Editor's note: This is AI Impact, Newsweek's weekly newsletter where each week, we will explore how business leaders are unlocking real value through artificial intelligence. Tap or click here to get this newsletter delivered to your inbox. Our Newsweek AI Impact webinar earlier this week did something I always like: It made AI sound a lot less magical and a lot more operational.
What made the conversation useful was how quickly it got into the machinery of the business itself. Yahoo’s Matt Sanchez talked about needing to modernize code and tooling before agentic development could really affect the core business. Microsoft’s Katy George explained how the company’s own Copilot AI rollout lost momentum until engineers studied how salespeople actually worked and redesigned around those workflows.
Qualcomm’s Durga Malladi brought the infrastructure side down to practical choices around connectivity, model size, cost and sensitive data. EY’s Rodrigo Madanes described another problem that can surface later, when privacy, data sovereignty and compliance requirements turn an easy-looking pilot into a much harder scaling exercise. Among those examples, the practical challenge kept moving.
Speeding up one part of a workflow can push the bottleneck somewhere else, while promising projects can run into constraints that were barely visible during experimentation. Capable tools can also lose adoption when they do not fit the way people actually work. I pulled together the biggest takeaways from “Overcoming Barriers to AI Transformation in Legacy Industries” in my recap, and you can also watch the full webinar, presented by Cognizant, if you missed the live discussion.
The video is also available at the top of the newsletter. This week’s Signal Capture takes that same practical question into financial services. As I explore below, automating more of the process does not necessarily mean a business is making better decisions.
Signals from the frontlines of AI adoption Taktile CEO: AI Agents Shouldn't Make Every Financial Decision Banks and insurers can now automate parts of underwriting, claims and onboarding that once required people to read documents, investigate cases and apply policy. Maik Taro Wehmeyer, CEO of financial decision platform Taktile, says choosing where agents belong inside those processes is becoming as important as adopting them in the first place. In practice, he described a financial decision as a combination of agents, data sources, fixed rules and human review, with each serving a different role in the process.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
