Call-centre stocks slide as investors worry AI makes them uninvestable
Call-centre stocks slide as investors worry AI makes them uninvestable

A guidance cut from Concentrix dragged the sector down and hardened a fear that automated agents are eroding the business of answering the phone. The fear that artificial intelligence would hollow out the call-centre business has been hanging over the …

StanChart’s former AI chief joins Accenture as Southeast Asia head
StanChart’s former AI chief joins Accenture as Southeast Asia head

David Hardoon, who left Standard Chartered after less than a year, will lead advanced AI for the region at a consultancy betting heavily on enterprise adoption. The corporate AI leadership market moves quickly enough that a year now counts as a tenure….

As a deadly heatwave grips Europe, Rome leans on a bracelet to watch its elderly
As a deadly heatwave grips Europe, Rome leans on a bracelet to watch its elderly

Dina Gazzella is 85, and on her wrist is a small black band that looks like a watch and does rather more than tell the time. “If I feel unwell, this is a lifesaver,” she told Reuters. In a summer that has turned lethal across Europe, that is not a figu…

Prosus profit roughly doubles as its e-commerce bets and Tencent stake pay off
Prosus profit roughly doubles as its e-commerce bets and Tencent stake pay off

For years Prosus was, in effect, a single bet wearing the costume of a diversified investor: a sprawling portfolio whose value rose and fell with one Chinese asset. Its latest results suggest the costume is becoming the company. Prosus reported revenue…

Cargo drone startup Elroy Air nears an $800m SPAC deal
Cargo drone startup Elroy Air nears an $800m SPAC deal

The maker of the autonomous Chaparral is in advanced talks to go public through a blank-cheque merger valuing the combined company at about $1bn. The SPAC, declared dead more than once over the past few years, keeps finding new uses, and the latest is …

Sarah Wynn-Williams sues Meta over efforts to keep her quiet
Sarah Wynn-Williams sues Meta over efforts to keep her quiet

For more than a year, the legal action in the Sarah Wynn-Williams affair ran one way: Meta against its former executive. That has now reversed. Sarah Wynn-Williams, the author of the Meta memoir Careless People, is suing the company over its efforts to…

Cannes insights: What a two-time major champion knows about marketing that CMOs don’t
Cannes insights: What a two-time major champion knows about marketing that CMOs don’t

For one week every June, the advertising industry decamps to the French Riviera to take its own temperature. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, now in its 72nd year, ran from 16 to 20 June 2025 and drew roughly 15,000 delegates from…

Berlin’s Almetra raises €16.3M to turn factory video into live data
Berlin’s Almetra raises €16.3M to turn factory video into live data

The Berlin startup points cameras at production lines, converts the footage into live data, and says it has lifted output at Bosch and ABB plants. Now it wants the US. Berlin startup that films what happens on a factory floor and turns it into live pro…

Two more Gemini researchers are leaving Google for Anthropic
Two more Gemini researchers are leaving Google for Anthropic

Two leading artificial intelligence researchers at Google are planning to leave for Anthropic, according to a Bloomberg report on June 24, the latest departures from the team behind Gemini and the second pair to head for the Claude maker inside a week….

Solo-maxxing: How tech taught Gen Z to monetise being alone
Solo-maxxing: How tech taught Gen Z to monetise being alone

We can no longer pretend that the bridge between generations is invisible, because it stands before us, growing wider every day, harder to cross and harder even to name. Nor can we deny that technology has had its hand in this rupture, since it has not…