July 7, 2025

Producing tangible business benefits from modern iPaaS solutions

When a historic UK-based retailer set out to modernize its IT environment, it was wrestling with systems that had grown organically for more than 175 years. Prior digital transformation efforts had resulted in a patchwork of hundreds of integration flows spanning cloud, on-premises systems, and third-party vendors, all communicating across multiple protocols.  The company needed…

Technology

The Download: power in Puerto Rico, and the pitfalls of AI agents

June 17, 2025
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Puerto Rico’s power struggles On the southeastern coast of Puerto Rico lies the country’s only coal-fired power station, flanked by a mountain of toxic ash. The plant, owned by the utility giant AES,…

Puerto Rico’s power struggles

June 17, 2025
At first glance, it seems as if life teems around Carmen Suárez Vázquez’s little teal-painted house in the municipality of Guayama, on Puerto Rico’s southeastern coast. The edge of the Aguirre State Forest, home to manatees, reptiles, as many as 184 species of birds, and at least three types of mangrove trees, is just a…

AI copyright anxiety will hold back creativity

June 17, 2025
Last fall, while attending a board meeting in Amsterdam, I had a few free hours and made an impromptu visit to the Van Gogh Museum. I often steal time for visits like this—a perk of global business travel for which I am grateful. Wandering the galleries, I found myself before The Courtesan (after Eisen), painted…

What does it mean for an algorithm to be “fair”?

June 17, 2025
Back in February, I flew to Amsterdam to report on a high-stakes experiment the city had recently conducted: a pilot program for what it called Smart Check, which was its attempt to create an effective, fair, and unbiased predictive algorithm to try to detect welfare fraud. But the city fell short of its lofty goals—and,…

When AIs bargain, a less advanced agent could cost you

June 17, 2025
The race to build ever larger AI models is slowing down. The industry’s focus is shifting toward agents—systems that can act autonomously, make decisions, and negotiate on users’ behalf. These AI agents are already being deployed in customer service and programming—and, increasingly, in e-commerce and personal finance. But what would happen if both a customer…

The Download: how AI can improve a city, and inside OpenAI’s empire

June 16, 2025
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How AI can help make cities work better In recent decades, cities have become increasingly adept at amassing all sorts of data. But that data can have limited impact when government officials are…

How AI can help make cities work better for residents

June 16, 2025
In recent decades, cities have become increasingly adept at amassing all sorts of data. But that data can have limited impact when government officials are unable to communicate, let alone analyze or put to use, all the information they have access to. This dynamic has always bothered Sarah Williams, a professor of urban planning and…

The U.S. Navy is more aggressively telling startups, ‘We want you’

June 15, 2025
While Silicon Valley executives like those from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI are grabbing headlines for trading their Brunello Cucinelli vests for Army Reserve uniforms, a quieter transformation has been underway in the U.S. Navy. How? Well, the Navy’s Chief Technology Officer Justin Fanelli says he has spent the last two and a half years focused […]