform how IT organizations manage complex distributed infrastructure and data more efficiently. Expanded AI capabilities are aimed at making it easier to manage AIOps and enabling IT organizations to transition from reactive to predictive IT operations.

Microsoft’s newest AI agents can detail how they reason

March 26, 2025: If you’re wondering how AI agents work, Microsoft’s new Copilot AI agents provide real-time answers on how data is being analyzed and sourced to reach results. The Researcher and Analyst agents take a deeper look at data sources such as email, chat or databases within an organization to produce research reports, analyze strategies, or convert raw information into meaningful data.

Microsoft launches AI agents to automate cybersecurity amid rising threats

March 26, 2025: Microsoft has introduced a new set of AI agents for its Security Copilot platform, designed to automate key cybersecurity functions as organizations face increasingly complex and fast-moving digital threats. The new tools focus on tasks such as phishing detection, data protection, and identity management.

How AI agents work

March 24, 2025: By leveraging technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and contextual understanding, AI agents can operate independently, even partnering with other agents to perform complex tasks.

5 top business use cases for AI agents

March 19, 2025: AI agents are poised to transform the enterprise, from automating mundane tasks to driving customer service and innovation. But having strong guardrails in place will be key to success.

Nvidia launches AgentIQ toolkit to connect disparate AI agents

March 21, 2025: As enterprises look to adopt agents and agentic AI to boost the efficiency of their applications, Nvidia this week introduced a new open-source software library — AgentIQ toolkit — to help developers connect disparate agents and agent frameworks..

Deloitte unveils agentic AI platform

March 18, 2025: At Nvidia GTC 2025 in San Jose, Deloitte announced Zora AI, a new agentic AI platform that offers a portfolio of AI agents for finance, human capital, supply chain, procurement, sales and marketing, and customer service.The platform draws on Deloitte’s experience from its technology, risk, tax, and audit businesses, and is integrated with all major enterprise software platforms. 

The dawn of agentic AI: Are we ready for autonomous technology?

March 15, 2025: Much of the AI work prior has focused on large language models (LLMs) with a goal to give prompts to get knowledge out of the unstructured data. So it’s a question-and-answer process. Agentic AI goes beyond that. You can give it a task that might involve a complex set of steps that can change each time.

How to know a business process is ripe for agentic AI

March 11, 2025: Deloitte predicts that in 2025, 25% of companies that use generative AI will launch agentic AI pilots or proofs of concept, growing to 50% in 2027. The firm says some agentic AI applications, in some industries and for some use cases, could see actual adoption into existing workflows this year.

With new division, AWS bets big on agentic AI automation

March 6, 2025: Amazon Web Services customers can expect to hear a lot more about agentic AI from AWS in future with the news that the company is setting up a dedicated unit to promote the technology on its platform.

How agentic AI makes decisions and solves problems

March 6, 2025: GenAI’s latest big step forward has been the arrival of autonomous AI agents. Agentic AI is based on AI-enabled applications capable of perceiving their environment, making decisions, and taking actions to achieve specific goals. 

CIOs are bullish on AI agents. IT employees? Not so much

Feb. 4, 2025: Most CIOs and CTOs are bullish on agentic AI, believing the emerging technology will soon become essential to their enterprises, but lower-level IT pros who will be tasked with implementing agents have serious doubts.

The next AI wave — agents — should come with warning labels. Is now the right time to invest in them?

Jan.13, 2025: The next wave of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is already under way, as AI agents — AI applications that can function independently and execute complex workflows with minimal or limited direct human oversight — are being rolled out across the tech industry.

AI agents are unlike any technology ever

Dec. 1, 2024: The agents are coming, and they represent a fundamental shift in the role artificial intelligence plays in businesses, governments, and our lives.

AI agents are coming to work — here’s what businesses need to know

Nov. 21, 2024: AI agents will soon be everywhere, automating complex business processes and taking care of mundane tasks for workers — at least that’s the claim of various software vendors that are quickly adding intelligent bots to a wide range of work apps.

Agentic AI swarms are headed your way

November 1, 2024: OpenAI launched an experimental framework called Swarm. It’s a “lightweight” system for the development of agentic AI swarms, which are networks of autonomous AI agents able to work together to handle complex tasks without human intervention, according to OpenAI. 

Is now the right time to invest in implementing agentic AI?

October 31, 2024: While software vendors say their current agentic AI-based offerings are easy to implement, analysts say that’s far from the truth.

Earlier this year, Omdia told us the MacBook Air had become the world’s most popular business laptop. With that in mind, I spoke with Apple Director for Mac Product Marketing Colleen Novielli, about why she thinks this is the case.

The move in recent years to Apple Silicon in Macs delivered a major boost to the platform. Not only did the move massively increase processor power, but it did so at low energy levels — turning even entry-level Macs into viable tools for business. “The Mac product line really is the strongest it’s ever been,” said Novielli. 

There’s a Mac for everyone

What that means is choice, with a suitable Mac available for almost every task. “What we like to say right now is there truly is a Mac for every employee in business to choose,” she said. (It’s easy to speculate that the extent of the offer might expand with the introduction of lower-cost Macs next year.)

The growing prevalence of employee choice schemes means more and more workers are choosing Macs, rather than other platforms. Martin Lang, enterprise mobility leader at SAP recently told me that about 50% of his company’s employees — roughly 54,000 people — now use Macs.

That’s not unique, said Novielli. “We’re seeing tremendous momentum around Mac in the enterprise,” she said. “We’re seeing this amazing spectrum of adoption across the Mac range.”

The company isn’t sitting back. It knows hundreds of thousands of Windows PCs need to be replaced by something else now that Windows 10 has run out of standard support. That something else could well be a Mac, and the decision to introduce M4 chips inside the MacBook Air formed part of Apple’s response. 

MacBook Air: Value and performance

“The M4 MacBook Air offers tremendous value and performance for enterprises as well as consumers,” Novielli said, noting its included 16GB memory, dual display support and 13- and 15-in. sizes as part of the appeal. Mainly, of course, with Apple Silicon, it’s a performance story.

The M4 MacBook Air has “all the performance that many employees need to get their work done and be their most productive all day and every day,” she said. Apple also offers computers with even more built-in performance, scaling up all the way to current and existing M5-powered Macs, beginning with the 14-in. MacBook Pro. 

This is driving more businesses to deploy Apple hardware. Capital One recently deployed thousands of MacBook Airs across the entire company, for example.

Macs are being deployed at scale in business

Novielli shared a couple of additional examples:

In China, leading mobility company Hello Incorporated has thousands of employees and recently deployed Macs company-wide, using them for research, product development, AI functions in their biking and carpooling divisions and taxi hire. Hello Incorporated has already updated to the M5 MacBook Pros “because they see the value in the performance and AI capabilities” the platform brings.

Food retail company Haidilao has also invested heavily in Mac, with systems now in place across 1,300 stores worldwide. The company is leaning into cutting-edge retail technology using these machines, including intelligent, AI-augmented guest servicing. That means obvious things such as monitoring for table churn, insuring orders are taken in a timely fashion and served correctly, and tracking safety measures in the kitchen and other parts of business management.

“They shared with us that this has led to a 78% energy savings from, you know, the things that they’re looking at from the efficiency of the actual buildings themselves,” she said, adding the systems have delivered 52% cost savings at the company.

Consumer simple is an enterprise superpower

“We have our amazing technology, which we create for the end user, which is the consumer, but also the enterprise,” she said. Of course, consumer-simple doesn’t mean consumer-dumb, which means that for enterprise users, the ease-of-use translates into getting tasks done faster, more efficiently and with less stress. 

The result? 

“We’re hearing more and more that our enterprise customers think that Mac is easier to use than ever,” Novielli said. “It’s more affordable than ever before and provides even more value. And it’s more compatible than ever before, even in this environment that is increasingly complicated from an IT perspective. There’s many great examples of customers who have deployed Mac and are really seeing the difference throughout the business, both from the impact it’s having on employees and their productivity, their daily lives, and also on their bottom line.”

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Remember newspapers? 

Or, more specifically, remember when everybody kept up with current events by reading newspapers and news magazines?

I started reading The New York Times every day when I was in college. The paper was usually delivered to my door by 10:30 pm the night before. Once I first started work as a journalist, I read three newspapers (one local, two national) and subscribed to five or so super high-quality print magazines (The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, and others). I kept this up when I shifted into technology journalism, and added super-high-quality tech magazines — including Computerworld.

Most people read print newspapers back then, and the world was a much better place for it. People could argue about politics in a friendly way, because the debates came from a shared set of facts with information about the world from credible, fact-checked sources. 

People also got news from TV, but people from both sides of the political spectrum watched the same shows. Reported news was presented separately from opinion columns, and people understood the difference. 

One of the most under-appreciated features of newspaper reading was that it showed you a range of stories that you wouldn’t necessarily seek out or find yourself drawn to. Some readers would skim those headlines and move on, and others would read them regardless, just because they were in the newspaper. 

People read local newspapers, and many cared much more about what was happening in their town and state than events taking place on the other side of the world. 

Foreign news was well covered, though, and investigative journalism was widespread, active, and effective because news organizations had the money to pay for it all. 

Then social networking happened. 

Bad news

Online message boards were displaced by Friendster-like sites, which were later displaced by Facebook-like sites, and people used these to post pictures and status updates and to chat. Within three years after Facebook emerged, sites like YouTube and Twitter arrived, the iPhone was launched, and mobile apps came along a year later. 

As Facebook, YouTube and Twitter got discovered by news organizations and users as places to share and promote news stories, those social sites also developed algorithms to favor more compelling posts and essentially censor others. The goal was to keep eyeballs glued to screens. 

People increasingly used social apps on smartphones to get news. The algorithms worked, and swiping through algorithmically sorted posts proved vastly more compelling than reading a paper newspaper. 

In global, multi-billion dollar contest for attention, the algorithms are constantly “improved” to be more compelling; eventually, the most algorithmically juiced site of all, TikTok, emerged.

As of this year, social media sites have become the top way Americans get news (54%). The biggest sources are Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and X, in that order. 

These are very bad sources of news. Legitimate news organizations have to compete in the algorithmically determined attention game against demagogue bloggers, conspiracy theorists, foreign disinformation campaigns, AI-generated slop, fake news organizations, parody accounts, clickbait farms, memes, and influencer rants recorded in their cars. 

And even when ethical, well-reported, fact-checked, and credible news organizations break through the noise, only a tiny number of those organizations’ stories emerge, and they’re not compensated for it. 

The attraction of bad sources is eviscerating the businesses of good sources. Media organizations are cutting back, reducing spending on investigative and foreign coverage or closing altogether. 

This is especially true of local newspapers. Some 40% of all newspapers in the US have shut down in the last 20 years. Millions of people simply don’t follow what’s happening locally anymore and instead are consumed all day by global events. 

But not all global events. Only the events that the algorithms have found capture attention. For example, the “winner” in this contest is the conflict in Gaza. I travel all over the world, and in the past year more than half the graffiti in the world is based on this conflict, as is much of the political discussion online. The Ukraine conflict is high on the list as well, partly because both sides in the conflict churn out massive amounts of online articles about it. 

So, while the algorithms have gotten everybody obsessing over these two conflicts, most don’t hear a word about the even larger conflicts and crises in Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Myanmar, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Burkina Faso. Major newspapers are covering these events daily, but most people never hear about them. 

Because the algorithms prioritize engagement, not credibility, people are exposed to extreme and polarizing content, including disinformation, false information and made-up AI slop. Algorithm personalization has created “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” where people form completely different understandings about the world. 

It’s also messing with our heads. Algorithmically curated platforms exploit human psychology to maximize engagement, trapping users in toxic cycles of addiction, negativity, and isolation that undermine mental well-being.

Good news

In a global push during 2024 and 2025, decentralized platforms are using federated moderation to attack the problem. The top decentralized platforms utilizing federated moderation include Mastodon, Bluesky, Farcaster, Lemmy, PeerTube, and Bookwyrm. 

My recommendation for everybody is to stop getting news from sources that use attention-maximizing algorithms to select the sources. 

In other words, never get news from social sites. Instead, switch to high-quality news apps and sites. Here are the best ones I know about: 

Google News. A week ago, I might not have recommended this source. But this week the app gained the ability for you to choose the news sources. The feature is called Preferred Sources. 

Kagi News. (Disclosure: My son works at Kagi.) As a news source, Kagi News eliminates the infinity pool problem with online news. You can select how many stories in each category you get per day, and it updates news only once per day (4 a.m. PT, 7 a.m. ET). It’s a morning newspaper. The stories are cobbled together summaries built with AI from highly credible sources, and the sources are clearly surfaced so you can click through to the media organizations’ websites easily. Kagi News is great at news understanding. It isolates the issues and events in each story and presents a timeline of how things unfolded. 

Sites (and apps) like NewsGuard and AllSides are doing great work educating the public about news, while also serving as great sources for news. 

For professional news, of course, you’ll want to subscribe to and read publications like Computerworld or any of its sister publications to stay on top of tech information related to your career. 

But for current events, never, ever get news from social media or video sites that use attention-grabbing algorithms. Instead, use one or more of the sites and apps I listed above for all your general news. Try to catch up once daily, then ignore the news for the rest of the day. 

And finally, of course, you can subscribe to print versions of your favorite newspapers and magazines, even if that feels like old news.

A warning for WhatsApp users: cybercriminals have discovered an alarmingly simple way to access a user’s conversations in real time by manipulating the app’s device pairing or linking routine.

Termed ‘GhostPairing’ by researchers at security company Gen Digital (owner of Norton, Avast, Avira, and AVG), no passwords or account details are needed to execute the attack, which was recently detected in Czechia.

All the attacker has to do is persuade a user to click on a malicious link sent to them as a WhatsApp message purporting to reveal a Facebook photo.

In the most common variant of the attack, this throws up a fake page which asks the user to verify themselves by entering their mobile number. This number is then forwarded by the attackers to WhatsApp to initiate the ‘link device via phone number’ feature which adds new devices to an account.

WhatsApp generates an 8-digit pairing code, which is intercepted and forwarded to the user. The user, who sees a new pairing prompt in WhatsApp, enters this code to confirm the pairing. Unfortunately, this adds the attacker’s browser session as a ‘trusted device.’

Unless the user becomes suspicious, it’s game over: the attacker now has full access to their account, messages, and message history, as well as the ability to view messages as they are sent and received.

“After their device is linked, the attacker does not need to exploit anything else. They have the same capabilities that any user has when connecting WhatsApp Web on their own computer,” said Gen Digital’s researchers. “Everything happens inside the boundaries of the feature set that WhatsApp intended.”

Worse, the attackers can also send messages that impersonate the user to spread the campaign to the victim’s contacts and WhatsApp groups.

E2EE bypass

GhostPairing is an example of an attack that exploits one of WhatsApp’s biggest draws: signing up, connecting to other users, and adding up to four additional devices to an account is incredibly convenient. It’s one reason why WhatsApp has become so popular. All users need to join is a phone number, with no username or password to remember.

Another draw is that the app is built on end-to-end encryption (E2EE) privacy in which the private keys used to secure messages are stored on the device itself. This should make it impossible to eavesdrop on private messages without either having physical access to the device or remotely infecting it with malware.

GhostPairing demonstrates that a social engineering attack can bypass this. Interestingly, although still possible, the attack is less practical when asking users to pair via QR codes. That offers some reassurance for users of messaging apps such as Signal, which only allows pairing requests via QR Codes.

Defending WhatsApp

Users can check which devices are paired via WhatsApp via Settings > Linked Devices. A rogue device link will appear here. Despite having access to a user’s WhatsApp account, the attacker can’t revoke their device access, which must be initiated by the primary device. Another tip is to enable two-step PIN verification. This won’t stop the attacker accessing messages but will mean they can’t change the primary email address.

The threat to enterprises is that large numbers of employees use WhatsApp as well as communicating in larger employee discussion groups. The risk is that many of these won’t be documented and will therefore be overlooked by security teams.

The recommendation is to assume that multiple groups do exist and educate users to report suspicious phishing or spam from unknown numbers. The message should be clear: WhatsApp messaging might look private, but the app itself has gaps that attackers can exploit.

GhostPairing comes only weeks after university researchers uncovered a major WhatsApp flaw that allowed them to discover the mobile numbers of the app’s 3.5 billion global user base. Earlier this year, Meta discovered a weakness in the WhatsApp Desktop app that could be used to target Windows users.

And it’s not only WhatsApp; researchers recently uncovered a hack affecting the company that created a modified version of Signal for use by senior US politicians.

This article first appeared on CSOonline.com.

Imagine it’s possible to balance regulatory desires to limit Apple’s market power with the welfare of the company’s existing customer base. Imagine a regulatory environment characterized by mutual respect and a willingness to collaborate on solutions, a place where Apple is forced to change some of its business practices, but in ways that benefit both competitors and customers.

That’s what you get in Japan.

How has Apple changed the App Store in Japan?

Following years of resistance and in order to bring its service in line with the Japanese equivalent of Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) — Japan’s Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA) — Apple has introduced a variety of changes to the way it runs its App Store. Described in depth on Apple’s own developer page, the changes made to iOS in Japan include:

App distribution

• App Store payment options on the App Store
• Distribution on alternative app marketplaces
• Creation of an alternative app marketplace
• Prioritization of child safety with alternative payments on the App Store
• New business terms

iOS capabilities

• Browser and search engine choice screens
• Default app controls
• Alternative web browser engines
• Side button access for voice-based
• Conversational apps
• Requests for additional interoperability.

What’s noteworthy about all these changes is that while Apple inevitably sees almost all of them as potentially threatening the existing App Store experience, the way in which they are being applied at least recognizes the need to protect customers.

That’s because, unlike in Europe, Apple says conversations with regulatory authorities have been constructive and collaborative, with respect given to the needs of customers, Apple’s own need to protect and benefit from its own IP, and the needs of competitors. 

The problem with Europe

European regulators, on the other hand, seem determined to apply the DMA in the toughest way possible and seem completely oblivious to what customers want and the need to maintain a unique platform experience. 

As a result, Apple believes the MSCA does a significantly better job protecting consumers than what other regulators have done.

There are significant examples that illustrate this.

• Take the idea of “additional interoperability.” In Europe, whenever Apple introduces a new feature, it must now make access to those features available to third parties from day one. It cannot control what is done by those companies with those features, and cannot prevent access in the event a developer abuses such access to the detriment of customers. It’s different in Japan; there developers can request access to Apple APIs. That means Apple can deny access to developers (such as Meta) who seek access to people’s private data for advertising or worse.
• When it comes to app distribution, while developers can choose to use Apple’s systems, their own systems, or a combination of systems — and have great freedom in terms of payment systems, web links and more — all apps made available to iOS must go through Apple’s App Notarization process. While this process isn’t as rigorous as App Store review, it does provide some oversight.
• In-app payments: It is always possible for customers to default to Apple’s payment system, no matter what system they have used before, while developers continue to pay fees for apps they sell. (Apple says 87% of developers distributing apps via the Japanese App Store pay nothing today, and will continue to do so). 
• Child safety in the digital age is a major issue for most parents. That’s why it’s such a surprise that the EU’s DMA introduces no explicit protection for children, while the MSCA allows Apple to try to protect kids. That means in Japan, age ratings mut be included for apps distributed outside the App Store, software in the Kids category can’t include transaction links, and Apple will integrate parental control in in-app purchases from all sources in future. Europe’s children have no such protection, though I suppose some clumsy legislation will deliver yet more damage to the existing user experience.

There are many additional differences between the collaborative Japanese approach and the fanatical steps put in place in Europe, Apple has pointed out. In Europe, regulators have adopted the toughest possible adoption of the rules, and have refused to even consider consumer welfare, says Apple. And while it is true that the company never wanted to accept these changes and still thinks they risk customer privacy and security, it also seems much more satisfied that even if they didn’t agree, the regulators in Japan were prepared to listen, learn, and develop positive compromise.

For the benefit of everyone?

Apple characterizes Japanese regulators as accepting the need to strike a balance between loosening Apple’s market power with the needs of customers. That’s not the same in Europe, where the hardline approach means some features might never appear as larger competitors seek to use the DMA to undermine Apple’s privacy and security protections. 

That’s the nub, really, as the European approach means only a very small number of wealthy competitors are really seeing any benefit, while customers suffer weaker privacy, security, and erosion of the user experience they chose. 

Perhaps the EU should adopt the Japanese approach? Doing so might not make Apple much happier, particularly as it doesn’t seem to have any intention to extend any of the changes to other jurisdictions unless forced. But it would at least deliver a better compromise between the needs of Apple, well-financed competitors and their political lobbyists, and consumers. Though it’s possible that once different approaches are in place in different markets, it will become easier to see which models deliver the best overall results.

It seems unlikely that benefit will come from Europe.

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The need to train people in AI at a faster pace is driving the multibillion-dollar merger between tech education giants Udemy and Coursera.

The merger, announced this week, is valued at $2.5 billion and will close in the second half of 2026, subject to approval by regulators and shareholders.

The combined entity will reach a combined 270 million learners. Udemy has credibility in the enterprise marketplace with 17,000 customers. Coursera is more popular among consumers with 191 million learners. 

The merger isn’t about aggregating learning content, said Coursera  CEO Greg Hart said during a call to explain the merger. “Until now, our companies have been building parallel tracks, investing separately in duplicative features and tools like AI tutors, authoring personalization and assessments,” Hart said.

“When you combine Udemy’s enterprise AI-powered reskilling platform and dynamic marketplace with Coursera’s academic rigor, you create a platform that adapts to industry needs in real time with valuable credentials,” said Udemy CEO Hugo Sarrazin said.

AI is automating repetitive jobs previously done by humans, who are now under pressure to upskill to be “AI ready.” About 39% of the workers’ core skills will become outdated by 2030, the World Economic Forum said in a recent study.

Many training programs now take so long they’re already outdated by the time employees finish them, Michelle Vaz, managing director of AWS Training and Certification program at Amazon, said in a research note this week. “The most successful companies will shift to rapid, bite-sized learning cycles that mirror the cadence of AI innovation, enabling employees to upskill in real time instead of playing catch-up,” she wrote.

AI skills in job postings are up 5% compared to the same time in 2024, said Kye Mitchell, head of Experis North America, a division of services firm ManpowerGroup.

The combined Udemy and Coursera will “build a unified system of record that allows leaders to benchmark, develop, and track the skills of their talent across every stage of their career,” Hart said.

Udemy’s content engine captures trends at the speed of innovation, which helps enterprises upskill employees at the speed of AI. Coursera’s Hart believes Udemy’s offerings are complementary to its career-focused courses offered in some top universities and by industry leaders.

“Udemy has built a large enterprise business powered by the world’s most dynamic marketplace for practical skills development,” Hart said.

The combined offering will upskill people into career pathways, with plans to also focus on individual skill development and certifications.

“We’ve made progress, but we need to move faster,” Hart said. “Sharing product and data investments accelerates our roadmap to become a truly AI-powered skills-acceleration platform for the global workforce.”

The executives also talked about the industry moving to subscription-based pricing for consumer revenue.

“On the consumer side, obviously, we’ve had strength on the subscription side of our business with it representing more than 50% of our consumer revenue…,” Hart said. “And that’s something that Udemy has started to move in that direction as well.”

A few weeks ago, Google launched the powerful AI model Gemini 3 and now it’s time for a faster variant called Gemini 3 Flash.

In addition to speed, Gemini 3 Flash is said to offer improved intelligence, at least compared to its predecessor, Gemini 2.5 Flash.

According to the Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) and Simple QA Verified measurement tools, Gemini 3 Flash scored almost the same as Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.2.

Gemini 3 Flash will be the default AI model in Google’s Gemini app, and will be available to enterprises in Vertex AI and Gemini Enterprise.

Your smartphone’s home screen is the heart and soul of your mobile tech experience — the launching pad for nearly everything you do on your device. And since you use Android, you’ve got a unique advantage over your iPhone-totin’ associates in that your home screen doesn’t have to be the same tired old grid everyone else is using. It certainly can be, if you want, but you also have the option to take complete control of that environment and turn it into a time-saving command center for your personal productivity needs.

We’re not just talkin’ about sprinkling a few exceptional widgets into the mix, either. With Android, you can install a completely new home screen launcher that lets you incorporate all sorts of custom actions, interfaces, and shortcuts into your device’s desktop — giving your phone a different look and feel and creating a system that’s custom-tailored to the way you like to get things done. It can make a current phone infinitely more useful and make any old Android device feel fresh and new again.

The Google Play Store has plenty of commendable launcher options to consider, and figuring out which makes the most sense for you ultimately comes down to deciding what exactly you want to accomplish and what style of interaction you prefer. After spending time with all the top contenders, these are the Android launchers I’d recommend for serious professionals — broken down by what type of experience they offer and in what areas they excel.

1. Smart Launcher: Complete customization

With long-time Android power-user favorite Nova Launcher now seemingly on life support, the throne is open and awaiting a new holder for the title of go-to general-purpose Android launcher champion.

That honor, without question, is well on its way to a popular independent creation called Smart Launcher. For the moment, at least, Smart Launcher is the launcher to look at if you’re seeking out a relatively traditional Android home screen setup with oodles of extra options and opportunities for customization.

Smart Launcher’s actually been around for some time now, but it’s struggled a bit to find its identity over the years. For a while, it positioned itself primarily around a specific distinctive layout and the idea of automated organization — an interesting approach, if inherently somewhat limited in the scope of its appeal.

Now, with Nova out of the mix, Smart Launcher is seamlessly stepping into the role of customization king. The app serves as a flexible framework for any arrangement of shortcuts and widgets imaginable, with a massive menu of options and the ability to tweak all sorts of details about the way your home screen and app drawer work — if you’re so inspired.

Smart Launcher gives you a flexible canvas for organizing your home screen — and app drawer — in practically any way you want.

JR Raphael / Foundry

The beauty of Smart Launcher, though, is that it’s really up to you to decide how deep you dive into geeky waters. If all you want is a fairly ordinary home screen with the ability to take total control over what’s on it — say, removing a permanently present widget or search bar that shows up on your phone’s standard home screen layout or arranging things in a way your stock setup doesn’t allow — Smart Launcher makes it simple to turn any such vision into reality.

And it offers some interesting extras, too, like the ability to create stacked widgets where you can swipe from one widget to another within the same physical space — and an app drawer that automatically splits your apps into different categories like productivity, media, and travel.

It lets you create a variety of custom gesture shortcuts, too — maybe double-tapping your home screen to fire up the excellent Smart Launcher universal search prompt, for instance, or opening specific apps or even pop-up widgets when you swipe in certain directions on the home screen or on different app icons.

And if you’re using a foldable phone, Smart Launcher empowers you to create completely different custom home screen layouts for your device’s inner and outer display (though you certainly don’t have to get that ambitious or complex).

Smart Launcher is free for its core features and perfectly pleasant to use in that state. Some of the more advanced extras — including the swipeable widget and pop-up widget abilities along with the option to edit the app drawer categories — require a Pro upgrade that’s available either for $21 as a lifetime upgrade or via a monthly or annual subscription (with prices varying based on both location and season).

In short: If you want complete control over every element of your home screen environment — or you just want a relatively standard home screen setup with a variety of extra options and opportunities for customization — Smart Launcher is the place to start.

2. Niagara Launcher: Ergonomic efficiency

Sometimes, the simplest solutions can be the most effective. That’s the idea behind Niagara Launcher, which works to strip away all the extraneous elements of an Android home screen and leave you only with fast and fuss-free tools to get where you need to go.

The Niagara home screen revolves around a single vertical menu of your most-used apps, but there’s much more to it than initially meets the eye. First, any shortcut on the home screen can either act as a traditional one-tap shortcut to opening an app or serve as a way to pop up a supercharged folder with a combination of both apps and widgets inside it.

From the simple vertical app menu (at left) to the supercharged folders (at right), Niagara’s home screen is all about simplicity and easy access to the items you need.

JR Raphael / Foundry

The top of the home screen, meanwhile, features a classy built-in info widget that can show you the current weather along with upcoming event info and even your phone’s current battery level. Tapping it pulls up a pop-up agenda panel with an even broader view of your agenda.

When you want to find an app that isn’t on your home screen, you simply slide your finger up or down along the edge of your screen to move through Niagara’s scrolling app list and jump to whatever it is you need. In a nice ergonomic twist, you can swipe or tap the list from the left or the right side of your screen, even, making it convenient to access no matter how you hold your phone.

Niagara has lots of other thoughtful efficiency-oriented features, including an option to show active notifications alongside an app’s icon on your home screen — even going as far as to let you interact with notifications and respond to messages or dismiss pending alerts right from that same area. It allows you to stack multiple Android widgets within your home screen’s topmost row for easily swipeable at-a-glance views of important info, too, and it gives you a smart search system that’s easily accessible with a single swipe upward anywhere on your home screen.

If all of that isn’t enough, Niagara features some intelligent automatic optimizations for larger-screen Android devices — so if you’re using a tablet or a foldable, it’ll make especially effective use of all your extra screen space (though in a way that happens on its own, following the Niagara framework, as opposed to being an open canvas for your own creation à la Smart Launcher — for better or for worse, depending on your perspective).

Niagara Launcher is free with an optional $14-a-year or $43 lifetime Pro upgrade that unlocks some of its more advanced options, including the built-in calendar and weather widgets.

In short: If you’re willing to keep an open mind and allow yourself a few days to adapt to a new and very unconventional approach, you might just find Niagara’s clever method of organization to be exactly the efficiency-enhancing change you didn’t know you needed.

3. Microsoft Launcher: The Microsoft-lover’s dream

Android is typically a Google-centric affair, but little by little, Microsoft has been creating its own sub-ecosystem right within the platform’s walls — and the centerpiece to that setup is the aptly named Microsoft Launcher.

Having Microsoft Launcher on your phone really does make it feel like you’re using a Microsoft Android device instead of a Google Android product. Most prominently, the app’s feed-like panel gives you glanceable info from your Outlook calendar along with tasks from your inbox, a panel of recent Windows-synced Sticky Notes, and a list of recently accessed documents from your cloud-based Microsoft Office storage. It also defaults to Bing for search, though you can easily opt to change that to any other provider if you want.

Microsoft Launcher puts Bing front and center and adds plenty of other Microsoft-centric touches to your home screen environment.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Microsoft-specific elements aside, the Microsoft Launcher is also just a nicely crafted take on the Android home screen interface, with a pleasant mix of tidy-looking simplicity and more advanced organizational options.

The app is completely free to use.

In short: If you work in Windows and want your phone to feel like an extension of that same ecosystem, Microsoft Launcher is the way to make it happen.

4. Square Home: Windows Phone meets Android

For all of its Microsoft focus, the actual Microsoft Launcher has nothing to do with the company’s now-abandoned Windows Phone effort and the content-packed organizational system that platform established. For that, you’ll want to turn to Square Home, which picks up where Windows Phone left off and brings its distinctive tile-centric setup into the realm of Android.

Even if you didn’t use Windows Phone, you might find Square Home to be a refreshing change that enhances your workflow. The launcher puts a series of customizable tiles on your home screen, each representing an app shortcut, a widget, or some other sort of action. You can even treat a tile as a three-dimensional cube and store related shortcuts on each side — say, Google Drive on the front, then Docs, Sheets, and other productivity apps on the inner sides — and then swipe the cube in any direction to access the associated items.

Square Home has tons of options, including some that let you control exactly how your tiles appear — everything from the number of columns for the tiles to the size of icons and text within them and the color and style of backgrounds used for different blocks. It also allows you to create some potentially useful custom shortcuts beyond just the usual gestures. You can set certain actions to occur when your phone is set flat with its screen facing either up or down, for instance, or even when you shake your phone.

Square Home transforms your home screen into a Windows-Phone-like environment, with plenty of advanced shortcuts and time-saving options.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Square Home is free with an optional $6 lifetime key or $2-a-year premium subscription for advanced features, options, and tile effects.

In short: If you miss the old Windows Phone interface or just like the idea of keeping everything you need in front of you and neatly organized in a geometrical manner, Square Home is your Android home screen answer.

5. ReZ Launcher: Gesture power

Taking interface inspiration from the past isn’t purely about nostalgia. Often, ideas are abandoned even when they have plenty of practical merit — as a result of broader business issues surrounding their creators or other such factors.

That’s absolutely the case with a nifty Android home screen concept Nokia once introduced into Android, during its short-lived era as an Android up-and-comer. Nokia came up with the idea of a home screen that revolves around gestures — not just the typical swipe-this-way-or-that variety but a more intricate and intuitive system of actually scribbling specific letters onto your screen to find what you need.

It’s a surprisingly swift and efficient way to fly around your phone, and the concept now lives on via a quirky off-the-beaten-path Android launcher called ReZ.

With ReZ as your default Android launcher, you can simply use your finger to draw any letter anywhere on your home screen. ReZ will recognize it right away and show you all the apps and contacts that match. If you don’t see what you want immediately, you can keep scribbling more letters to narrow down the search.

ReZ Launcher looks simple on the surface — but scribble a letter anywhere on its home screen, and you’ll see what makes it special.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Scribbling aside, ReZ gives you a swipeable widget at the top of its screen, with custom native widgets showing the time and date alongside any upcoming calendar events and active media controls (when relevant). Beneath that is the beginning of an easily accessible list of all your installed apps, which you can continue to see by swiping upward from the bottom of the screen.

You can add commonly accessed app shortcuts into a dock at the bottom of the screen, too — by long-pressing any icons in the main app list — and ReZ also offers a bevy of options for customizing its interface and the appearance of your home screen.

But more than anything, this one’s all about the gestures and that signature scribbling. It’s a delightfully different take on smartphone interaction, and that alone makes it well worth trying.

In short: If you enjoy the idea of finding anything you need with a swift ‘n’ simple scribble, ReZ is a one-of-a-kind concept and the kind of interesting possibility you’ll find only on Android.

6. Lynx Launcher: Sleek simplicity

When it comes to optimizing your digital universe, simplicity can go a surprisingly long way. That’s the key idea around Lynx Launcher, a relatively new contender in the Android launcher arena and one with an approach that absolutely makes it stand out from the pack.

Lynx Launcher is said to be “inspired” by the Linux-based Gnome desktop interface, but even if you aren’t a card-carrying computer geek, there’s plenty to like about its frills-free home screen setup. At its core, Lynx Launcher gives you a single primary home screen panel with a simple built-in clock widget at its top and a row of favorite apps on its right side. You can add any additional shortcuts and widgets you want into that main area as well, but it seems designed to be relatively sparse and open.

That’s in large part because of Lynx’s series of distinctive elements that exist around that primary panel:

1. With a swipe to the right — or a tap on the nine-dot icon within the favorites dock on the main screen — you zip over to Lynx’s lovely alphabetical app drawer, which makes it delightfully fast and easy to find what you need.
2. With a swipe to the left, you pull up a self-populating Favorites screen. It automatically fills itself up with your most frequently used apps and contacts for especially speedy access.
3. With a swipe downward on any home screen panel — or a tap on the search box at the top of your home screen — you launch Lynx’s swift search system. There, you can quickly find any app or contact on your phone by typing in a letter or two, and you can also perform a standard web search by typing out the full term and then selecting the “Search on Google” (or any alternate search engine you choose) option.
4. Finally, with a swipe up on any area of your home screen, you summon Lynx’s “Desktop” area. It’s basically an extra on-demand home screen panel where you can store any combination of shortcuts and widgets for easy ongoing access without having ’em constantly in your face.

The Linux-inspired Lynx Launcher has a sleek and simple primary home screen (at left) with some unusual elements around it, including an especially effective and easy-to-use app drawer (at right).

JR Raphael / Foundry

Lynx packs plenty of customization options, too, ranging from details of the launcher’s appearance to more functional changes related to which interface elements are and aren’t present and how exactly they work. And it sports a host of custom gestures you can set for launching apps or performing system functions with all sorts of different swipes, if you want to go down that road.

Lynx is free to use in its base form with an optional $4 pro upgrade to unlock some of the more advanced customization possibilities.

In short: Whether you love Linux or just appreciate a sleek, simple setup with plenty of practical touches, Lynx Launcher is an unconventional Android home screen contender that’s well worth your while to try.

7. Before Launcher: Minimalist focus

Speaking of simplicity, ever feel like you’re spending too much time on your phone? Before Launcher is all about giving you a minimalist, no-frills home screen for distraction-free productivity — a setup its creators claim can help you open your phone a whopping 40% less than you do now.

Before’s primary home screen panel is a plain-as-can-be text-based list of your most frequently accessed apps, with not a single icon or eye-catching flourish to be found. If you need to get to something else, you can find a complete list of installed programs one panel over to the right. And to the left sits a filtered notification drawer that can hide low-priority notifications and make ’em available only when you actively opt to seek ’em out.

From the plain-text primary home screen to the built-in notification filtering system, less really is more with the understated Before Launcher.

JR Raphael / Foundry

Before has some simple options for customizing the appearance of your home screen and creating a couple of custom gestures, but it’s all pretty barebones and basic by design. The launcher also offers an optional $7 Pro upgrade that adds in a handful of more advanced features, including a custom folder and label system for apps and the ability to hide apps entirely out of view.

In short: If you want the utmost in simplicity and a setup that keeps distractions almost entirely out of sight, Before Launcher is just what the minimalist ordered.

This article was originally published in June 2019 and most recently updated in December 2025.

Enterprise IT execs know well the dangers of relying too much on third-parties, how automated decision systems need to always have a human in the loop, and the dangers of telling customers too much/too little when policy violations require an account shutdown. But a saga that played out Tuesday between Anthropic and the CEO of a Swiss cybersecurity company brings it all into a new and disturbing context.

The tale began when Tom Hoffman, the CEO of a Swiss cybersecurity company called Wicked Design, on Monday received an alert from Anthropic’s system that the company’s entire account had been cancelled due to an automated review that supposedly found unspecified policy violations.

Hoffman knew the best way to get that addressed was with social media support, so he wrote about it on LinkedIn. He also alerted some people who worked at Anthropic, including the head of product legal. The latter responded, saying he’d flagged the issue internally for review. “We are working on the automated ban stuff,” said the Anthropic attorney.  (Hoffman shared multiple Anthropic screen captures with Computerworld.) 

Within a day, the account was restored — sort of. The new alert told him: “Earlier this week, your account was disabled by an automated system for being in violation of our Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy. Upon further investigation, we believe this was an error and your account has been reinstated. We apologize for the inconvenience and for your patience.” 

Hoffman briefly celebrated, logged in and found that most of the account — 80% of company projects and data, he said — was missing.

When he asked Anthropic’s automated system how to restore those files, the system replied, “I understand how frustrating this must be. When a user is removed and later re-added to an organization, previous projects and their associated chats are not restored — even if you use the same email address. Unfortunately, there’s no way to restore or transfer these previous projects back to your account once you’ve been re-added.”

But the message also said the files could be restored if the company paid. Apparently, that “there’s no way to restore” reference doesn’t apply if money changes hands. “Reactivating your subscription will restore access to all your previous projects,” Anthropic said. 

(After Hoffman paid the money, the files were restored, he said.)

As amusing — and simultaneously terrifying — as that back-and-forth is, it highlights key issues for enterprise IT.

AI third-party dependency

This is nothing new, though most fears about AI vendor dependency involve outages and cyberattacks. The idea that an AI vendor’s automated system could cancel an account with no details, no warning and no easy way to make your case to a human, is where the really annoying part kicks in.

In an interview, Hoffman said that despite everything that happened, he plans on sticking with Anthropic. Why? 

“Their service is quite good and where else am I going to go?” Hoffman said, adding he has no reason to believe Microsoft, AWS, Google, OpenAI or Perplexity — or even Oracle or IBM — would be any better at avoiding this problem with being cut off. (Computerworld reached out to Microsoft, Google, AWS, Anthropic, OpenAI and Perplexity for comment. None offered any comment.)

There’s another concern Hoffman noted. Given that these firms typically share no details about the rationale for a cancellation, that could provide cover if some government pressured them to punish a company using their service. Such retribution is far easier if an AI vendor already has a history of not saying why someone has been cut off. 

“I definitely don’t trust them anymore,” he said. “You want to build your business around AI integration. And it’s a crown jewel that someone else can easily switch off? What is your contingency plan? Maybe the next time [the account is cut off], I am not so lucky.”

What to tell customers who are being cut off

This issue requires a balancing act, which is where many vendors — and autonomous agents and bots — struggle. 

The argument for not giving detail information to customers is based in cybersecurity and anti-fraud protocols. On the chance that the disconnected customer actually is a fraudster/cyberthief/state actor, telling them specific details about how their bad behavior was detected could be a mistake. It might allow them to refine tactics, steal a new identity and try again, perhaps more successfully.

The argument for telling customers as much as possible is housed in fairness for the customer, allowing them a meaningful chance to address the accusations and mount a defense. Paying customers certainly deserve that.

The answer, I would argue, is squarely in the middle. It’s not that difficult. Tell the customer enough so they can address the issue, but not so much a thief could find useful. Tell them what you think they did, not necessarily how you discovered it. 

Criminal lawyers do this routinely. When a suspect wants to ask prosecutors for an immunity deal in exchange for revealing information to help their case, they have to do this dance. Reveal enough that prosecutors can evaluate the offer and make a decision, but don’t reveal so much they have no reason to make a deal.

Using automated decision software

This is an easy one, in theory. But when vendors face serious cost-cutting pressures, it can get a lot harder. Having a human in the loop is critical. 

But just that is not enough. If software recommends 11,000 customers be disconnected — and one person has 30 minutes to make decisions — that’s not a serious attempt at human management of the process. 

The software should detect issues, but humans must actively review them. Yes, there are edge cases, such as when lives are in danger, where an account needs to be immediately suspended, prompting a follow-up investigation. But those cases are rare. Most times, giving advance warning to a customer and letting them respond before a decision is made is preferable.

Having a person discuss the case

This is another time where money comes into play. If a vendor wants to make a secure environment for all, it needs to be staffed to discuss customer cutoff decisions. And these people need to be sufficiently senior to be able to overrule the software and immediately reinstate customers. 

And there should be significant compensation for customers incorrectly accused of wrongdoing. That serves two purposes. One, it will make the customer less angry. Two, companies have little incentive to improve these automated systems if there is no financial pain for it making bad recommendations.

To be clear, if a vendor is paying out too much money to customers who’ve been falsely accused, maybe the software needs to be changed. With enough financial pain, that might actually happen.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, the chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said this cutoff situation is going to become more common and enterprises need to devise ways to deal with it.

“Silent shutdowns of paying enterprise accounts by AI and cloud providers are not rare enforcement anomalies,” Gogia said. “They are an emergent control risk created by automation, contractual discretion, and platform scale. [Roughly] 47% of global CIOs admit they have no defined response plan if a core cloud or AI provider suspends their account without explanation. This is not a security gap. It is a governance gap. 

“Enforcement systems now combine billing, fraud, policy, compliance, and reputational risk signals into a single automated decision path. When that path triggers, suspension is immediate and broad. Explanation is optional. Human appeal is uncertain. Continuity becomes conditional. Enterprises that now run identity, data, analytics, and production workloads inside these platforms are absorbing existential operational risk without visibility, proportionality, or procedural protection.”

The best way to mitigate this risk is contractually, Gogia said. “If a vendor can shut you down without telling you why, continuity is conditional. Enterprises must treat provider-initiated shutdown risk as a first-class governance issue,” Gogia said. “Procurement must demand bounded disclosure, defined 

A warning from Microsoft that a Windows patch issued last week may cause the Message Queuing (MSMQ) function in the operating system to malfunction could be behind multiple reports of internet of things (IoT) applications failing.

David Shipley, head of Canadian security awareness training provider Beauceron Security, says he saw a query on a Microsoft learning forum today asking if the MSMQ problem is behind the failure of a firm’s point of sale system to issue sales receipts.

Another person posted a query on a different Microsoft forum about a building in an unnamed city being without its fire alarm or smoke detector systems.

A link between these posts and the December 16 security update from Microsoft on the MSMQ issue couldn’t be confirmed. But Shipley said it is odd that Microsoft’s initial advice says that a workaround is available, but instead of detailing it, it urges admins to contact Microsoft Support For Businesses.

“The scariest words when it comes to a serious bug in Windows you’re trying to fix, that’s crashing your applications, is, ‘Call us,’” he said.

MSMQ is a protocol for secure messaging between applications, Shipley noted, so if there is a problem, “it’s going to break stuff.”

The Microsoft post says that individuals using Windows Home or Pro editions on personal devices are “very unlikely to experience this issue. This issue primarily affects enterprise or managed IT environments,” including those running clustered MSMQ environments under load.

Symptoms include:

• MSMQ becoming inactive;
• Internet Information Services (IIS) sites failing with “Insufficient resources to perform operation” errors;
• applications unable to write to queues;
• errors such as “The message file ‘C:\Windows\System32\msmq\storage*.mq’ cannot be created” when creating message files;
• misleading log entries such as “There is insufficient disk space or memory”, despite sufficient disk space and memory being available.

Affected are servers running Windows Server 2019 and 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012.

Also affected are PCs running Windows 10 version 22H2, Windows 10 version 21H2, Windows 10 version 1809, and Windows 10 version 1607. Support for Windows 10 ended October 14, so the issue should only affect these systems if admins have paid for extended support and received the December update.

This issue is caused by a December Patch Tuesday security update (KB5071546) that introduced changes to the MSMQ security model and NTFS permissions on the C:\Windows\System32\MSMQ\ storage folder. MSMQ users now require write access to this folder, which is normally restricted to administrators, says Microsoft. As a result, attempts to send messages via MSMQ APIs might fail with resource errors.

“A workaround is available for affected devices,” says the Microsoft update. “To apply the workaround and mitigate this issue in your organization, please contact Microsoft Support for business. We are investigating this issue and will provide more information when it is available.” 

Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at Action1, suggested as a temporary workaround for MSMQ failures that Windows admins grant write access to the MSMQ directory C:\Windows\System32\msmq. Once Microsoft provides the official update, revert the directory permissions to their original state and deploy the fix, he said.

Danny Nguyen of Wicloud suggested on a Microsoft Learn forum that admins could either roll back the December security update (KB5071546) or adjust the permissions, as Bicer suggests. However, Nguyen urged admins to consult with their security team before making system-level permission changes.

A Microsoft spokesperson was asked for comment, but no response was received by press time.

This isn’t the first MSMQ problem in recent memory; last year Microsoft discovered a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2024-30008) that carried a criticality rating of 9.8. 

In this case, however, said Robert Beggs, head of Canadian incident response firm DigitalDefence, although the cause of the issue is a security patch, the impact and workaround are not strictly security issues. Therefore, he believes the fix is a workaround that does not involve security and security support, but regular support for a Windows system. 

As for the company’s reason for asking admins to contact Microsoft Support for Business for the workaround, he suggested that Microsoft may want to spread the workload to ensure that security support is not overworked.

More broadly, warned Shipley, any update that leads to a business application failure is the kind of issue that turns admins off patching. December is the biggest month of the year for retail, and not the time for POS machines to go down because of the installation of a new patch.

IT leaders are setting their operations strategies for 2026 with an eye toward agility, flexibility, and tangible business results. 

Download the January 2026 issue of the Enterprise Spotlight from the editors of CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World and learn about the trends and technologies that will drive the IT agenda in the year ahead.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has opened up a new can of worms for the tech industry, with memory prices increasing rapidly as demand grows. In response to these increased costs, manufacturers will be forced to raise prices on their products, making for more expensive smartphones, computers, and more.

It’s a bigger problem than you think. Because while AI means we need more server-side memory to drive all those generative AI (genAI) cloud services, it also means we need more AI in the devices to handle edge intelligence queries.

Making more from less

Apple has always been reluctant to insert too much memory into its devices. The company has regularly argued that it makes more sense to optimize hardware and software to deliver the best possible performance, rather than simply throwing vast quantities of memory at problems. 

That’s why even as recently as 2023; iPhones shipped with just 4GB RAM inside. When AI truly hit the market last year, Apple doubled that to 8GB and now places 12GB memory in its highest end iPhones. 

While those memory levels are still lower than the quantity of RAM installed in similar smartphones, Apple’s systems are more efficient. It means that they can generate more computational performance for the same memory than competitors, and means an Apple Silicon iPhone can easily handle on-device AI, as well as multitasking — all with decent battery life. 

This extends to Macs, which also use Apple Silicon. 

Computers with better designers

As a result, Apple is a little less exposed in the coming memory price war than its competitors. Where other smartphones might carry 24GB of RAM, their performance is usually matched by an iPhone with half that. 

That’s not simply a happy accident; Apple’s systems are designed that way. (Design isn’t just how it looks, but also how it works.) If you think about it, one of the benefits of Apple’s historical disadvantages in PowerPC and then Intel processor performance is the company needed to figure out how to get more performance out of fewer computational resources.

That’s less of a problem with Apple Silicon, but a cultural preference for optimization supported by innovations such as Unified Memory is deeply woven into Apple’s DNA. The company has gotten used to squeezing out more from less.

Flogging the horse

Historically, critics and competitors have pretended to be blind to Apple’s approach. Rather than consider things like relative performance benchmarks between their chosen platform and Apple’s, they have insisted on pointing to the quantity of installed memory — ignoring iPhones or Macs that achieve near equal or (now) better performance on what is there. 

While it is true that Apple has made memory its Achilles Heel, mainly by charging way more than most for pre-installed extra RAM and failing to make memory a user upgradable component, what it achieves with the memory it does install is now a competitive advantage as RAM prices rise.

Feeling the pressure

The demand for more RAM inside devices means even low-tier manufacturers will need to put more of it inside their smartphones, tablets, PCs, and everything else – and the companies and products most exposed to this will be those less able to purchase memory in vast quantities in advance.

Smaller vendors will be pressured on manufacturing costs from below, even as they’re forced to compete more fiercely for sales at the more lucrative parts of the mid-range market (where Apple is now fighting, too). The company already plans lower-cost Macs and iPhones next year.

Looking at the impact of memory prices, Counterpoint Senior Analyst Yang Wang recently said: “Apple and Samsung are best positioned to weather the next few quarters, but it will be tough for others that don’t have as much wiggle room to manage market share versus profit margins.”

Siri’s chance to laugh last

These advantages apply even if Apple must negotiate new long-term supply deals for the component next year. There are few willing to reject the kind of money a memory supply deal for Apple’s products can generate, and even if cost does increase, that economy of scale — combined with Apple’s ability to squeeze more performance from less memory — gives the company a buffer. Indeed, if Apple manages to constrain any price increases in the next 12 months, its products can only end up seeming to be an even better value than those you can obtain elsewhere. Not only that, but thanks to Apple Silicon it also seems set to deliver devices increasingly capable of running AI at the edge, a privacy-protecting story enterprise users are searching for. And they’re likely to power the upcoming private-by-design Siri.

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