By Shikhar Mehrotra ASUS ROG and Xreal’s R1 are the world’s first 240Hz micro-OLED AR gaming glasses, offering a 171-inch virtual screen, 57-degree field of view, and 3ms motion-to-photon latency at $849.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Shikhar Mehrotra Neural Handwriting is now live for every Ray-Ban Display owner, letting them type messages with finger movements, with no voice or phone required.

Source:: Digital Trends

Microsoft this week released 139 updates affecting Windows, Office, .NET, and SQL Server (though there were no updates for Microsoft Exchange Server). Despite the absence of zero-days, the May Patch Tuesday update still requires Patch Now recommendations for Windows and Office. 

The combination of three unauthenticated network RCEs (Netlogon, DNS Client, and SSO Plugin for Jira and Confluence), four Word Preview Pane RCEs, the large TCP/IP vulnerability cluster, and the carry-over BitLocker recovery condition (still active on Windows 10 and Windows Server) warrants an accelerated deployment release schedule. The Readiness team suggests that testing start with internet-facing services, domain controllers, and Office endpoints. The May 2026 Assurance Security Dashboard breaks the cycle down by Microsoft product family for deployment risk assessment.

(More information about recent Patch Tuesday releases is available here.)

Known issues

Patch Tuesday arrived this month with a clean bill of health (at least with respect to reported and known issues) for Windows 11 24H2, 23H2, Windows 10 22H2, and Windows Server 2025. However, two items warrant attention.

Windows 10 and Windows Server customers remain exposed to the April 2026 BitLocker recovery condition on devices set with the “Configure TPM platform validation profile for native UEFI firmware configurations” Group Policy and an invalid PCR7 (Platform Configuration Register 7) profile. 

Microsoft also acknowledged on the Hardware Dev Center that Windows Update replaces manually-installed graphics drivers with older OEM versions from the catalogue, because its ranking uses four-part Hardware IDs rather than version numbers: “Customers who actively manage their display drivers experience unwanted downgrades through Windows Update.”

Issues resolved

KB5089549 for Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2 resolves the April PCR7/BitLocker recovery condition and improves Boot Manager servicing so subsequent boot file updates do not trigger recovery.

Secure Boot certificate distribution adds a new C:WindowsSecureBoot folder of automation scripts for IT teams rolling out the Windows UEFI CA 2023 key replacement under CVE-2023-24932, ahead of the 2011 certificate expirations happening between June and October 2026.

Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) notification reliability improves, so the service is less likely to become unresponsive under sustained load; this is relevant to networks running UPnP device discovery.

Major revisions and mitigations

Given this month’s Preview Pane issues, Microsoft offered mitigation advice:

Microsoft Word Preview Pane RCEs — CVE-2026-40361, CVE-2026-40364, CVE-2026-40366, CVE-2026-40367, critical at CVSS 8.4, with the first two flagged “Exploitation More Likely.” The Preview Pane is the attack vector; viewing a malicious document in Outlook or File Explorer is enough to trigger exploitation. 

Windows lifecycle and enforcement updates

We’ve mentioned the CA certificate issue before, but it’s worth flagging again as we approach the EOS and enforcement dates for:

SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019, Project Server 2016 and 2019, SQL Server 2016, and SQL Server 2014 ESU Year 2, all of which reach end of support in July.

Secure Boot certificate enforcement — the 2011 KEK CA expires on June 24, the UEFI CA for third-party boot loaders on June 27, and the Windows Production PCA for the boot manager on Oct. 19. 

Graphics driver HWID enforcement — the pilot moving driver submissions from four-part to two-part Hardware IDs plus Computer Hardware IDs runs to September, with broader enforcement planned for the fourth quarter of this year and Q1 of 2027.

Each month, the team at Readiness provides detailed, actionable testing guidance for Patch Tuesday releases. This guidance is based on assessing a large application portfolio and a comprehensive analysis of the patches and their potential impact on Windows platforms and application deployments.

This month’s Patch Tuesday flags two components as high-risk: the Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock, with an explicit Bluetooth focus, and the Telnet client. Microsoft also ships a pre-release security fix to the Common Log File System driver, and Secure Boot key rolling continues under CVE-2023-24932. TCP/IP is the most-patched component this cycle, with 11 separate updates. Lower-risk patches involve graphics, storage, virtualization, VPN, and Office MSI editions.

Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock 

The WinSock kernel driver (afd.sys) mediates every TCP and UDP socket on Windows, and the May update lands a regression-sensitive change to the Bluetooth interaction path. Failure here typically surfaces as audio dropouts, paired-device drops on sleep, slow reconnect on Wi-Fi handover, or a clean AFD-referenced bug check during sustained load. Watch the System event log for new errors from AFD, TCP/IP, or BTHUSB sources during your test window.

Success in testing these drivers looks silent: no stutters, no event-log churn, no handle leaks.

Your testing regime should include:

Browse the web over HTTP and HTTPS on both IPv4 and IPv6; download a multi-gigabyte file and verify it completes without stalls.

Establish a Remote Desktop session, idle 30+ minutes, then resume; place a Teams call with audio, video, and screen share.

Disable and re-enable the NIC, switch between Wi-Fi and Ethernet, and sleep/resume the machine; expect the network to return cleanly with no AFD-referenced bug check.

Toggle Bluetooth on and off from Settings and Action Center; pair and unpair headphones, mouse, keyboard, and phone, repeating through several cycles.

Play audio over a Bluetooth headset for 10+ minutes during a Teams call; expect zero dropouts and clean mic/speaker switching as devices toggle.

Transfer a file to and from a phone over Bluetooth; connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, leave idle, and resume input.

Sleep and resume the machine with Bluetooth peripherals connected; verify they reconnect without manual intervention.

Telnet client

The Telnet client (telnet.exe) is an optional Windows feature, rarely enabled on modern endpoints. The high-risk flag matters wherever the feature is installed. Check first with Get-WindowsCapability -Online -Name “Telnet.Client~~~~0.0.1.0”. If installed, launch telnet.exe against a known good endpoint and confirm it opens, accepts input, and exits cleanly. If the feature is not in use, treat this update as an opportunity for attack-surface reduction and remove it.

Common Log File System security fix

Microsoft corrected two integer underflow vulnerabilities in the CLFS driver (clfs.sys) that could trigger a system crash or elevation of privilege. Regression risk is low, but CLFS underpins transaction logging across SQL Server, DTC, Failover Clustering, Hyper-V, Active Directory, and Event Log. Validate where these run. A bug check referencing clfs.sys after the update is the clearest red flag.

Reboot, run a representative workload for 24 to 48 hours, and check System and Application logs for new errors referencing CLFS, NTFS, DTC, or FailoverClustering.

On SQL Server, restart the service, run standard transactions, perform a backup and restore, and confirm Always On replication stays healthy.

Patch each cluster node, verify all nodes return as Up, and move a clustered role across nodes.

On a patched domain controller, run repadmin /replsummary and dcdiag /v; verify Group Policy still applies on clients.

Confirm VSS writers report Stable via vssadmin list writers, then run a full backup and a test restore.

Secure Boot and BitLocker

Secure Boot validation continues under the CVE-2023-24932 key rolling work. The risk is a recovery prompt or an unbootable device. Run only on dedicated test machines with the recovery key backed up.

Enable BitLocker on the OS drive, verify TPM protectors with manage-bde -protectors -get c:, then disable and confirm clean decryption.

With Secure Boot enabled, trigger recovery via reagentc /boottore 1, unlock with the recovery key, and verify normal next boot.

With both enabled, apply the Windows UEFI CA 2023 key update and confirm the system boots without a recovery prompt.

Hibernate with Secure Boot and BitLocker on (powercfg /hibernate on, shutdown -h), then resume and confirm no recovery screen.

Other Windows components

TCP/IP has the highest patch volume; the rest receive routine updates with no functional changes.

Networking: run sustained file transfers, VPN sessions, and stable throughput over IPv4 and IPv6 to cover tcpip.sys (six updates), the Native Wi-Fi driver, and the LLDP driver.

VPN and filtering: exercise IKEv2 tunnels through sleep/wake and verify Windows Firewall rules to cover IKEEXT.dll and BFE.

Graphics and shell: run sustained UI activity and GPU-accelerated workloads to cover the Desktop Window Manager, graphics memory manager, and the graphics kernel; watch for artifacts or flickering.

Virtualization: exercise VM start/save/resume/stop and external/internal/private virtual switches to cover Hyper-V vmswitch.sys.

Storage and sync: exercise cloud sync hydration, Storage Spaces pool operations, and RDP printer/clipboard redirection.

Microsoft Office and SharePoint

This month’s Office updates target MSI editions only: Excel 2016 (KB5002865), Word 2016 (KB5002858), Office 2016 shared libraries (KB5002866), and SharePoint Server 2016, 2019, Online Server, and Subscription Edition. Click-to-Run estates are unaffected.

Open complex Excel workbooks with formulas, macros, and external data connections; save and reopen to verify integrity.

Edit Word documents with embedded objects, tracked changes, and complex formatting.

Across patched SharePoint editions, validate document library operations, co-authoring, and workflow execution.

Confirm that Office add-ins and line-of-business integrations continue to operate.

The Readiness team recommends testing start with the high-risk items. The WinSock driver update warrants a Bluetooth-heavy regression pass across peripherals, audio, file transfer, and sleep/wake. The Telnet client flag is narrow but applies wherever the optional feature is enabled. The CLFS security fix is low regression risk, but its blast radius is wide: validate SQL Server, failover clusters, Hyper-V, Active Directory, and event logging where they exist. Secure Boot and BitLocker validation remains essential as CVE-2023-24932 key rolling continues. Microsoft Office is MSI-only this cycle.

Each month, we break down the update cycle into product families (as defined by Microsoft) with the following basic groupings: 

Browsers (Microsoft Edge) 

Microsoft Windows (both desktop and server) 

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server 

Microsoft Developer Tools (Visual Studio and .NET)

Adobe (if you get this far) 

Browsers

For this Patch Tuesday, Microsoft Edge released the stable version (148.0.3967.54) on May 7, according to the Edge security release notes. This update cycle covers six Edge-engineered CVEs plus 127 Chromium upstream CVEs flowing through:

CVE-2026-33111 — Copilot Chat (Microsoft Edge) — Information disclosure (CVSS 7.5, rated critical). This is the headline browser issue this month.

CVE-2026-41107 — Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) — Information disclosure (CVSS 7.4). External control of file name and path.

CVE-2026-42838 — Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) — Elevation of privilege (CVSS 5.4). Injection in a downstream component.

CVE-2026-7896 through CVE-2026-8022 — Chromium upstream — 127 CVEs covering use-after-free, out-of-bounds read and write, type confusion, and integer overflow across V8, Blink, Skia, WebRTC, ANGLE, and DevTools. The same fixes ship in the Chrome Stable channel; see the Chrome releases blog for the upstream notes.

Add these updates to your Patch Now deployment schedule for Edge-managed environments.

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft addressed 67 unique vulnerabilities across Windows, six rated critical and 61, important. Elevation of privilege dominates by volume (44 entries), followed by remote code execution (9), denial of service (7), information disclosure (4), and security feature bypass (3). The six critical entries span six distinct Windows features:

CVE-2026-41089 — Windows Netlogon — Remote code execution (CVSS 9.8). Unauthenticated stack-based buffer overflow targeting domain controllers; the highest-impact Windows CVE this cycle.

CVE-2026-41096 — Windows DNS Client — Remote code execution (CVSS 9.8). Unauthenticated heap-based overflow in name resolution.

CVE-2026-40402 — Windows Hyper-V — Elevation of privilege (CVSS 9.3). The only non-RCE critical this cycle; guest-to-host escalation on virtualization hosts.

CVE-2026-40403 — Windows Graphics Component — Remote code execution (CVSS 8.8). Rendering-path RCE.

CVE-2026-35421 — Windows GDI — Remote code execution (CVSS 7.8). Exploitation via a malicious Enhanced Metafile (EMF) image opened in Microsoft Paint or any EMF-rendering application.

CVE-2026-32161 — Windows Native WiFi Miniport Driver — Remote code execution (CVSS 7.5). Wireless networking attack surface.

Domain controllers and Hyper-V hosts are the deployment priority, given Netlogon’s unauthenticated profile and the guest-to-host escape. Add this Windows update to your Patch Now deployment schedule.

Microsoft Office

Microsoft released 27 Office CVEs — nine critical, 18 important. Remote code execution dominates with 15 entries; the rest split across information disclosure (4), elevation of privilege (4), spoofing (3), and tampering (1).

SharePoint Server 2016 remote code execution — CVE-2026-40365, CVSS 8.8. Authenticated Site Owner can inject arbitrary code remotely via insufficient access-control granularity.

Microsoft Word Preview Pane remote code execution — CVE-2026-40361, CVE-2026-40364, CVE-2026-40366, CVE-2026-40367, each with a reported CVSS of 8.4.

Microsoft Office remote code execution — CVE-2026-40358 and CVE-2026-40363, each CVSS 8.4. Office 2019 32-bit editions affected.

SharePoint Server is the main priority, given the network-RCE profile — even with the authenticated-Site-Owner precondition. Office 2019 MSI estates pick up six critical fixes between the four Word RCEs and the two generic Office RCEs. The Team Events Portal CVE is addressed cloud-side — no on-premises action. Apply this month’s Office security updates (KB5002865, KB5002858, KB5002866, and the SharePoint set in Issues Resolved above) per the standard ring schedule.

Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server

This month, Microsoft SQL Server receives a single patch and Microsoft Exchange Server gets none:

CVE-2026-40370 — SQL Server — Remote code execution (CVSS 8.8). External control of file name or path allows an authenticated attacker to execute code over a network. The fix is broadly distributed across SQL Server 2025, 2022, 2019, 2017, and 2016 SP3 via both GDR and CU channels.

SQL Server estates should deploy via GDR or CU per their standard patching cadence, prioritizing internet-exposed instances given the post-authentication blast radius implied by the CVSS 8.8. Add this update to your Patch Now deployment schedule for any internet-connected SQL Server.

Developer tools

Microsoft released 11 CVEs across its developer tooling, with one update rated critical (for Azure DevOps) and 10 rated important, covering the following areas:

Visual Studio Code — five entries: CVE-2026-41109 security feature bypass involving GitHub Copilot, CVE-2026-41610 security feature bypass, CVE-2026-41611 remote code execution, CVE-2026-41613 elevation of privilege, and CVE-2026-41612 information disclosure in the Live Preview extension.

.NET on Windows — four entries: CVE-2026-32175 (.NET Core tampering), CVE-2026-32177 and CVE-2026-35433 (.NET 10.0 elevation of privilege), and CVE-2026-42899 (ASP.NET Core denial of service on .NET 8.0).

Add these Microsoft updates to your standard developer update release schedule.

Adobe (and third-party updates)

I keep promising that this section should be retired (and it should), but Microsoft released a sizable third-party sweep through Azure Linux 3.0 and CBL Mariner 2.0 this month: 191 open-source CVEs spanning the Linux kernel, the Go runtime, Apache httpd, PHP, CoreDNS, valkey, Ruby, gnutls, Apache Thrift across its Node.js, Rust, and Java implementations, plus vim, postfix, expat, nmap, Prometheus, KEDA, and PgBouncer. This is a lot for anyone.

In addition to all this, Microsoft issued a patch (CVE-2026-41103) for its own SSO Plugin for Jira and Confluence. This vulnerability allows an attacker to forge a Microsoft Entra ID identity via a crafted SAML response; patching requires updating the plugin within Atlassian rather than on a Microsoft platform. In other words, the Microsoft attack surface now extends to other vendors’ application stacks, with patching responsibilities split across vendors. 

With such diffusion of responsibility, what could go wrong?

Source:: Computer World

By Darius Popa   Anthropic has committed $200 million over four years to a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest deal of its kind between an AI company and a global philanthropy. The money, a mix of grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support, will fund programmes in global health, life sciences, education, […] This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Cristian Dina   Eighteen48 Partners, the London-based alternative asset manager co-founded by Julien Sevaux, Tarek AbuZayyad, and Edward Clive, has closed €175 million for the first tranche of its inaugural private equity fund. The fund is targeting €350 million in total and will back mid-market buyouts across Europe, sourced exclusively through independent sponsors, dealmakers who find and […] This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Shimul Sood A new leak suggests Google may be preparing a more powerful version of Gemini that can manage inbox clutter, generate meeting briefs, and even create custom AI skills.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Manisha Priyadarshini A new AI tool from Cornell researchers helps you make better decisions by spotting contradictions between your stated values and actual choices.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Hisan Kidwai It’s no secret that India’s gaming industry has been growing at an exponential pace for quite…
The post Tencent Returns to India’s Gaming Ecosystem With ₹100 Million Investment appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Shimul Sood AI wearables may be heading in a very different direction. These new smart earbuds promise to see, hear, and even remember things for you — all without putting another screen in front of your face.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Deepti Pathak ChatGPT is now one of the most popular tools people use online. From content creation to…
The post How To Fix ChatGPT When It’s Not Working? appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Sudhanshu Kumar Mangalam Microsoft Edge is bringing Copilot tab reasoning, Journeys, Voice, and Vision to mobile, giving smartphone users a real reason to try it before Chrome’s Gemini upgrade arrives.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Alina Maria Stan   For ten months, Figma has been a case study in how quickly Wall Street can fall out of love. The company went public on 31 July 2025 at $33 a share, soared past $140 on its debut, and has spent most of 2026 in freefall,  battered by Google’s free Stitch design tool, Anthropic’s Claude […] This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Cristian Dina Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital has taken a roughly $100 million stake in Shopify, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter. The investment is notable less for its size, $100 million is a rounding error in a firm that raised more than $10 billion for its latest fund, than for what it signals […] This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Apple has a design for AI life. It hopes to build on the outstanding hardware performance its systems already provide to create a fantastic environment in which AI developers can thrive. If this plan sounds familiar it’s because it’s all about the App Store, and while it’s easy to expect Apple’s revenue share to change, the plan still makes the company the custodian of the AI age.

The way it should work is if app developers see that one way to bring their AI services to billions of iPhones, iPad, and Mac users is to make AI agents available via Apple’s own portals. These will likely be via App Intents, enabling Siri to execute actions inside their apps without actively opening them. 

The Information reports some developers are resistant to joining the initiative, in part because they want to avoid paying any fees. All the same, consider the moment, consider the meaning, and I think the significance is that Apple has at last got its act together with AI.

Ecosystem, services, store

Apple is going to bet that the advantages its existing store provides will give customers the faith and trust to access AI apps there rather than somewhere else. The company hasn’t announced its plan yet, though there have been hints. Just look at how Apple is laying things out with these moves (both announced and speculated about). It’s:

Working with Google to build out Apple Intelligence.

Working with third parties to support AI services as apps with which to replace or supplement Siri.

Maintaining investment in better hardware to run AI — you can quite happily run some models natively on an iPad. 

Equipping systems with powerful tools such as Unified Memory and the Neural Engine.

Rolling out Apple Private Cloud Computer to provide an infrastructure to support private AI in the cloud.

Pulling these elements together to form an ecosystem.

Like a jigsaw, the pieces fit together to provide a fantastic base from which Apple can distribute increasingly powerful AI APIs developers can use to create amazing AI experiences. I spoke with the smart people at the OmniGroup just last year who explained how they already use Apple Intelligence APIs (aka Foundation Models) to add powerful AI features to apps. 

That was just the first lap; the second comes at WWDC 2026; and the third and subsequent races take place over the next 12 to 24 months as Apple implements the elements it’s put in place across its ecosystem. 

Making money, one token at a time

The prize? For Apple, it’s about maintaining its own relevance within the AI age while carving out some way to generate revenue as its hardware ecosystem runs AI agents and services. The company will continue to develop and build out Apple Intelligence as a peer player in the competitive AI market. But, as most now agree, it is also focused on ensuring its platforms are the best systems on which to run AI.

Apple’s attempt to build a profitable, secure, and capable way to run AI — supported by customer-focused security and privacy standards— seems like an answer to some of the emerging challenges around AI deployment. Speak to almost anyone in IT right now and you’ll come across stories of corporate data leaks that may fall foul of data regulation. That’s before you even consider the manner in which AI ownership consolidates power over the intellectual future of humanity into such a small number of hands it almost makes media ownership seem democratic.

Getting the band together

With so much at stake, not just for Apple, it feels as if the company has found some of the answers that could enable a less frightening AI future. It has a chance to own the hardware ecosystem while curating the AI services environment for the benefit of its customers — and producing its own trusted systems for casual AI usage.

We’ll find out more in a few weeks.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Source:: Computer World

By Shikhar Mehrotra Developers don’t trust Apple’s Siri commission promise. Apple doesn’t know how to approve AI agents safely. WWDC is three weeks away. Something has to give.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Paulo Vargas Samsung may show Galaxy Glasses at Unpacked in July, pairing Android XR and Gemini with cameras, microphones, and speakers for a voice-first AI wearable tied to the Galaxy ecosystem.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Deepti Pathak OPPO has officially confirmed that the Find X9S and Find X9 Ultra will launch in India…
The post OPPO Confirms Find X9s and Find X9 Ultra India Launch Date appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

As digital tools become more central to its operations, Southwest Airlines is increasingly turning to AI and automation to prevent endpoint issues from affecting the sprawling airline.

The new tools allow the company’s IT team to take a more strategic, rather than reactive, approach to operations, said Derek Whisenhunt, head of end user computing at Southwest Airlines. 

“Bottom line is we now focus our team’s time on proactive and preventative work and increasing the digital employee experience and not waiting for issues to arise before focusing on them,” said Whisenhunt.

Southwest has been steadily digitizing frontline workflows for the past decade, replacing paper-based operational processes with mobile devices and cloud applications for its maintenance, flight operations, and gate services workers — and even cabin crews.

The Dallas-based company has largely digitized operations for its 72,000 staffers — two-thirds of which are in frontline roles — replacing the printed manuals used by pilots and ground operations teams with mobile devices, for instance. 

At the same time, the switch to digital tools has placed even greater demands on IT: the Southwest end user computing team supports around 50,000 employee smartphones and tablets, 20,000 laptops, and 15,000 PCs. 

Problems with end user devices can be costly to the business. With short turn-around times for Southwest’s 800 Boeing 737 aircraft, hardware or software failures on employee devices can quickly affect airline customers. 

Derek Whisenhunt, head of end user computing at Southwest Airlines.
Southwest Airlines

“You’ve seen it, or you’ve experienced this,” said Whisenhunt. “If you go up to a customer service or a gate agent and you can see the line start to extend — or the customers start to get frustrated and the agent’s on the phone with somebody — that’s either a ticket issue or it’s a system issue.

“To me, it’s very personal, because we’re impacting the employees’ experience, we’re impacting our customers’ experience,” he said. “In just that one scenario, we’re drastically impacting our ability to turn aircraft.”

Using remote actions to prevent IT issues

To monitor and manage its fleet of end-user devices, Southwest deployed a digital employee experience (DEX) application from Nexthink several years ago. DEX software is designed to monitor and improve how employees interact with workplace technology, including device performance, application reliability, and IT support interactions.

In recent years Southwest has become more advanced in its use of DEX software, said Whisenhunt. Within its 14-strong endpoint management team, Southwest now has a “full-blown DEX operations team” and a DEX engineering team — with an additional 12 employees — that’s “forward-looking, deploying new products” and managing automations, said Whisenhunt..  

In addition to gathering insights into the performance of devices, Southwest now uses DEX to actively remediate problems. Automation plays a key role here, with Southwest using “remote actions” to automate simple fixes, such as cleaning cache files that had caused Microsoft Teams to crash for users.

The volume of remote actions deployed by the airline has grown significantly in recent years. In 2024, the company conducted 1.1 billion remote actions, equivalent to roughly 13,000 hours saved for employees dealing with IT problems. In 2025, the remote action figure rose to 2.1 billion — with 23,000 hours saved, he said. 

“That’s how important a remote action is.… It’s in that preventative world, where we’re addressing an issue before you even know it.”

Automated remote actions have also helped Southwest avoid hardware upgrades, said Whisenhunt.

The airline has around 8,000 back-office PCs, with as many as 20 employees logging in to each one. Because full Microsoft 365 profiles are downloaded when a user logs in, the PC hard drives fill up and cause performance issues. Remote actions were used to delete user profiles for employees that hadn’t logged in for a week or more – averting the planned purchase of 1-terabyte hard drives to deal with the demands, said Whisenhunt.

Remote actions can also be combined into automated workflows using ‘if/and’ statements to perform more complex actions. 

Over the last month or so, Southwest has automated approximately 5.8 million remote actions “across a range of endpoint health, security, and lifecycle workflows,” said Whisenhunt, the majority of which center on disk space management, with 13 remote actions executed roughly 3 million times to “proactively reclaim disk space.”

The team was able to address a 20% failure rate for its Microsoft SCCM client — used for software and security updates on employee devices — chaining together several remote actions to check the health of the client, restart the service, and, if needed, repair or reinstall the client software.

The DEX platform also integrates with ServiceNow to enable automated ticket generation when users run into technical problems.

“For example, if we see your system had three blue screens of death in 24 hours, a ticket is automatically generated,” he said, working around any  employees who would rather put up with the inconvenience than file a trouble ticket. 

“A lot of people don’t even call the service desk, they’re like, ‘Whatever – reboot, just deal with it. I don’t have time for this.’”

Using AI to boost productivity and empower workers 

In addition to workflow automation, Whisenhunt said AI tools could help boost productivity. Nexthink’s Workspace — an LLM-based conversational assistant — lets staff quickly find information about problems affecting their devices, and can  provide guidance around what tasks to prioritize. 

That’s helped the end user computing team access relevant data faster, he said, “while allowing our analysts and our engineers to focus on what’s more important.”

The team uses Workspace daily, he said, to monitor device health, application performance, security posture, and lifecycle signals. It’s also used to trigger remote actions to correct issues “often before the employee is aware there’s a problem,” said Whisenhunt.

“This has shifted the team from a ticket‑driven, reactive support model to a proactive operations model where we can detect degradation, validate remediation outcomes, and continuously improve stability at scale,” he said. The result has been a reduction in service desk volumes, “faster time‑to‑resolution when issues do surface, improved endpoint reliability, and meaningful recovery of engineering capacity previously spent on repetitive fixes.” 

Southwest plans to roll out Nexthink’s Spark — an AI tool designed to tackle user problems by diagnosing and suggesting simple fixes before contacting IT. A pilot rollout is in the works, said Whisenhunt, starting with the IT team.

“By combining real‑time context from the endpoint with IT‑approved automation and guided remediation, Spark allows users to resolve many issues themselves, in the moment, without opening a ticket or waiting for human intervention,” he said.

Beyond the potential productivity boost, Whisenhunt is taking steps to mitigate possible AI downsides. ‘As with any AI‑driven capability in an enterprise IT environment, we do have healthy concerns around reliability, oversight, and ensuring the right balance between automation and control,” he said

“We are treating trust as something that must be earned over time through strong governance, clear guardrails, and continuous validation of outcomes rather than assuming it from day one.”

Source:: Computer World

Nearly halfway into 2026, enterprises are beginning to see tangible returns on their AI investments. Yet many are discovering that scaling requires something far less glamorous than flashy frontier models and state-of-the-art benchmarking: Clean, interoperable, governed data.

According to a new AI Momentum Survey from Dun & Bradstreet, 97% of organizations report active AI initiatives, but just 5% say their data is ready to support them.

This reflects the messy reality of AI as enterprises struggle to move beyond experimentation to operationalization.

“You do not need enterprise-wide AI-ready data to launch pilots or isolated AI use cases,” said Cayetano Gea-Carrasco, Dun & Bradstreet’s chief strategy officer. “But you do need it to scale AI reliably across mission-critical workflows and systems.”

Early gains seen

Organizations are all-in on AI in 2026 and view it as a mission-critical imperative, according to the D&B report. Well over half (67%) are seeing “early signs or pockets” of ROI, and 24% report “broad or strong” returns.

Further, more than half (56%) of the 10,000 businesses polled by the data and analytics firm say they are planning to increase AI investment in the next 12 months. Around one-third (30%) are scaling AI into production and 26% are operationalizing the technology across multiple core processes.

As adoption rapidly increases, early returns are more common now than even just a year ago, D&B noted, but they still remain uneven. Dovetailing with this, concerns around data readiness are “even more profound” than in 2025.

This is for a variety of reasons, including problems with access to data (reported by 50% of those polled by D&B), privacy and compliance risks (44%), and data quality and integrity concerns (40%). Further, 38% report lack of integration across systems, while 37% say there is a shortage of qualified AI professionals.

Concerningly, however, just a small number of enterprises (10%) say with high confidence that they are able to identify and mitigate AI-related risks.

“The key question is no longer whether organizations are experimenting with AI,” said Gea-Carrasco. “It’s whether they have the data and infrastructure required to deploy AI reliably at enterprise scale.”

He noted that it’s relatively easy for enterprises to launch copilots, chat interfaces, or departmental AI tools using general-purpose models and get “impressive results in a controlled environment.” But far fewer are able to deploy AI into production workflows, where accuracy, accountability, explainability, interoperability, and consistency directly impact business decisions. This includes areas like onboarding, compliance, risk management, and customer operations. “That’s where data readiness becomes critical,” said Gea-Carrasco.

The data hurdle

The challenges around data are only compounded as enterprises move from copilots to more autonomous agentic workflows. “Most enterprise data environments were built for human workflows, not autonomous AI systems operating continuously across the business,” he pointed out.

While AI systems can produce outputs that sound coherent, they can be difficult to trust operationally, due to hallucinations, conflicting recommendations across systems, and compliance issues, Gea-Carrasco noted. This is problematic for all enterprises, but particularly for those in regulated industries like banking, insurance, healthcare, and financial services, where trustworthy and auditable outputs are “non-negotiable.”

Organizations seeing the most progress are those working to ensure that their data is high-quality, reliable, and governed. They are investing in consistent identity resolution and data interoperability and maintenance, so that AI can “reliably consume” and act on information, he explained.

Where enterprises are seeing ROI

Enterprises are beginning to see ROI in areas where underlying data environments are more mature, thus making it easier for AI to be directly embedded into real workflows, according to Gea-Carrasco. This includes areas like sales intelligence, onboarding, compliance workflows, customer research, risk analysis, workflow automation, prospecting, screening, supplier evaluation, and business verification.

ROI is typically reflected in reduced manual research, faster onboarding and review cycles, improved operational consistency, accelerated sales workflows, and better decision support for employees, he said. “In many cases, organizations are using AI to help teams process and synthesize large amounts of information significantly faster than before.”

He emphasized that AI is most successful when it augments existing operational processes rather than fully replacing human decision-making. “Organizations are finding success where AI helps employees work faster, make better decisions, and it reduces repetitive manual work while humans remain involved in oversight and final approvals,” he said.

Enterprise approach to agentic AI

Agentic AI is beginning to enter production environments, although it is “still relatively early and targeted,” Gea-Carrasco pointed out.

Most enterprises today are deploying agents that are narrowly scoped rather than fully autonomous, he said. The near-term pattern is supervised autonomy, where agents execute portions of workflows while humans remain involved in approvals, oversight, and exception handling. Thus, agents are entering what he referred to as “clearly defined workflows,” such as research, onboarding support, and workflow orchestration.

Over the next several years, AI will move from standalone copilots to more connected agentic systems embedded directly into enterprise workflows, he noted. They will increasingly coordinate work across customers, suppliers, partners, employees, and enterprise apps. Agents will likely become ever more prominent in workflows around sales operations, onboarding, compliance, procurement, customer research, risk management, supplier evaluation, and monitoring.

“Enterprise AI is becoming less about isolated productivity tools,” said Gea-Carrasco, “and more about building intelligent operational systems that can support decision-making and workflow execution at scale.”

This article originally appeared on CIO.com.

Source:: Computer World

There are conflicting signals about whether AI is creating or destroying jobs, though many companies have blamed the technology for recent cuts. 

Analysts and industry experts say the reality is more nuanced: jobs being lost now to AI will likely reappear elsewhere, especially for those with hands-on AI experience.

In other words, while AI may be reshaping the labor market, it is not eliminating the need for talent. “We are seeing a shift toward the type of talent employers need and the expectations they have for impact,” said Kye Mitchell, head of Experis US.

Though hiring for entry-level jobs is under pressure as AI absorbs more routine work, that doesn’t eliminate opportunity, she said. “It changes the expectations. Employers now expect candidates to come in with hands-on experience, AI familiarity, and the ability to contribute faster.”

While reductions in headcount are real, the savings from cutting those jobs will reappear elsewhere in hiring for other roles or tasks, said Deepak Seth, senior director analyst at Gartner.

For example, though Claude Code might help IT leaders reduce the number of developers they have on hand, one faulty software rollout could lead to new hiring to fill gaps, Seth said. “Maybe you need to hire more quality testers in another group. Maybe you need to hire more people to train people on how to use these tools,” Seth said.

One thing seems clear: AI is indeed affecting young workers and suppressing entry-level wages. And it goes companies a rationale to do layoffs.

Many big tech companies are attributing large job cuts to AI, Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a May 7 blog post. 

April was particularly brutal for AI-related layoffs, with some top IT firms cutting positions due to efficiencies from AI. “They are also often citing AI spend and innovation. Regardless of whether individual jobs are being replaced by AI, the money for those roles is,” Challenger said.

Opinions vary among workers about whether AI is taking jobs away, according to a study published last month by ADP Research and the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.

Though young workers are especially worried AI will slow job creation in some sectors, more experienced workers are sanguine about losing their jobs, Stanford and BCG said in separate studies.

“There appears to be less cause for concern about widespread job displacement … particularly those in occupations with high experience premiums in which AI is likely to complement the worker’s tacit knowledge,” BCG said in its study “AI will reshape more jobs than it replaces.”

LinkedIn in a January labor report went a step further and projected that AI had created 1.3 million new jobs globally. The jobs were in the areas such as data annotators, forward-deployed engineers and AI engineers.

Microsoft cited the LinkedIn report in its recent Work Trend Index study, and said AI is  creating a new operating model allowing companies to be smarter and more efficient.

But the company sidestepped the larger issue of how AI is affecting the job market. “Some jobs will change. Some will go away. And many that don’t exist yet will emerge,” Microsoft said in the study.

Source:: Computer World