Connected Economy/page/5 news and trends

P&G Takes Its AI Scrap Killer Global
Artificial Intelligence // September 29, 2026

Procter & Gamble is expanding an artificial intelligence (AI) quality inspection system across its manufacturing operations worldwide, turning a tool that proved itself on individual lines into standard equipment for the whole company. The system, built with Siemens, inspects every product in real time at...

SEC’s Crypto Push Could Shift Who Raises Capital and Who Controls Trading
Cryptocurrency // September 28, 2026

Nature abhors a vacuum, and marketplaces do, too. After all, no industry exists in a vacuum. The digital asset space is finding that out in real time, as it enters into an apparent regulatory vacuum after the Sept. 15 failure of the Digital Asset Market...

Fed Finds B2B Payments Went Digital, but the Paperwork Didn’t
B2B Payments // September 28, 2026

In 2024, the B2B payments conversation centered on moving businesses away from checks and toward electronic transactions. Two years later, the industry has made infrastructure advances, but two newly published research briefs from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland highlight that the hardest part of...

Block Joins Push to Standardize Agentic Payments
Artificial Intelligence // September 25, 2026

Block has joined the x402 Foundation to help advance open, agentic commerce, Steve Reis, head of product, Block Financial Platform, said in a Thursday (Sept. 24) blog post. As a member of this open standard for agentic payments, Block will bring its experience across payments and consumer products to the Foundation’s working groups,...

Interviews & Exclusives
Why Building AI Agents Is No Longer the Hardest Part of Agentic Commerce

September 25, 2026
Watch more: The Agentic Experience With Mastercard’s Sabrina Therani Agentic commerce is becoming an infrastructure race. The biggest agentic constraint today is not whether AI can shop but whether the systems surrounding that AI can determine what an agent is allowed to do, who is responsible when something goes wrong and how a machine-initiated transaction […]

Stablecoins Changed the Rails but Haven’t Captured the Economics

September 24, 2026
Stablecoins spent years trying to prove they could move money better than banks, and they have succeeded. Announcements this week from banks, card networks, cryptocurrency exchanges and central banks show...

Mastercard: Merchants Want AI Shoppers Without Losing the Customer

September 24, 2026
Watch more: The Agentic Experience With Gaurang Shah of Mastercard Agentic commerce is approaching an awkward transition point in its adoption cycle. The artificial intelligence (AI) foundation is getting good...

Amazon Moves to Power the Agents That Power Commerce

September 23, 2026
Amazon’s next artificial intelligence push for merchants is less about giving sellers better answers than reducing how often they need to ask questions at all. Mary Beth Westmoreland, vice president,...

Quick Reads
Block Joins Push to Standardize Agentic Payments

September 25, 2026
Block has joined the x402 Foundation to help advance open, agentic commerce, Steve Reis, head of product, Block Financial Platform, said in a Thursday (Sept. 24) blog post. As a member of this open standard for agentic payments, Block will bring its experience across payments and consumer products to the Foundation’s working groups, continue contributing to Bitcoin Lightning support of x402 and continue […]

OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Join Forces to Set AI Safety Standards

September 24, 2026
Anthropic, Google and OpenAI aim to launch a standards body focused on artificial intelligence (AI) by the end of this year or early next year, The Information reported Thursday (Sept. 24), citing unnamed...

AI-Generated Medical Coding Adds Nearly $1 Billion to Blue Cross Costs

September 24, 2026
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools used by healthcare providers to identify patients’ secondary medical conditions contributed nearly $1 billion in additional costs for Blue Cross Blue Shield insurers over two years,...

Bird Secures $450 Million and Extends Communications Infrastructure to AI Agents

September 23, 2026
Bird, a provider of communications infrastructure for businesses and artificial intelligence (AI) agents, secured $450 million in debt financing, Bird Founder and CEO Robert Vis said in a Wednesday (Sept. 23) blog post. The...