Industry news

Amazon cuts 14,000 from its corporate workforce in pursuit of agility and AI investment

The layoffs fall considerably short of the 30,000 number mooted in earlier reports.

Nonetheless, the cuts will affect almost every Amazon business, including human resources, operations, devices and services, and AWS.

The rationale behind the cuts is clearly presented in a statement from Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, Beth Galetti.

“Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well. Across our businesses, we're delivering great customer experiences every day, innovating at a rapid rate, and producing strong business results. What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly.”

Read the full article on Computing here.

Accenture has announced its Physical AI Orchestrator, a cloud-based platform designed to help manufacturers turn physical facilities into software-defined environments.

The system combines NVIDIA Omniverse technologies with AI agents from Accenture’s AI Refinery (a framework to help organisations build, train, and deploy AI models more efficiently) to create and manage live digital twins of plants and warehouses.

The idea is to bring together the physical and digital worlds of production. Virtual replicas of factories and warehouses run real-time, physics-based simulations to test changes or detect potential issues. AI agents then interpret the findings and translate them into precise actions, automatically adjusting production schedules, quality controls, or resource use across the physical site.

Read the full article on TechMarketView here.

Yesterday, Capita launched its new 'AI Catalyst Stack', as it continues to move towards what it terms "agentic BPO", a repositioning of its service delivery model around AI agents rather than traditional labour arbitrage.

Over the last twelve months, Capita has moved significantly to embed AI across its BPO operations, in particular addressing the UK public sector's evolving procurement expectations. With government increasingly mandating AI capability rather than treating it as a nice-to-have, Capita's timing fits with broader policy shifts around AI Growth Labs and digital service transformation.

Early operational metrics published by Capita suggest real impact beyond pilot-stage experimentation. The company reports 17% to 20% faster handling times and up to 35% productivity gains in customer experience operations, alongside 60% to 70% reductions in delivery cycles through repeatable AI products. These results, drawn from Capita's 'client zero' internal deployment, suggest production-scale viability.

Read the full on TechMarketView here.

Google has launched Gemini Enterprise, an AI platform combining six components through a single interface. The system integrates Google's Gemini models with a no-code workbench for coordinating AI agents, pre-built and custom agents for tasks such as deep research, enterprise data connections across Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Salesforce and SAP, centralised governance controls, and access to over 100,000 partners.

The platform includes several new capabilities. Google Vids converts presentations and other content into videos with AI-generated scripts and voiceovers. Google Meet now offers real-time speech translation that captures natural tone and expression beyond simple word translation. A Data Science Agent automates data wrangling, ingestion and exploration, whilst streamlining model development by generating multi-step training plans. The company has also introduced next-generation conversational agents with low-code visual builders and new extension frameworks for customisation.

Read the full article on TechMarketView here.

TCS continues to battle headwinds, delivering a resilient Q2 FY26 performance, posting revenues of $7.5bn with sequential constant currency growth of 0.8% but down 3.3% year-on-year. Perhaps more significantly, operating margins expanded 70 basis points to 25.2%, as the business adjusts to emerging operating environments (see TCS reduces workforce by 2% amid AI-driven skills shift).

The Indian IT services giant is pivoting heavily toward AI-led transformation, announcing plans for a 1 GW capacity AI datacentre in India and acquiring US-based Salesforce specialist ListEngage for a reported $73m. The company's ambition to become the "world's largest AI-led technology services company" gained credibility through a $10bn quarterly TCV and marquee wins including a seven-year $647m engagement with Scandinavian insurer Tryg.

Read the full article on TechMarketView here.

British employees are sounding the alarm over the rise of AI agents in the workplace, warning that the tools are unreliable, unresponsive to feedback, and in some cases creating more work instead of reducing it.

That's according to the Global State of AI at Work 2025 Report, commissioned by work management platform vendor Asana.

The study surveyed 2,025 workers worldwide, including 1,021 in the UK, and paints a picture of a workforce eager to embrace AI but held back by trust and oversight gaps.

Employees expect to hand off almost a third (32%) of their workload to AI within a year, and 41% within three years. Yet today, only one in four (25%) say they feel ready.

Even as use grows, confidence is lagging. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of workers describe AI agents as unreliable. More than half say the tools confidently produce incorrect results or ignore feedback altogether. Without clear accountability, mistakes go unresolved, undermining both efficiency and trust.

Read the full article on Computing here.

Human resources software giant Workday has disclosed a data breach following a social engineering attack that compromised a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

In a blog post on Friday, the California-based firm said attackers accessed some information stored on its CRM systems after targeting employees in a campaign that has also ensnared multiple global organisations.

However, Workday stressed that no customer tenants or their data were affected.

"We want to let you know about a recent social engineering campaign targeting many large organisations, including Workday," the company said.

"We recently identified that Workday had been targeted and threat actors were able to access some information from our third-party CRM platform. There is no indication of access to customer tenants or the data within them.

Read the full article on Computing here.

Hackers stole the personal information of 1.1 million customers in a July breach at US insurer Allianz Life, according to the data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.

In late July, Allianz Life – The US arm of insurance conglomerate Allianz SE – revealed that hackers had breached a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) database, stealing the personal information of the "majority" of customers as well as company employees.

"The threat actor was able to obtain personally identifiable data related to the majority of Allianz Life's customers, financial professionals and select Allianz Life employees," Brett Weinberg, a spokesperson for Allianz Life, said last month.

Allianz has nearly 2,000 staff in the United States and serves around 128 million customers worldwide.

Read the full article on Computing here.

A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has revealed that the vast majority of corporate generative AI pilots are failing to generate meaningful financial returns, despite widespread investment.

The report, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, published by MIT’s NADA initiative, found that 95% of pilots stall at early stages and never progress to scaled adoption. Only 5% of projects achieved rapid revenue growth.

Based on 150 interviews with business leaders, a survey of 350 employees and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments, the study highlights a growing divide between successful AI integrations and those that remain stuck in experimental mode.

Read the full article on Computing here.

The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) has published its ‘AI action plan for justice’, detailing the potential artificial intelligence (AI) has in helping reduce court backlogs, increase prison capacity, improve rehabilitation outcomes and enhance victim services. Implementation of the plan will be led by its Justice AI Unit, which was established in late 2024, with input from its Data Science, Digital and Transformation teams.

The policy paper focuses on three AI priorities: strengthening the MOJ’s foundations, embedding AI across justice services, and investing in the people who will deliver this transformation. The MOJ intends to deliver these priorities over a three-year period through the ‘Scan, Pilot, Scale’ approach used in the UK government's AI Opportunities Action Plan.