efficiency

China’s low-cost, open-source AI models have triggered a quiet but consequential shift in enterprise AI procurement: many businesses are choosing models such as Alibaba’s Qwen and the newcomer DeepSeek for production workloads because they are dramatically cheaper — and in some cases effectively...

Dignity has opened an in-house AI & Data Academy for 55 employees in a targeted push to convert decades of manual administration into data-driven, AI-augmented operations across more than 570 branches, aiming to cut repetitive work such as the processing of roughly 100,000 paper cheques every...

Valve’s long-running Steam Deck wishlist finally shipped a small but consequential battery- and OLED-friendly feature this month, while Microsoft quietly flipped a major switch in datacenter silicon with the announcement of the Azure Cobalt 200 — a 132-core Arm-based SoC aimed squarely at...

Microsoft has quietly begun building native support for video wallpapers into Windows 11 — a full-circle moment that revives a DreamScene-era idea while exposing difficult trade-offs around battery life, compatibility, and the long shadow of third‑party wallpaper engines. The capability...

A new Principled Technologies (PT) study — circulated as a press release and picked up by partner outlets — argues that adopting a single‑cloud approach for AI on Microsoft Azure can produce concrete benefits in performance, manageability, and cost predictability, while also leaving room for...

I stopped treating my Windows 11 PC like a personal to-do list and let five small automations do the boring, repetitive work — the result felt like a genuine speed boost in my daily flow. Overview Windows 11 is fast when it’s doing the heavy lifting, but it’s the tiny, repeated tasks — opening...

Microsoft is rolling out a major Notepad update that finally brings true on-device generative AI to Windows 11 — allowing users of Copilot+ PCs to generate, rewrite, and summarize text locally with no Microsoft 365 subscription or constant internet connection required. Overview Notepad’s AI...

Microsoft is weaving its AI assistant deeper into the Office experience by rolling Copilot Chat and agent capabilities directly into core Microsoft 365 apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote — bringing a unified, in-context chat pane and a raft of new tools aimed at turning an AI...

Windows 11’s keyboard shortcuts are not just a convenience—they’re the backbone of a faster, less distracted daily workflow for power users and knowledge workers alike, and a recent roundup that distilled “73+” essential combinations crystallizes why learning a compact set of keystrokes pays...

A new executive paradox is reshaping corporate strategy: while a large majority of CEOs privately fear that artificial intelligence could unseat them, those same leaders are aggressively folding advanced models into core operations—testing AI on the tasks that matter most to governance, finance...

Microsoft’s productivity stack is entering a new, more plural era: after years of deep integration with OpenAI’s models, Microsoft is reported to be adding Anthropic’s Claude — specifically the Sonnet model family — into Office 365’s Copilot workflows, creating a multi‑model orchestration that...

Microsoft’s choice to omit the x86 HLT (halt) instruction from Windows 95’s shipped idle path was not a bug or oversight — it was a deliberate, conservative engineering decision taken to avoid a catastrophic failure mode that, in lab and field tests, could leave some laptops effectively bricked...

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...

The UK Department for Business and Trade’s pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot returned a clear, measured verdict: staff liked the assistant, and specific writing and summarisation tasks became noticeably faster, but the trial produced no robust evidence that those time savings translated into...

ZDNET’s compact roundup of "45+ time‑saving Windows keyboard shortcuts" is less a listicle and more a practical playbook: a curated set of high‑impact keystrokes that swap repetitive mouse motions for instant, repeatable actions and unlock features many users overlook. The author prioritizes...

Geekom’s long‑teased QS1 Pro mini PC promises to ship one of the most intriguing hardware combinations we’ve seen for a compact Windows machine: a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (X1E‑80‑100) class SoC, Windows 11 Pro preinstalled, up to 64GB of LPDDR5‑5600 memory, and a modern I/O stack that...

Microsoft’s move to ship MAI‑Voice‑1 and MAI‑1‑preview marks a clear strategic inflection: the company is no longer only a buyer and integrator of frontier models but a serious producer of first‑party models engineered to run inside Copilot and across Microsoft’s consumer surfaces. Microsoft...

Microsoft’s new MAI models are the clearest signal yet that Copilot’s brain is shifting from being almost wholly powered by OpenAI to a hybrid architecture that increasingly routes routine, latency-sensitive, and cost-sensitive tasks to Microsoft’s own systems. The company announced two...

Microsoft has quietly crossed a strategic Rubicon: after years of tight integration with OpenAI, the company has begun shipping its own first-party foundation models — notably MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview — and is positioning them inside Copilot and Azure as the start of a long-term bid to...

Microsoft has quietly shipped its first fully in‑house AI models — MAI‑Voice‑1 and MAI‑1‑preview — marking a deliberate shift in strategy that reduces dependence on OpenAI’s stack and accelerates Microsoft’s plan to own more of the compute, models, and product surface area that power Copilot...