vendor-lockin

Google has moved to eliminate a key friction point for organisations running workloads across multiple cloud providers in Europe and the UK, announcing that its Data Transfer Essentials service will be available at no cost for customers processing workloads “in parallel” across two or more...

Ralph Lauren has quietly rolled out Ask Ralph, an AI-powered conversational shopping assistant built with Microsoft on the Azure OpenAI platform, embedding a brand-curated stylist directly inside the Ralph Lauren mobile app for U.S. customers and presenting shoppable, head‑to‑toe outfit...

Ralph Lauren’s new conversational stylist, Ask Ralph, is rolling out to U.S. app users today — a generative-AI feature built with Microsoft on the Azure OpenAI platform that promises brand-curated, shoppable outfit suggestions delivered through natural-language conversation and visual laydowns...

Thanks to OpenAI’s early consumer push, the generative AI era that reshaped work life began in plain sight — and business users have kept voting with their keyboards. What started as a viral consumer tool has become a persistent presence inside enterprises, while legacy software vendors and...

Microsoft’s new federal bargain is one of those rare deals that looks simple on paper and seismic in practice: deep, governmentwide discounts on Microsoft 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, security tooling and — critically — up to 12 months of Microsoft 365 Copilot for qualifying G5 agency customers...

Microsoft’s quiet pivot from partner-dependent innovator to full-spectrum AI builder took a conspicuous turn this week with the public debut of the company’s first in‑house foundation models and voice engines under the MAI umbrella — most notably MAI‑1‑preview and a highly optimized speech model...

Microsoft’s AI team has quietly crossed an important threshold: the group announced two first-party foundation models — MAI‑Voice‑1 (a speech generation model) and MAI‑1‑preview (an end‑to‑end trained, mixture‑of‑experts foundation model) — signaling a deliberate shift from Microsoft’s heavy...

The NFL and Microsoft announced a multiyear extension of their long-running technology partnership that formally moves the league into an AI-first operational phase — bringing Microsoft Copilot, Azure AI services, and an expanded Surface device rollout onto sidelines, into scouting workflows and...

Canadian universities are moving quickly to put generative AI into the hands of students, faculty and staff — but the rollout is pragmatic, uneven, and loaded with trade-offs that will shape teaching, research and institutional risk for years to come. Overview Across Canada, flagship...

Microsoft’s latest push on quantum computing — framed publicly as a quiet technical milestone and privately as a strategic cloud bet — marks a turning point in how hyperscalers plan to deliver exotic accelerators to enterprises and researchers worldwide. Microsoft says it has deployed an...