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Ralph Lauren has launched a branded conversational shopping assistant — Ask Ralph — inside its U.S. mobile app, powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI platform, marking a deliberate move by a heritage luxury label to turn generative AI into a first‑party, shoppable styling experience for customers. Background Ralph Lauren’s Ask Ralph arrives at the intersection of two clear industry currents: the rapid consumer adoption of conversational AI interfaces and brands’ desire to retain editorial...

Microsoft has quietly added a simple but consequential toggle in Microsoft Edge Dev that hands users explicit control over whether the browser’s Efficiency mode follows Windows 11’s system-level Energy Saver or stays enabled all the time—an integration that tightens the browser’s power-management behavior with the operating system but also raises questions about default behavior, user consent, and real-world trade-offs for performance and battery life. Background Microsoft Edge long offered...

EY’s Simon Brown frames the challenge clearly: agentic AI is no longer an abstract tech trend — it’s a workforce engine that will rewire HR, L&D and organizational culture, and the time to prepare is now. Background Simon Brown, EY’s Global Learning & Development leader, has spent the last two years building programs to ready EY’s roughly 400,000-strong workforce for an AI‑driven future. That headcount and his remit are listed on EY’s official people pages, which describe him as leading...

ANZ’s incoming restructuring will cut about 3,500 permanent roles and review a further ~1,000 managed‑services contractor engagements, with the bank’s retail and technology divisions set to shoulder much of the impact—moves the company says are aimed at removing duplication, simplifying operations and strengthening non‑financial risk controls, but which pose immediate operational, security and talent‑retention challenges for one of Australia’s largest financial institutions. Background ANZ...

Microsoft’s Office productivity stack is entering a new phase: after years of leaning hard on OpenAI, Redmond is reportedly adding Anthropic’s Claude family to the mix and routing certain Copilot workloads to the company’s Sonnet models — a pragmatic pivot toward multi‑vendor, workload‑specific AI that aims to improve speed, reduce cost, and hedge commercial risk while keeping the Copilot user experience consistent. Background Microsoft’s 2023 push to embed large language models into...

Dave Plummer’s off‑hand confession that his Windows NT port of the beloved 3D Pinball: Space Cadet rendered “as fast as it could” and eventually spiked into the thousands of frames per second is a compact engineering parable: a tiny timing assumption left unchecked, harmless on 1990s hardware, became a CPU‑pegging runaway as processors accelerated, forcing a surgical fix that capped the game’s framerate and restored sanity to developer workstations. Background 3D Pinball: Space Cadet...

September’s Patch Tuesday delivered a predictable mix of Windows fixes and the usual Office headaches — but this month the spotlight belongs to SAP, where a string of actively exploited and high-severity NetWeaver flaws demand an urgent, prioritized response from enterprise teams. Background Patch Tuesday remains the backbone of enterprise risk management: Microsoft, Adobe and other vendors cluster fixes on the second Tuesday of the month so administrators can plan testing and rollouts. In...

Microsoft’s internal playbook has shifted: the company has moved decisively to limit open employee speech and reassert physical presence as a baseline for collaboration, coupling tighter moderation of internal channels and heightened on‑campus security with a phased requirement that many staff return to the office at least three days a week. Background Microsoft spent the pandemic years as the visible poster child for hybrid collaboration—promoting Teams and Microsoft 365 as the backbone of...

Microsoft has quietly begun the most consequential recalibration of its productivity‑AI stack since Copilot’s debut: Office 365 will now route select Copilot workloads to Anthropic’s Claude family—most notably the Sonnet 4 lineage—alongside continued use of OpenAI models and Microsoft’s own engines. This is a deliberate, workload‑centric shift toward a multi‑model Copilot architecture that prioritizes the right model for the right task, not vendor exclusivity, and it has immediate...

Korea Telecom’s shift from a fragmented file sprawl to a unified, AI-augmented knowledge layer shows how Microsoft 365 Copilot can be the hinge between legacy habits and modern information workflows, delivering faster discovery, clearer context, and measurable productivity gains across a large enterprise. Background / Overview For decades, enterprises have wrestled with the same document problem: steady daily file creation combined with decentralized storage habits leads to duplicated...

Microsoft’s Office 365 product line is poised for a material AI shift: sources say Redmond will begin routing certain Copilot and Office features to Anthropic’s Claude models — notably the Sonnet 4 family — alongside continued use of OpenAI and Microsoft’s own models, a move that reflects both product optimization and strategic risk management inside the company. Background Microsoft’s multi-year bet on generative AI has been defined by an unusually close relationship with one vendor...

The Trade Desk is betting that AI will be a growth engine — not an existential threat — but the company's fate now hinges on an unmistakable tension: can Kokai and a push into CTV and retail media offset the structural supply loss that AI‑powered search and summarized discovery are already imposing on the open web? Background The Trade Desk (TTD) built its reputation as the independent demand‑side platform (DSP) for advertisers who want transparency, granular control, and an alternative to...

Microsoft’s move to fold Anthropic’s Claude models into Office 365 marks a clear turning point in the company’s AI strategy: after years of heavy reliance on OpenAI, Microsoft is now building a multi-vendor, task‑optimized Copilot that mixes Anthropic, OpenAI, and its own in‑house models to balance performance, cost, and operational risk. Background Microsoft’s Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout since 2023 leaned heavily on OpenAI’s GPT family to add generative AI into Word, Excel, PowerPoint...

Cartoon of a plump, rosy-cheeked old man in bed with a nightcap, claiming he rises at 10:30.

Flyoobe is the newest, most complete tool in the growing toolkit that lets you install Windows 11 on machines Microsoft deems “incompatible” — and it does more than just bypass TPM and Secure Boot checks: it also lets you strip out built‑in apps, customize the Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE), and run scripted setup extensions so the first boot looks and behaves the way you want. Background / Overview Windows 11’s strict hardware rules (TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, recent CPU families and instruction...

Visual Studio 2026’s first Insiders build lands as a clear statement: Microsoft intends to make AI the connective tissue of the IDE while simultaneously modernizing Visual Studio’s foundation for the .NET 10 era. At VSLive! San Diego Microsoft unveiled Visual Studio 2026 (internal version 18.0) in the new Insiders Channel, pairing deep GitHub Copilot integration — from adaptive paste to an AI-powered profiler — with a refreshed Fluent UI, faster solution and build performance, and...

Microsoft’s surprise agreement with Nebius to supply large blocks of AI compute to Azure marks a strategic pivot: rather than racing to open more hyperscale data centers itself, Microsoft is contracting external “neocloud” capacity to close short-term gaps in U.S. availability while it rebalances how and where it invests in AI infrastructure. Multiple financial and industry reports place the headline value at roughly $17.4 billion over the initial term, with tail value and optional services...

Microsoft’s latest internal reset marries a stricter return‑to‑office mandate with tighter controls on employee speech — a move that recasts the company’s post‑pandemic workplace policies as a strategic lever in its high‑stakes push into artificial intelligence. The company has closed or curtailed long‑standing open forums used by employees to question senior leadership, tightened campus access after an on‑site sit‑in, and ordered many staff who live near Microsoft offices back to the...

Microsoft’s September 2025 Patch Tuesday shipped a wide-ranging set of fixes addressing 80 CVEs across Windows, Office, virtualization, and platform components — with eight rated Critical and 72 rated Important — and included several high-profile fixes for SMB, NTLM, NTFS, Office, SharePoint, and Hyper‑V that require rapid attention from administrators and security teams. Background Microsoft’s monthly security cadence continues to be the primary mechanism for shipping fixes for...

Ralph Lauren has quietly embedded a branded AI stylist into its mobile app — Ask Ralph — a conversational, shoppable assistant developed with Microsoft on the Azure OpenAI platform that delivers brand‑curated, head‑to‑toe outfit recommendations and in‑app purchase actions to U.S. shoppers. Background Ralph Lauren’s Ask Ralph arrives at a moment when conversational AI is moving from experimental lab projects into consumer‑facing commerce. The brand frames the feature as the digital equivalent...