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Virgin Atlantic is piloting an OpenAI agent in to help with the 'customer journey'

2 weeks 6 days ago
Hello, operator? Book me to Memphis, Tennessee

Interview  For all the talk of the "agentic era" from AI vendors like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and just about everyone else in the space, corporate use of the technology is still tentative. Virgin Atlantic has been conducting flight tests of its website with an AI agent called Operator, and early results are promising, pointing the way toward how agents might actually be used to help customers book flights.…

Thomas Claburn

Microsoft's Big AI Hire Can't Match OpenAI

2 weeks 6 days ago
An anonymous reader shares a report: At Microsoft's annual executive huddle last month, the company's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT's growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users. OpenAI's iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft's best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling. It was a sobering chart for Microsoft's consumer AI team and the man who's been leading it for the past year, Mustafa Suleyman. Microsoft brought Suleyman aboard in March of 2024, along with much of the talent at his struggling AI startup Inflection, in return for a $650 million licensing fee that made Inflection's investors whole, and then some. [...] Yet from the very start, people inside the company told me they were skeptical. Many outsiders have struggled to make an impact or even survive at Microsoft, a company that's full of lifers who cut their tech teeth in a different era. My skeptical sources noted Suleyman's previous run at a big company hadn't gone well, with Google stripping him of some management responsibilities following complaints of how he treated staff, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. There was also much eye-rolling at the fact that Suleyman was given the title of CEO of Microsoft AI. That designation is typically reserved for the top executive at companies it acquires and lets operate semi-autonomously, such as LinkedIn or Github.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash

Microsoft To Kill Windows Maps App in July

2 weeks 6 days ago
Microsoft will remove its Maps app from the Microsoft Store in July 2025, delivering an "update" that renders the application completely nonfunctional. Following the cutoff, users won't be able to reinstall the app even if previously downloaded, according to a Microsoft support document. While the app will retain personal data like saved navigation routes and map URLs, this information will become unusable after the deprecation. The Maps application, a remnant from the Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile era, will disappear completely while Bing Maps will continue functioning as a web service through bing.com/maps. Microsoft hasn't provided specific reasoning for the decision to sunset the desktop application, which has existed as an increasingly anachronistic holdover from Microsoft's abandoned mobile platform efforts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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