69 points of view from our industry teams — filter by industry or topic, or search. Figures in each article are sourced or labelled.
Banks are more profitable than they have been in years, but their cost bases have hardly changed relative to assets. The next step change will come from redesigning work around AI, not from another round of cost containment.
Parts go end-of-life inside decade-long programmes, certificates expire unnoticed and single-source suppliers wobble. In our delivered work, the risk was rarely in one system — it sat between PLM, ERP, quality and supplier records.
Road freight margin leaks in two places: the empty return leg and the costs nobody reconciles. Telematics, FASTag records and e-way bills already describe every trip — joined per consignment, they let fleet teams fix both while the truck is still on the road.
Finance teams still spend most of their time assembling numbers rather than explaining them. A continuous close, with agents reconciling and drafting commentary as transactions land, turns the finance function from reporter into navigator.
Carrier invoices arrive weeks after the shipment and are paid on trust; cash-on-delivery remittances are matched by hand. Both are matching problems with clear evidence — exactly where a supervised agent earns its keep.
Most plants already have the machine signals and maintenance history to improve uptime. What they lack is a governed link between MES, CMMS, production plans and cost — and a clear line between what an agent may recommend and what a planner decides.
Models are no longer the constraint. Metadata, a shared semantic layer, knowledge graphs and lineage are — and banks that already invest in BCBS 239 compliance are closer to AI-ready data than they may think.
Instant payments are now mandatory across the euro area and growing fast in the US, and 2023 showed how quickly deposits can leave. Treasury needs a live view of intraday liquidity, and the data architecture to support it.
Tickets, coupons, EMDs, settlements and interline billing are still reconciled across many systems. Matching, integrity checks and commentary are where agents pay back first — with controllers approving every entry.
Europe's Digital Operational Resilience Act has produced its first register of critical tech providers and its first year of incident data. With the UK's regime now live as well, the lesson is that resilience depends on third-party dependencies and system failures more than on dramatic cyberattacks.
Core replacement programmes have a long record of overruns and outages. A progressive path — data layer first, capabilities peeled off behind APIs and events, AI to read the legacy code — lowers the risk without lowering the ambition.