Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

After nearly a decade as engineers at Instacart, Champ AI’s founders learned a painful lesson: scaling a company can mean drowning in back-office busywork. Now they’ve raised $8.5 million to build AI agents that automate the work of back-office operations teams.”We’ve seen firsthand how operations teams deal with lots of manual processes and really struggle as a company scales,” Champ AI cofounder and CEO Jagannath Putrevu told Business Insider. There were orders to fix, store hours to update, fraud issues to investigate, and customer-support policies to follow. Much of that work required operations employees to tediously move between documents, internal…

New types of design tools, such as Perpexity-owned Visual Electric, Figma-owned Weavy, Flora, and Krea, have risen in popularity in the last few years, thanks to AI. These tools bank on the promise that, with AI, a product team with designers can iterate through variations quickly. A new design startup, Dessn, now backed by $6 million in funding, believes that design tools that don’t let you work directly on your codebase can limit you from being able to imagine new workflows and features. That’s why Dessn developed technology that allows startups to run their codebases in the cloud without any…

AI optimists have been reminded that not everyone sees the technology as a force for good. Loading audio narration… A speaker was booed onstage after saying, “AI is the next industrial revolution” at the University of Central Florida’s spring commencement on Saturday.”What happened? OK, I struck a chord,” said Gloria Caulfield, the speaker and Vice President of real estate firm Strategic Alliances for Tavistock Development company, upon hearing the boos.”Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” Caulfield continued. This time, she was met with cheers from the crowd.The reaction to the speech highlights a…

Spotify wants you to take a trip down music memory lane. Loading audio narration… The streamer is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a new data package, similar to its beloved Wrapped rollout. Spotify users can now see their all-time top songs, along with a handful of other nostalgic surprises.”This was an opportunity for us to give back and make people connect with their time on Spotify,” Marc Hazan, SVP of marketing and partnerships, told Business Insider. “We help soundtrack people’s lives.” Spotify’s “Party of the Year(s)” shows users how many songs they’ve streamed.  Spotify How to find your own “Party…

Amazon Ring, facing a surge in customer-support calls during last year’s holiday season, evaluated more than 40 AI voice vendors before choosing startup Vapi to handle its inbound phone traffic. Today, Ring routes 100% of its inbound calls through Vapi’s platform. That deployment helped Vapi raise a $50 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a valuation of around $500 million after investment, according to a person familiar with the matter. Ring turned to Vapi in mid-Q4 last year, when it was weighing whether to expand call-center capacity, rely more heavily on traditional automated phone systems, or deploy…

EBay has turned down Ryan Cohen’s unsolicited offer to take over its business, saying it’s better off on its own. Loading audio narration… The online marketplace giant said in a Tuesday press release that it has officially rejected the GameStop CEO’s $55.5 billion bid for the company.”We have concluded that your proposal is neither credible nor attractive,” eBay’s chairman, Paul Pressler, wrote in a letter to Cohen, before outlining six factors influencing the decision.They were:”EBay’s standalone prospects.””The uncertainty regarding your financing proposal.””The impact of your proposal on eBay’s long-term growth and profitability.””The leverage, operational risks, and leadership structure of a…

Colin Angle put the Roomba in millions of homes by giving it a simple job: cleaning the floor. Loading audio narration… Now, the longtime iRobot CEO wants his next home robot to do something harder to measure. His new startup, Boston-based Familiar Machines & Magic, has built a four-legged, pet-inspired robot meant to offer companionship, emotional support, and gentle nudges toward healthier routines.The company calls the robot the Familiar, a reference to the supernatural animal companions associated with witches. Familiar Machines will start selling it next year, and while Angle declined to say how much it will cost, he said…

Amazon is changing the way it builds data centers, to “future-proof” these giant facilities for the AI era. Loading audio narration… An internal AWS initiative known as “Titus” aims to dramatically accelerate data center construction while redesigning facilities to meet the demands of next-generation AI hardware, according to internal planning documents reviewed by Business Insider.”The objective of the Titus portfolio of program variants is to deliver the next AWS generational Data Center design,” one internal document states.The effort underscores how the AI boom is reshaping the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing, as increasingly power-hungry AI systems push data centers beyond…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Anand Ramanathan, who works at Meta and lives in New Jersey. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Loading audio narration… When I was choosing my undergraduate degree in the early 2000s, people told me to pick computer science, the hot field of the time. Instead, I studied physics, all the way to getting my Ph.D in 2011, because I really enjoyed it.In 2012, after working at NASA for roughly a year, I was thinking about what was next, and I looked into fields like defense contracting. My cousin,…

Like a lot of guys of the era, Eli Cohen had a great idea for an app back in 2010. But unlike many of his peers, whose musings were confined to bar hangouts and bad dates, he actually invested about $20,000 of his own money to try to bring the project to life. Unfortunately, his gumption only got him so far. Back then, “building software was painfully hard,” he says. He burned through his budget well before it got off the ground.What bugs him isn’t that the endeavor failed, it’s that a similar concept — the online education platform Udemy…