Providers and deployers of AI systems: You only have a couple of weeks left until you must explicitly inform users when they are interacting with AI content.

To assist in the effort, the European Commission (Commission) has published guidelines to help AI deployers get in line with the AI Act’s transparency obligations, which will begin to go into effect on August 2.

After that, companies providing AI systems must alert users when they are interacting with AI. They must also tell users when they have been exposed to deepfakes, “emotion recognition,” or biometric categorization systems, or when they are given AI-manipulated content in matters of “public interests without human review or editorial control.”

Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive VP for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said in a statement, “with today’s guidelines, the Commission supports the smooth and effective application of the AI Act to make AI systems interacting with people such as chatbots and AI agents and AI content more transparent and trustworthy. These guidelines support providers and deployers in meeting their obligations under the AI Act, while helping citizens know when they are interacting with AI.”

Systems must include machine-readable markers to reveal such content, to reduce “the risk of deception and manipulation” and build public trust in AI.

“Generative systems have collapsed the cost of producing convincing content while the cost of judging it stands where it always stood,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. This requirement is “an attempt to restore friction to that imbalance.”

A company’s non-compliance could result in fines anywhere from €750K (about $856K) to €15M (about $17 million), or even up to 3% of its total worldwide annual revenue.

Transparency requirements

The EU AI Act’s transparency requirements apply to “natural or legal persons,” public authorities, agencies, or other bodies that develop AI systems, or have them developed, and place them on the EU market or into use under their name or trademark. This means all companies, regardless of whether or not they are EU-based.

“Systems placed on the European market, put into service there, or producing outputs used there are inside the field, wherever the developer sits,” Gogia noted.

Applicable systems must be intended to interact directly with “natural persons”; these systems include AI-enabled chatbots or conversational agents, AI companions, or coding agents. However, AI-enabled tools like recommender systems, spam filters, authentication, search and retrieval, transcription, text and code auto-completion, or predictive maintenance do not fall under the rule.

Specific outputs such as AI-generated text, images, video, and audio must contain a machine-readable mark. Deepfakes and public interest-related text created by AI without human review or control must be clearly labeled, however, deepfake content that is “artistic, creative, satirical, or fictional” is largely exempt.

AI content must be marked with one of three labels: “AI,” “Fully AI-generated,” or “Partially AI-modified.” For instance, “Fully AI-generated” applies when news summaries, music, art, or videos have been created without any human oversight (apart from prompting), while “partially AI-modified” could mean a person’s face is swapped into an authentic photograph to create a deepfake.

The three icons are publicly available for free use; enterprises can download zip files in PNG and SVG formats.

Most of the Act’s transparency rules begin to go into effect on August 2. But AI systems placed on the market before then will have some leeway; they must be in compliance by December 2.

However, a four-month allowance “on one obligation, for one population of systems, contingent on one procedural step, is not a strategy,” Gogia emphasized. Enterprises should plan to comply by August 2 and “treat any relief that arrives as margin.”

A consistent code of practice

Along with the transparency guidelines, the Commission has introduced a code of practice that essentially serves as a gesture of good faith. When signed, it can provide “legal certainty” and a “simple and practical” way to demonstrate compliance with the AI Act, according to the Commission. Signatories can also collaborate through the ‘Signatory Taskforce,’ which will share practices and advance technologies around marking and labeling practices.

Providers that choose not to sign must comply through other methods and demonstrate that those methods are “adequate” through assessment by surveillance authorities, according to the Commission.

Non-signatories “keep their flexibility, and will face more case-by-case scrutiny for it,” said Gogia.

Criteria for compliance

Shashi Bellamkonda, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, pointed out that the transparency requirements apply to content only when three criteria are met: It has been published, is informative to the public, or is on matters of public interest.

B2B business content or blogs may not need an AI disclosure if they do not meet these criteria, he noted. Also, published text that has undergone human review or is under editorial control does not need to be labeled. Editorial control means that a person must hold the ultimate legal responsibility for the publication of the content.

Many companies like Google, Adobe, and LinkedIn have already established ways to identify images marked as AI-generated. Meta has made it a requirement, but the creator has to add the AI-generated label, Bellamkonda said.

“This is a good move for guardrails around public information, and companies with good compliance and ethical oversight may not have to worry about this,” he noted. But as a general practice, companies should disclose AI-generated content and state whether it has been human reviewed.

Creating a transparency pipeline

Establishing full transparency means identifying who carries the responsibility for the content, whether the marking survives real use, not just testing, and what evidence will defend the decision, Gogia said.

Concerns cluster around responsibility, durability and evidence. Several organizations usually touch one piece of content, and none controls the whole chain, which is why contracts become the “pressure point,” he said. Most current agreements were written to deliver software and say “almost nothing” about provenance persistence, verification access, or evidence retention.

The durability concern is the most difficult, Gogia noted, because marking performs well in controlled settings but “badly in ordinary life.” Meta, for one, said its invisible watermark was designed to survive cropping; a published test, however, found the company’s preview detector missed 55% of cropped images.

“CIOs should ask which platform can actually provide evidence before believing its dashboard,” said Gogia.

Disclosure of AI use must be “clear, distinguishable and accessible,” he emphasized. “A notice buried in lengthy terms, or reachable only through determined clicking, satisfies nobody, least of all a market surveillance authority.”

Sustained compliance is a “living control” requiring a central record of systems, duties and evidence; testing taking place where the user meets the control rather than where the developer built it; and continuous supplier assurance. Enforcement will vary by country, so keep one common baseline with local overlays, Gogia said.

His advice: Inventory every system that talks to people, generates content, or gauges sentiment; classify provider and deployer roles; place disclosures at first interaction; define substantive human review; keep the evidence.

Marks and provenance signals should be tested after content undergoes cropping, compression, translation, transcription, and other editing, Gogia said. A useful audit starts from a real output and follows its “pulse” through generation, editing and publication, identifying at “each beat” the responsible party, the surviving mark, and evidence for exceptions. Missed labels should also be traced for root cause and recurrence.

To ensure compliance, before August 2, enterprises need a prioritized inventory, live disclosures on the highest-risk use cases, and a “named owner for every control,” he noted. In the first 30 days, they should stabilize and test; in the first 90 days, push requirements into procurement processes as a standing discipline. Procurement must secure commitments on marking methods, known failure modes, and evidence access, with explicit notice if/when any of them change.

“The sensible architecture is a common transparency baseline carrying traceability, responsibility, and evidence, with jurisdictional overlays for language, sector rules, and local practice,” Gogia said.

This article originally appeared on CIO.com.

Building a presentation can take lots of time. There are design choices to figure out: the slide layouts, fonts, theme colors, and so on. You can use a template to skip this hassle, but you still have to paste your text and other content into the slides and edit it all so that the results are visually appealing.

In PowerPoint, Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant can now automate the heavy lifting of presentation creation. It can generate a first-draft presentation in minutes, then help you edit it. You can also prompt Copilot to help you quickly understand the contents of a presentation and glean insights from it. Use the tips in this guide to save oodles of time as you create and work with presentations.

Who can use Copilot in PowerPoint

Individuals with a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, or Premium subscription have access to Copilot from within PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps. Users with a Premium plan have higher Copilot usage allowances and access to advanced AI features.

For business users, it’s more complicated. Organizations with more than 2,000 users must pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses for their users in addition to their regular Microsoft 365 licenses. Users at organizations with fewer than 2,000 users can use Copilot within M365 apps even without the M365 Copilot add-on licenses, but there are limitations in usage, speed, and feature availability.

To see what kind of access you have, log in to Microsoft’s Copilot Chat web hub and look for your name in the lower left corner. If you see “M365 Copilot (Premium)” under your name, you can use Copilot in M365 apps with priority access and advanced features. “M365 Copilot (Basic)” means you can use Copilot in M365 apps with lower-priority access and limited features. If you see “Copilot Chat (Basic)” or nothing below your name, you can’t use Copilot in M365 apps.

(Copilot Chat Basic users do get some Copilot functionality, including the ability to generate presentations, via the Copilot Chat hub. See our Copilot Chat tutorial for details.)

In this article:

• Working with Copilot in PowerPoint
• Create a presentation template
• Create a presentation from a document
• Add content from a document to a slide
• Refine your slide text
• Find or create an image
• Expand your presentation with relevant slides
• Summarize a presentation
• Answer questions about a presentation
• Help you navigate a large presentation
• Generate speaker notes and/or an FAQ

Working with Copilot in PowerPoint

First, let’s quickly go over the notable settings of the Copilot sidebar.

When you have a presentation open in PowerPoint, click the Copilot icon; it may be floating at the lower-right corner of your PowerPoint window or parked at the right end of the Ribbon toolbar. The Copilot sidebar will open along the right of the page. You’ll type your prompts to Copilot inside the chat window in this pane.

Agent mode: By default, Copilot can build a new presentation or make changes to an existing one in the main PowerPoint window. This is known as “agent mode.” To change this so that Copilot can’t take direct action on a presentation (all its responses appear in the sidebar), click the Allow editing button above the chat window and change it to Chat only.

The tips in this guide require that Copilot be in agent mode, so make sure you see Allow editing above the chat window.

Choice of AI model: Behind the scenes, Copilot has access to various genAI models, including different versions of Anthropic Claude and OpenAI GPT.  By default, it decides which model to use based on your prompt. You can set it to use a particular model: click Auto at the upper right of the Copilot pane and select a model from the dropdown that opens.

The tips in this guide should work fine on the default Auto setting. But feel free to experiment switching to specific models to see which give you the best results for particular tasks.

Important: Remember that generative AI output often includes errors, so always check Copilot’s output for accuracy. (Also see our tips for reducing hallucinations in Copilot.) You’ll likely want to rewrite it in your own voice as you’re reviewing it.

1. Create a presentation template

For many people, the hardest part of creating a presentation is getting started. What types of information should be included on the slides, and in what order? Copilot can give you a leg up by creating the type of presentation you need, with placeholder data that you can later replace with your own.

Start a new presentation, open the Copilot sidebar, and type your prompt into the chat window. It’s best to provide very specific details in your prompt. The more context or details you provide, the more likely Copilot will generate a presentation template that suits your needs.

A good prompt should contain the slide count, subject, audience, and tone. Example:

• Create a 6-slide presentation for a sales meeting focusing on Q1 revenue. The audience is the sales team, so keep the tone professional and focused on the sales data.

Copilot may ask a series of follow-up questions, such as your preferred visual style and desired level of detail. Then it will generate a presentation template.

You can optionally prompt Copilot for revisions, and when you’re happy with the template, swap in your own data.

2. Create a presentation from a document

You can attach a document (such as a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or PDF) and prompt Copilot to generate a presentation based on its contents. This works best with a structured-format document (such as a business plan, project proposal, or summary report) that contains sections with headings.

Copilot can extract the document’s text and structure to generate the slide content for the new presentation. This can especially be useful for quickly turning a long report into a visually appealing presentation.

In the Copilot pane, click the + icon at the bottom of the chat window. A list of documents that you’ve recently accessed appears. Select the one that you want Copilot to use. Alternatively, click the magnifying glass icon and inside its search box, type a few letters of the filename for the document you want. (Business users with an M365 Copilot license can select up to five files for Copilot to pull from when creating a presentation.)

Then in the chat window, you can enter a prompt that’s as simple as “Create a presentation,” although as always, providing more details and context is better. This is especially important for corporate users who reference multiple source files. It’s useful to tell Copilot what data to pull from each document.

Answer any follow-up questions that Copilot asks, and it will then generate the presentation.

Note: Your marketing department may have created one or more branded company templates for Copilot to work from. If that’s the case at your organization, simply open the appropriate company template as your first step. Then you can upload docs and type a prompt as described above. Copilot will create a presentation using the branded template.

3. Add content from a document to a slide

Manually copying text or other content from a document and pasting it into a new slide is a chore. Instead, you can prompt Copilot to extract information directly from a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or PDF to create new slides.

In the Copilot pane, attach the document using the same steps described in tip 2, then tell Copilot to create a slide from the document. As always, it helps to provide details such as the new slide’s focus or what data to include:

• Add a slide based on the attached document.
• Use the attached file to add a slide about the project budget that focuses on Q1 projections.
• Summarize only the financial section of the attached document as a slide.

4. Refine your slide text

A presentation should be visual and display only the core message. Conciseness and proper writing tone are essential for your slides, so that they don’t lose the attention of your audience.

You can prompt Copilot to refine text on an individual slide in various ways, such as rewriting it in a more professional tone or making it more concise. Highlight the text inside a text box on the slide. On the toolbar that appears over the highlighted text, click Edit with Copilot.

On the menu that opens, you can select a preset prompt to refine the text, such as Condense or Make professional. Or, at the top of this menu, you can type a prompt to rewrite the highlighted text.

Note that this feature affects all the text inside the text box. To rewrite only a portion of text inside a text box, you must split that portion out into a separate text box.

Alternatively, you can prompt Copilot to analyze your entire presentation and tighten up the wording throughout all of its slides. For example:

• Make these slides more visual and use less text.

5. Find or create an image

If you have Copilot generate a presentation from an existing Word document that contains images, it will incorporate those images into the presentation. If there are no images in the source document, you can ask Copilot to find or create one and add it to a slide.

To add a stock image or an image from your organization’s brand library, tell Copilot what you’re looking for:

• Add a stock photo of young adults in a cafe drinking boba tea.
• Add a photo from our asset library of young adults in a cafe drinking boba tea.

To have Copilot create an image using Microsoft’s Designer image generation tool, describe your desired image. As always, specificity is helpful:

• Create a photorealistic image of a diverse group of 5 or 6 fashionable young adults sitting in a cafe drinking boba tea. They’re smiling or laughing, and some are looking at their phones.

Just as you need to review any text output from Copilot, take a close look at generated images to be sure nothing looks off.

Also note that Copilot image generation isn’t always reliable in PowerPoint. For some time during our testing for this story, Copilot said it couldn’t create an image because “the image generation service is returning a server error on every attempt.” After about a day and a half, the service began working again.

6. Expand your presentation with relevant slides

As you’re building your presentation, you may find that it’s become text heavy. Or perhaps it could use more visually oriented slides to break things up and make its progression flow better. Copilot can generate and insert new slides that are based on the content of the slides already in the presentation.

In the Copilot pane, specify exactly where you want the new slide to go. This helps Copilot to analyze the content of the slides before and after where you want the new slide. Then it can generate a slide to bridge between the two slides. Examples:

• Add a slide after slide 3 about our competitive advantages.
• Add a slide after slide 11 that transitions to slide 12.

7. Summarize a presentation

Maybe you need a quick refresh of your presentation before an important meeting. Or maybe a co-worker has sent you a presentation that’s packed with lots of slides. You can prompt Copilot to generate a summary of the presentation’s overall messaging.

In the Copilot pane, just type “summarize this presentation.” You can also have Copilot flag key slides that contain important information: “show me key slides.”

8. Answer questions about a presentation

As you’re reviewing a presentation, especially one that you didn’t create and are not familiar with, you can get Copilot to pull key data points from its slides.

In the Copilot pane, type specific informational questions. Examples:

• What are the action items in this deck?
• What is the proposed budget mentioned here?

If Copilot can’t find the exact answer to the question you ask, it will provide related information from the presentation.

This method can also help you validate that your presentation includes everything you want it to. If you ask Copilot about the action items in a presentation and it can’t find any, you know you need to add them. (Copilot will likely offer to generate them for you based on the rest of the slides.)

You can even take this tactic a step further and ask Copilot if the presentation is missing any important data, if any slides are weak or confusing, if there are any awkward transitions, if there are key points that should be better emphasized, and so on.

9. Help you navigate a large presentation

In the business world, presentations with dozens of slides are not uncommon, such as for financial reports or project documentation. Trying to find a specific slide or multiple slides can be tough. Copilot can help you navigate such a presentation.

In the Copilot pane, prompt Copilot to find slides based on specific topics. Example:

• Show me the slides about the project timeline.

Copilot will analyze the presentation and reply with a list of links to the relevant slides. Click one of these to jump directly to that slide.

10. Generate speaker notes and/or an FAQ

Here’s a great timesaver when you’re preparing to show your presentation to an audience: Copilot can automatically generate suggested speaker notes for you, based on the content of your slides. Example prompt:

• Write speaker notes for every slide with one talking point per slide.

In a related feature, Copilot can create a frequently asked questions list (FAQ) for you to consult in your speaker notes or to present as a slide:

• Write an FAQ for these slides.

Copilot will ask where you want the questions and answers added — as a new slide at the end, integrated into the speaker notes of relevant slides, or somewhere else that you designate. Make a selection, and Copilot will generate the FAQ based on the content of your presentation.

Related reading:

• 11 cool things Copilot can do in Excel
• 9 ways Copilot can turbocharge OneNote
• PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 cheat sheet
• Copilot Chat: Your hub for document creation and analysis
• How to curb hallucinations in Copilot (and other genAI tools)
• Microsoft Copilot can boost your writing in Word, Outlook, and OneNote — here’s how
• More Microsoft tips and tutorials

Healthy software companies typically don’t suddenly eliminate one-fifth of their workforce, but monday.com is doing just that as it bets on flatter teams, AI agents, and customer implementation expertise as the winning combination in the AI era.

Monday.com co-founder and co-CEO Eran Zinman today announced the “very difficult decision” to reduce the AI work platform company’s global workforce by about 20%, or 620 people.

The move has nothing to do with increasing margins or replacing humans with AI, he insisted in his post on LinkedIn; rather, it’s a calculated decision to trim down and hone the company’s focus as AI becomes integral to day-to-day workflows.

“This is not a distress signal; it is a deliberate reset, disclosed with its price attached,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. “The industry has quietly swapped the meaning of productivity, and this filing is the clearest exhibit yet.”

A ‘significant opportunity’ in technology

In a SEC filing this week, monday.com said its restructuring plan reflects the “ongoing transformation of its product, marketing, and go-to-market strategy.” The move is intended to support a “leaner, more focused operating model” as the company continues to invest in its AI-driven strategy.

Zinman noted in his post that the company has shifted to “doing the work with AI and not just managing it,” and is focused on building environments where “people and AI agents [work] together in one workspace.”

In recent months, monday.com has evolved its products, strategy, and the way it serves its customers, and Zinman contended that “the organization we built for our previous chapter is not the organization that fits the new AI era.” Monday.com needs to “execute more decisively,” take on new challenges, and quickly respond to market changes, he said.

“We have never seen such a significant opportunity in software, driven by such exciting technology,” Zinman noted. He emphasized that the reduction is not to replace people with AI, nor to improve margins; the “vast majority” of savings will be reinvested into talent, products, and AI.

The restructuring will result in a “flatter organization” with fewer management layers and smaller, more autonomous teams, and monday.com also has a new go-to-market model, Zinman explained. Customers expect “deeper implementation support” as they deploy AI, and the company will work more closely with customers, increase its on-site presence, create new roles, and “adapt many existing ones.” In its SEC filing, the company said it expects to continue hiring in “key strategic areas” throughout 2026.

Workers will be expected to work better, “not harder,” Zinman noted. He pointed to several past examples where work could have been done in a few days, but instead took many months with “multiple meetings and endless friction.”

“This wasn’t people’s fault and everyone was frustrated by this,” he said. “Our new org changes ownership to allow people to make decisions and move fast.”

A spokesperson for monday.com declined to comment further on the staff reductions.

Monday.com’s key market advantages

Monday.com certainly isn’t struggling; the company expects 19% to 20% year-over-year growth in 2026.

“Companies in that position do not restructure because they must,” Greyhound’s Gogia noted. “They restructure because they have decided to become something else.”

Melody Brue, VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, pointed out that organizational redesign is important for real AI transformation, but while it can signal confidence to the market, it can still be “devastating” to humans.

While the company looks as though it’s trying to do right, that ultimately remains to be seen, she said. “There are often hidden internal bruises that can surface long after layoffs.”

Monday.com’s advantage is in its “structured substrate,” Gogia noted; its boards, permissions and typed workflows give agents something firmer to act on than just documents and chat history. The company highlights its natively built agents that can be configured by any team member, as well as connectors with Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and ChatGPT, and dedicated routes for external agents to authenticate and operate.

“For some time, the sharper enterprise question has been shifting from who has an agent to who owns the governed runtime in which an agent can safely act,” he said. “Structured work is a serious claim on that runtime.”

But parts of monday.com’s agent estate remain in staged release, and its product is ultimately “mid-transition,” Gogia pointed out; its agent builder carried a beta label as recently as March,. Also, the company’s pricing model changed in May to a hybrid model charging for seats as well as mandatory AI credits. And, while its AI-powered no-code builder monday vibe passed $1 million in annual recurring revenue within two and a half months, monday.com has not released subsequent outcomes, usage volumes, or attach rates.

Further, there’s an element of “gravity” with its competitors, he observed. Asana is reorganizing teams around agents, Atlassian is wiring agents into the developer estate, and others are simply bundling them into their offerings: Microsoft is doing so across the productivity stack, and ServiceNow across enterprise operations, each with identity and procurement built in.

“Their pull is strongest exactly where monday.com wants to grow, in the largest accounts, where control-plane depth and administrative reach decide the deal,” said Gogia.

Actions for the near-term

Going forward, buyers should focus on operating risk, not headline risk, Moor’s Brue noted. In practice, that’s continuity of service, roadmap consistency, and strength of enterprise support. Productivity should be valued as better outcomes per unit of organizational effort, not mere activity.

“It should be a measure of how much smoother, faster, and more effective the operating model becomes when AI is built into the work,” said Brue.

Gogia noted that strain surfaces first in customer service, and monday.com’s attention is being redistributed. The company’s annual report disclosed that its focus is now concentrated on the largest accounts, with support for medium-sized clients moved to an AI-first and human-supported model.

During the first month of the transition, buyers should track named account continuity and escalation times, he advised. By the first quarter, keep an eye on whether credit governance and admin controls mature on schedule, and if the roadmap beyond the AI estate keeps pace. By the half-year mark, determine whether promised implementation depth is producing outcomes or “simply more billable engagement.”

Support tiers should be enumerated in writing before renewal, and buyers should contract for “side exits,” Gogia emphasized, with overage pricing fixed in advance, the right to pause consumption, and portability for workflows and agent configuration “if the relationship sours.” Finance should also insist on monthly consumption reporting by capability. Further, integration efforts, partner dependency, and change management should be considered first-class costs of the agent era, “not as afterthoughts to a license.”

“A license was a known cost,” said Gogia. “A meter is a behavior, and behavior is harder to forecast than headcount.”

This article originally appeared on CIO.com.

OpenAI has launched Presence, an enterprise service for deploying voice and chat agents that can resolve customer and employee requests, potentially automating some work now handled by frontline support teams.

The agents can answer questions and operate IT systems, and enterprises can decide what actions the agents may take and when they should seek human approval for actions or transfer a case to a human.

OpenAI is already using Presence internally for its English-language phone support channel, where it verifies callers and uses account information to complete approved actions. The company said the system resolves 75% of inbound issues without human assistance.

Another OpenAI service, Codex, can be used to monitor agents and suggest updates or improvements to processes. In OpenAI’s own tests, suggestions from Codex helped reduce handoffs to humans by 15 percentage points over 10 days, it said. Presence also includes simulation and evaluation tools that allow companies to test an agent before deployment. The tests assess whether it reaches the correct outcome, follows company policy, and hands a case to an employee when required.

OpenAI intends each Presence deployment to deal with one kind of task, for example billing issues, insurance claims, or employee IT service requests, with agents getting only the knowledge and system access required for that task.

Presence is not a self-service product: Enterprises will have to sign up for the limited availability program, with integration performed by OpenAI or selected global systems integrators.

Companies exploring or testing Presence include Spanish bank BBVA, which is evaluating the service for everyday banking support in Mexico, and Japanese technology group SoftBank, which is using it in trials involving Japanese-language customer interactions. Australian insurer IAG is assessing whether the technology can help it respond to surges in customer demand during severe weather events.

Workforce impact

OpenAI’s announcement did not address the potential effect of Presence on employment. But its claimed automation rate raises questions about how the technology could affect staffing in customer service and other support functions.

Pareekh Jain, CEO of Pareekh Consulting, said CIOs should regard the 75% figure as evidence that the technology can work, rather than as a benchmark that every enterprise can expect to reach.

Jain said OpenAI’s deployment benefits from being built around the company’s own products and data. Large enterprises may achieve lower automation rates because they must contend with fragmented legacy systems, uneven knowledge bases and more complex compliance demands.

“Most organizations should expect lower initial automation levels that improve over time as the AI agent is refined,” Jain said.

The first workforce effect is more likely to be slower hiring than immediate layoffs, according to Tulika Sheel, senior vice president at Kadence International.

“The roles most exposed are likely to be repetitive, high-volume functions such as frontline customer support and routine back-office processing,” Sheel said. “However, I would expect the first impact to be on hiring and team growth rather than immediate large-scale job cuts. Over time, enterprises may redesign roles around AI-assisted workflows, with humans focusing more on complex cases, escalation, and relationship management.”

Jain said Tier-1 support agents handling predictable queries would face the most exposure. Broader reductions would become more likely only after companies reorganize their operations around the technology.

However, Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, said Presence is unlikely to increase the threat of job displacement because companies have used similar customer-support automation from vendors such as Genesys, NiCE, Five9 and AWS for years.

Enterprises are more likely to use Presence alongside employees, with AI handling routine requests while people remain responsible for work requiring judgment and empathy, Su said.

Cost and operational risks

Analysts said CIOs should examine whether Presence can maintain resolution quality as usage grows, since fewer human handoffs could leave employees dealing with a more difficult mix of cases.

“The key question is not simply how many tasks AI can handle, but whether it can handle them reliably at scale,” Sheel said.

The financial case will depend partly on the cost of connecting Presence to existing systems and maintaining the controls needed to govern its use, according to Jain. “Often the biggest cost of enterprise AI is not tokens but integration and governance,” Jain added.

Companies will need to determine what systems and data the agents can access, monitor their performance, and audit the actions they take. Those investments could offset early savings.

Su said the complexity of enterprise IT will make it difficult for OpenAI to automate entire workflows on its own. Enterprises will still need to work with other technology providers and human employees, while CIOs will favor systems that can be audited and integrated with existing infrastructure.

Jain said the economics could improve if companies use the same integrations and governance controls across additional workflows.

This article first appeared on CIO.

AMD executives took to the stage at its Advancing AI 2026 event in San Francisco today to detail the company’s next generation of AI infrastructure solutions, from Instinct MI455X AI accelerator GPUs and 6th Gen EPYC “Venice” CPUs, to Pensando networking, ROCm.AI software and its Helios rack-scale platform that ties it all together.

AMD has been working towards rack-scale AI system solutions for years. Its ZT Systems acquisition last year added valuable engineering talent and intellectual property that is now finally bearing the real fruits. Its Helios AI platform is a major platform evolution for AMD, with shipments scheduled to begin in the second half of this year (which is here and now).

The announcements at Advancing AI show how the company has engineered its AI platform solutions for large reasoning models, sustained inference and agentic workflows. These workloads pressure memory capacity, data movement, networking and CPU orchestration. AMD’s approach is to keep as much data close to the compute engines as possible and move it more efficiently throughout the system, but there’s deeper nuance here that’s obvious versus AMD’s chief rival, NVIDIA.  

AMD’s MI455X targets the AI memory wall

The Instinct MI455X GPU is the compute engine that fuels the Helios rack, and the first GPU based on AMD’s new CDNA 5 architecture. Built with a modular mix of 2nm and 3nm chiplets, it carries 432GB of HBM4 and 23.3TB/s of peak memory bandwidth.

Compared to AMD’s current MI355X, the MI455X offers 1.5 times the memory capacity, up to 2.9 times the peak memory bandwidth and up to four times the peak matrix performance with MXFP4 and MXFP8 data types, which are lower-precision numerical formats designed to accelerate AI processing while reducing memory demands. With MXFP6 (6-bit floating point), performance is rated at up to twice that of MI355X.

AMD also shared some actual, measured internal results using production silicon. The company claims MI455X delivers 3.8 times higher FP8 decode performance, 3.5 times more measured FP4 compute performance and between 2.5 and 3.5 times more networking bandwidth than MI355X, depending on the transfer path tested. Those figures provide more context than just numerical specifications, though they remain AMD-provided comparisons that will need independent validation.

The architectural choices behind the numbers are important. Reasoning models and long context windows require sizeable KV caches for maintaining AI attention states, while mixture-of-experts models frequently move large amounts of data across accelerators. MI455X should let more model data, activation states and cache remain local. New dedicated IP in hardware can transfer data while the GPU continues processing, and expanded cache and multicast capabilities are designed to reduce redundant data movement to further improve efficiency.

The aforementioned lower-precision formats can also raise throughput and reduce memory use, but model developers still have to determine where they can be applied without unacceptable accuracy loss.

AMD’s Helios rack takes aim at Vera Rubin

Helios is AMD’s primary rack-scale competitor to NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform. Each liquid-cooled rack combines 72 MI455X GPUs, 18 single-socket Venice host CPUs and Pensando networking technologies.

In its most complete, premium configuration, AMD rates Helios for 2.9 exaflops of low-precision AI compute, with 31TB of aggregate HBM4 capacity, 1.7PB/s of memory bandwidth, 260TB/s of bidirectional scale-up bandwidth and 43TB/s of scale-out bandwidth.

These are formidable figures, but they are technical specifications rather than actual application benchmarks. The more consequential development is AMD’s move from collections of eight-GPU servers to a 72-GPU shared-memory domain. Models too large for one node can operate across the rack without treating every exchange as a scale-out networking transaction, which benefits large-model inference as well as training.

AMD uses UALink over Ethernet, or UALoE, for an open standard scale-up fabric. Each MI455X provides 3.6TB/s of bidirectional scale-up bandwidth, while the complete rack delivers all-to-all connectivity through a single switch layer. AMD also claims six times more scale-out bandwidth per GPU than MI355X when MI455X is configured with three Pensando Vulcano 800 AI NICs.

While open standards give cloud providers more control over suppliers and system design, AMD and its partners now have to prove those components can deliver the predictable performance, reliability and deployment experience customers expect from a tightly controlled, more vertically integrated platform.

Finally, AMD designed Helios with automatic rerouting around failed links, virtual rack partitions, tray-level serviceability and rack-wide power, cooling and health monitoring. Major hyperscalers and potentially large-scale enterprise customers will likely key in on these capabilities, which can affect the availability, total cost and consistency of the AI services they consume.

Kind of like cowbell, AMD Venice gives agentic AI more CPU

AMD’s agentic CPU messaging regarding its upcoming Venice-based EPYC processors is mostly marketing speak, but the underlying requirement is very real. An AI agent can invoke retrieval, databases, security checks, code execution and other tools before a GPU generates a response. Running many agents concurrently increases the amount of conventional compute requirements surrounding the accelerators.

Venice scales to 256 Zen 6 cores with support for 512 threads, 16 memory channels, up to 1GB of L3 cache per socket, along with PCIe 6.0 and CXL 3.1 connectivity. AMD is also offering several Venice configurations for other applications, including general-purpose servers, high-frequency workloads, GPU hosts and high-density CPU sandbox systems used to execute agent tools.

Treating the CPU solely as a GPU host understates its role. Gateways, tokenization, vector search, databases and short-lived code execution stress different mixes of per-core performance, thread count, memory bandwidth and I/O. Specifically, AMD’s internal testing shows Venice significantly outperforming its current EPYC 9965 Turin CPU across five parts of the agentic AI pipeline, including gateway processing, context assembly, vector search, enterprise applications and short-lived tool execution. Individual gains vary by workload, but AMD details the overall generational improvement at up to a 1.7 times lift. As with the MI455X figures though, these comparisons come from AMD and will require independent validation.

Pensando networking and ROCm software advance

Keeping GPUs fed with data and coordinating traffic across racks directly affects utilization and operating costs. In fact, GPU utilization is a pretty sad state of affairs currently for some of the major frontier model providers.

As such, Pensando networking has become central to AMD’s roadmap. Helios can connect each MI455X to as many as three 800Gbps Vulcano AI NICs, while Salina DPUs handle front-end networking and infrastructure services.

On the software side, which is an equally critical component, AMD also introduced ROCm.AI, an AI-assisted development layer due to arrive in August. It includes reusable skills for coding agents, simplified management and Hyperloom, which can profile workloads, tune serving configurations, modify kernels and validate results.

These tools address two persistent AMD challenges: developer efficiency and ease of use, and software tuning. Automated optimization still has to produce repeatable gains without creating hard-to-maintain code, however. And while ROCm has progressed significantly over the last few years, NVIDIA’s CUDA retains an advantage in maturity, tooling and developer familiarity.

Customer commitments underscore rack-scale confidence

AMD now has commitments that give its MI450 generation and Helios considerably more weight. Meta and OpenAI have announced multi-generation agreements composed of up to 6GW of AMD compute capacity, with initial 1GW deployments planned for the second half of 2026.

Oracle plans a 50,000-GPU public cloud cluster beginning in the third quarter, while Microsoft will deploy Helios for Azure AI inference. Finally, just before the AMD event, Anthropic announced a strategic partnership for up to 2 Gigawatts of AMD-fueled AI compute, with its first gigawatt expected online in the first half of 2027.

Commitments of this scale reflect confidence in more than just MI455X performance. These customers are evaluating the complete architecture, including Venice CPUs, Pensando networking, ROCm software, rack integration, serviceability and AMD’s ability to deliver and execute across multiple product generations.

There is some financial alignment behind the agreements as well. AMD issued OpenAI performance-based warrants and committed to investing up to $5 billion in Anthropic. That context matters when evaluating these deals as market validation, but these planned deployments are substantial nonetheless and put Helios on a much stronger foundation as it begins shipping.

AMD expands its robotics and embedded foundation

AMD also expanded its physical AI portfolio, building on credible traction from its Xilinx-derived Kria adaptive system-on-modules and embedded technologies that are already powering robotics, machine vision and industrial automation applications.

The new Ryzen AI Embedded X100 combines up to 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, integrated Radeon graphics, a second-generation NPU and as much as 128GB of unified LPDDR5X memory shared across its compute engines. To me this looks a lot like a repackaging and optimization of the company’s Strix Halo platform, but with specific optimizations for the embedded space. Regardless, AMD is pairing X100 with the Kria AI Robotics Developer Platform, which includes a System Module or SOM, and a new Robotics Partner Network spanning hardware, software and platform providers.

Samples began shipping in June, with full production expected in the fourth quarter. This broader objective is to give developers a path across AMD x86 CPUs, GPUs, NPUs and FPGAs for real-time autonomous systems, rather than requiring them to assemble those hardware engines and software components independently.

Execution for AMD is now the test

AMD has assembled a credible platform for the burgeoning agentic AI market that’s blowing up currently with no signs of stopping. MI455X addresses memory and data movement, Venice handles dense agentic CPU workloads, Pensando networking connects global system resources, and ROCm.AI addresses software complexity. Finally, Helios assembles these components into a true competitive threat for NVIDIA’s latest Vera Rubin platform.

AMD’s open architecture may appeal to customers seeking supplier choice, but openness must also translate into reliable deployments, competitive total cost and software that does not require a significant rip-up. NVIDIA enters this cycle with a stronger ecosystem and far more rack-scale deployment experience. The true test will be how easily and reliably customers can integrate, operate and maintain these AMD solutions at scale.

As it stands, AMD now has major customers and a clearly defined architecture with systems engineering expertise behind it. Delivering Helios on schedule and showing that its performance claims translate into a real production workload throughput advantage and total cost of ownership gains will determine how much the competitive gap narrows. And of course, this is in a market that is clamoring for ever-more compute resources with a seemingly insatiable demand for AI services and capacity. That’s an environment for big iron success. Now AMD just has to deliver optimized, turnkey AI platforms. This is far easier said than done, but time will soon tell as deployments take shape this year.

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Microsoft cloud and Azure services hosted on the West Coast of the US went down for hours on Thursday when network connectivity failed. Although services running entirely within Microsoft’s West US cloud region were unaffected, any traffic entering or leaving the facilities was affected.

Microsoft has now published a Preliminary Post Incident Review (PIR) of the incident, reporting that connectivity was lost for five hours between 14.44 UTC (7.44 a.m. Pacific Time) and 19.41 UTC on July 23. The problem was caused when a set of IP routes was removed in error while isolating a device for routine maintenance.

Before starting the maintenance work, Microsoft checked that at least one of the two redundant paths to the facility remained operational. When it came to starting the work, however, automated systems included some additional devices in the perimeter to be isolated, and removing some IP routes that had not been included in the initial assessment.

Customers discovered the problems very quickly, and engineers identified the issue within the first hour and started to reconnect services.  Microsoft said the disruption had been caused by some “recent fiber maintenance activity”.

To minimize the risk of disruption from such errors in the future, Microsoft advised organizations handling mission-critical data to consider a multi-region approach.

The Azure outage was the second significant one to hit Microsoft this year. In February, there was a 10-hour disruption to US West and US East regions.

This article first appeared on Network World.