This Week’s Top 5 Stories in AI

SAP Sapphire Round Up: The Suite of Business AI Innovations

SAP has unveiled a suite of AI innovations at its annual Sapphire conference, with the company forecasting productivity gains of up to 30% for organisations that implement the new technologies.

Firstly, the company has expanded its Joule copilot – an AI assistant that provides contextual support to users – and introduced additional AI agents designed to operate across multiple business systems and functions.

These developments form part of SAP's strategy to make what it terms ‘Business AI’ accessible throughout organisations.

“SAP combines the world's most powerful suite of business applications with uniquely rich data and the latest AI innovations to create a virtuous circle of customer value,” says SAP CEO Christian Klein.

“With the expansion of Joule, our partnerships with leading AI pioneers and advancements in SAP Business Data Cloud, we're delivering on the promise of Business AI as we drive digital transformations that help customers thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world.”

Muhammad Alam, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Product and Engineering, described the company's approach as a “flywheel of apps, data and AI” that enables organisations to overcome fragmented IT environments.

“In the age of AI, true differentiation will lie in how you create value from this end-to-end context for your organisation,” he says.

Will iPhone Designer Sir Jony Ive's OpenAI Move Hurt Apple?​​​​​​​

AI systems can now see, think and understand language – yet users still interact with them through keyboards and touchscreens designed for an older era.

This disconnect has created a fierce competition amongst technology companies to develop the first truly AI-native hardware.

But as innovative devices roll out across leading tech giants, from smartphones to Vision Pro headsets, AI develops again and again – and now, the challenge for the companies is increasing pressure to identify hardware opportunities beyond smartphones as AI evolution only speeds up. 

However, as a result of this disconnect between AI potential and user experience, a rare opportunity has blossomed for companies willing to be brave enough to reimagine how people interact with intelligent systems.

Spotting this opportunity, OpenAI has acquired io, a hardware startup founded by Sir Jony Ive, the former Apple design executive. 

“I think we have the opportunity here to kind of completely re-imagine what it means to use a computer,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI says.

“No one can do this like Jony and his team; the amount of care they put into every aspect of the process is extraordinary.”

The AI Round up of Nvidia's Announcements at Computex

Nvidia is at the heart of the AI industry. Once known primarily for gaming graphics cards, it is now dominating AI computing hardware.

The company’s meteoric rise has mirrored the explosive growth of AI itself – and now at Taiwan's annual Computex technology conference in Taipei, the largest computing-focused trade show in Asia, the company has announced the next generation of AI technologies.

At this year’s event, themed AI Next, Nvidia introduced many new innovations, including NVLink Fusion, a major development in AI infrastructure, which allows industries to build semi-custom systems with multiple interconnected chips.

This is Nvidia’s latest effort to strengthen its AI ecosystem through strategic partnerships. 

This is all while simultaneously addressing the growing need for more specialised and efficient AI computing architectures, as large language models (LLMs) and Gen AI applications continue to expand in size and complexity.

“A tectonic shift is underway: for the first time in decades, data centres must be fundamentally rearchitected – AI is being fused into every computing platform,” says Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of Nvidia, during his keynote presentation.

CoreAI and Microsoft Executives’ Principles for AI Success

As technology firms vie to establish dominance in AI infrastructure and development tools, developers, once focused primarily on traditional software engineering, now require entirely new frameworks, models and platforms to harness machine learning (ML) capabilities effectively.

As a result, Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI and integrated Gen AI capabilities across its product suite, aiming to consolidate its developer tools strategy under a unified vision as competitors intensify their efforts to capture market share in AI infrastructure.

Now, Microsoft has established a new engineering organisation called CoreAI – Platform and Tools as part of its strategy, as the company's executives identify AI as a fundamental shift in how software is built and deployed.

The newly formed CoreAI organisation will be led by Executive Vice President Jay Parikh and aims to accelerate Microsoft's roadmap in AI infrastructure.

The division is a consolidation of Microsoft's extensive investments in platforms, developer tools and infrastructure.

“By putting this all together in this vertically integrated approach, now the mission is very simple – it’s to empower every developer to shape the future with AI,” Jay says.

Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott describes the current AI evolution as potentially “the most important tech platform shift that's happened in our lifetime.”

The Next Generation AI Solutions with Dell and Nvidia

Dell Technologies has revealed significant updates to its Dell AI Factory collaboration with Nvidia.

The announcement introduces new infrastructure, software and managed services targeted at enterprises moving beyond initial AI experimentation into organisation-wide implementation.

The centrepiece of the announcement includes a new generation of advanced compute solutions featuring both air-cooled and liquid-cooled servers designed for different deployment scenarios.

The air-cooled Dell PowerEdge XE9780 and XE9785 servers integrate into existing enterprise data centres, while the liquid-cooled Dell PowerEdge XE9780L and XE9785L servers support rack-scale deployment.

These PowerEdge servers can be configured with up to 192 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra graphics processing units (GPUs) and the systems can be further customised with up to 256 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs per Dell IR7000 rack.

According to Dell, these platforms deliver up to four times faster large language model (LLM) training with the 8-way Nvidia HGX B300.

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