News

Artificial Intelligence
AI Has a Frankenstein Dilemma
September 16, 2026

AI Has a Frankenstein Dilemma Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818. More than two hundred years later, it’s said to sell about 40,000 to 50,00 copies a year. It’s said that’s more than many best-selling releases. Most people who’ve read the book remember the monster....

Artificial Intelligence
AI Picks the Shortlist Before Retailers Get the Click
September 16, 2026

Before a shopper ever reaches a retailer, an artificial intelligence assistant may have already narrowed the field to three options. Making that shortlist is becoming its own competition. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The AI Power User Gets Pickier,” the September edition of the Consumer AI...

Artificial Intelligence
Google Launches New Gemini Models to Upgrade Enterprise Voice Agents
September 15, 2026

Google has begun rolling out two new artificial intelligence models designed to power voice agents, the company said in a Tuesday (Sept. 15) blog post. Gemini 3.8 Live is built for scale and cost efficiency, while Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking is built for high-complexity...

Artificial Intelligence
Agentic Commerce Needs eCommerce-Level Trust to Scale, Mastercard-PYMNTS Panelists Say
September 15, 2026

Agentic commerce needs to build trust among both consumers and merchants to scale, Mastercard said in a Tuesday (Sept. 15) press release highlighting some takeaways from a recent executive roundtable convened by Mastercard and PYMNTS. Held at Mastercard’s New York City Tech Hub and moderated...

Retail
Nike’s S&P Exit Is a Warning for Every Consumer Brand
September 15, 2026

Nike’s upcoming removal from the S&P 100 is easy to read as a corporate fall-from-grace story. It may be more useful to read it as a retail one. After nearly 18 years in the index, Nike will be removed from the S&P 100 before trading...

Artificial Intelligence
Nvidia and Palantir Restrict Anthropic’s Fable Over Data Retention
September 15, 2026

Nvidia, Palantir, Booz Allen Hamilton and Novo Nordisk are drawing hard boundaries around where Anthropic’s most advanced artificial intelligence models may operate, as first reported by The Information. Nvidia and Booz Allen tied their restrictions directly to Anthropic’s data-retention terms. Novo Nordisk and Northrop Grumman...

Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI Defies Antitrust Concerns to Join Rivals on AI Safety
September 15, 2026

OpenAI Global Policy Chief Chris Lehane said Tuesday (Sept. 15) that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind have been working together for several weeks to address artificial intelligence safety issues, Bloomberg reported. Speaking at a briefing in Washington, Lehane said OpenAI does not see any need...

Artificial Intelligence
Ryanair’s AI Resolves 80% of Customer Chats Without Humans
September 15, 2026

Ryanair’s artificial intelligence now handles 120,000 customer chats a day across seven languages and resolves 80% of these conversations without a human agent, according to a case study published by Amazon Web Services. AWS sells the airline the cloud and AI services behind the system,...

Banking
Ex-Synapse Partner Lineage Bank Rebrands as Harpeth in Community Banking Pivot
September 15, 2026

Lineage Bank, a Tennessee-based bank that was a partner bank for Synapse, the banking-as-a-service (BaaS) provider that went bankrupt in 2024, has rebranded as Harpeth Bank & Trust. The bank announced the name change in a Tuesday (Sept. 15) post on LinkedIn. “This transition reflects...