human in the loop

Starting this fall, the U.S. House of Representatives will begin a controlled pilot giving thousands of House staffers access to Microsoft Copilot — a marked reversal from a 2024 prohibition — as leadership frames the move as a pragmatic modernization push that must be matched by strict...

The U.S. House of Representatives is shifting from caution to experimentation: members and their staff will be offered access to Microsoft Copilot this fall as part of a staged modernization push introduced at the Congressional Hackathon, with officials saying the deployment will include...

Microsoft, Nvidia and Google now sit at the center of the agentic AI conversation — and if your organization is planning to deploy autonomous, task‑completing agents at scale, you will almost certainly be doing business with one or more of them. Background / Overview Agentic AI describes...

Law firms are racing to adopt artificial intelligence tools—but the move from pilot projects and individual experimentation to firm‑wide, governed production deployments remains the exception rather than the rule, driven less by model capability than by the legal profession’s special duties...

Law firms have embraced artificial intelligence enthusiastically, moving from curiosity and pilots into widespread experimentation—but the leap from scattered use to fully governed, firm‑wide deployment remains rare, constrained not by model ingenuity but by the legal profession’s obligations...

Law firms are experimenting with artificial intelligence at a rapid clip, but according to recent reporting and industry surveys, widespread, fully governed production deployments remain the exception rather than the rule—a reality shaped less by technical immaturity than by ethical, regulatory...

In a deliberately fictional exercise staged by IPAA ACT, a cabinet decision to replace frontline public servants with AI agents culminates in spectacle and sharp lessons: procurement defaults to a dominant vendor, automated casework produces unexpected harms for vulnerable communities, and an...

Waitaki District Council’s cautious, staff-first rollout of generative AI shows how a small public body can harness large language models for practical gains—while keeping human judgment, privacy safeguards and governance firmly in the driver’s seat. The council’s chief digital officer, Teresa...

The Town of Gray is quietly turning a policy conversation into practical public service: after adopting guidelines for generative AI this summer, the town’s communications and IT director has begun using Microsoft Copilot to produce faster, more accessible meeting recaps, is hosting public...

When the first “employee” of a startup is an AI agent, everything that founders, investors, and HR teams thought they knew about building organizations is suddenly negotiable — from who gets hired and why, to how decisions are made, who owns accountability, and what leadership looks like in...

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s head of consumer AI, has bluntly declared that the idea of machine consciousness is an “illusion” and warned that intentionally building systems to appear conscious could produce social, legal, and psychological harms far sooner than any technical breakthrough in...

Microsoft’s Copilot produced a wildly entertaining — and instructive — first-round mock of the 2026 NFL Draft after Week 1, exposing both the speed and the limits of conversational AI when it tries to translate fuzzy, fast-moving sports data into roster decisions. Background USA TODAY’s...

Ralph Lauren has put a chatbot in the business of taste: Ask Ralph, an in‑app stylist built with Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI, is now rolling out to U.S. app users and promising shoppable, head‑to‑toe looks that translate decades of archive imagery into instant styling advice. The launch is a clear...

Microsoft’s latest Copilot Studio updates push AI deeper into the everyday mechanics of business by letting agents make routine approval decisions inside multistage workflows — automating rule-driven steps while keeping humans in the loop for exceptions and final sign‑off. Background / Overview...

OpenAI’s backing of a feature-length, largely AI-created animated film called Critterz has jolted the animation world: the project — expanding a 2023 AI-made short into a Cannes-bound feature — explicitly uses OpenAI tools (including GPT-5 and the Sora video model) and a dramatically reduced...

More than a third of New Zealand’s retail investors now report using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot to inform investment decisions — and a substantial majority of those users say they are satisfied with the results — a shift that is reshaping how ordinary investors...

The UK Department for Business and Trade’s three‑month pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot delivered a familiar but important paradox: users reported real and concentrated time savings—especially on written work and meeting summaries—but the evaluation could not find robust evidence that those...

The UK Department for Business and Trade’s three‑month pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot delivered a mixed verdict: users reported high satisfaction and clear wins on routine drafting and meeting summaries, but independent evaluation found only modest, use‑case‑specific time savings and no robust...

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs has quietly moved from talk to trial: a beta AI-powered search is now live on the DVA website, the agency has published an AI transparency statement, and small-scale pilots — including an internal Microsoft Copilot trial and a proof‑of‑concept claims tool...

Artificial intelligence would have told Pete Carroll to hand the ball to Marshawn Lynch. The verdict — blunt, repeatable and nearly universal among modern analysts — is now being echoed by the same generative models that pundits and teams are experimenting with at the edge of NFL operations. Yet...