UK authorities have unveiled a major policing reform programme that places AI and facial recognition at the centre of future law enforcement strategy. The plans include expanding the use of Live Facial Recognition and creating a national hub to scale AI tools across police forces.
The Home Office will fund 40 new facial recognition vans for town centres across England and Wales, significantly increasing real-time biometric surveillance capacity. Officials say the rollout responds to crime that increasingly involves digital activity.
The UK government will also invest £115 million over three years into a National Centre for AI in Policing, known as Police.AI. The centre will focus on speeding investigations, reducing paperwork and improving crime detection.
New governance measures will regulate police use of facial recognition and introduce a public register of deployed AI systems. National data standards aim to strengthen accountability and coordination across forces.
Structural reforms include creating a National Police Service to tackle serious crime and terrorism. Predictive analytics, deepfake detection and digital forensics will play a larger operational role.
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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University created a virtual company staffed solely by AI ’employees’ trained on large language models from vendors including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, assigning them roles such as financial analyst and software engineer.
In this simulated work environment, the AI agents struggled to complete most tasks, with even the best-performing model only completing about a quarter of its assignments.
The experiment highlighted key weaknesses in current AI systems, including difficulty interpreting nuanced instructions, managing web navigation with pop-ups, and coordinating multi-step workflows without human intervention.
These gaps suggest that human judgement, adaptability and collaboration remain essential in real workplaces for the foreseeable future.
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Cybersecurity is set to receive the largest budget increases over the next 12 months, as organisations respond to rising geopolitical tensions and a surge in high-profile cyber-attacks, according to the KPMG Global Tech Report 2026.
More than half of UK firms plan to lift cybersecurity spending by over 10 percent, outpacing global averages and reflecting heightened concern over digital resilience.
AI and data analytics are also attracting substantial investment, with most organisations increasing budgets as they anticipate stronger returns by the end of 2026. Executives expect AI to shift from an efficiency tool to a core revenue driver, signalling a move toward large-scale deployment.
Despite strong investment momentum, scaling remains a major challenge. Fewer than one in 10 organisations report fully deployed AI or cybersecurity systems today, although around half expect to reach that stage within a year.
Structural barriers, fragmented ownership, and unclear accountability continue to slow execution, highlighting the complexity of translating strategy into operational impact.
Agentic AI is emerging as a central focus, with most organisations already embedding autonomous systems into workflows. Demand for specialist AI roles is rising, alongside closer collaboration to ensure secure deployment, governance, and continuous monitoring.
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Aquila has completed a €5 million investment in AI-driven warehouse automation at its Ilfov, Dragomiresti logistics centre. The project is a strategic response to increasing portfolio complexity and growing distribution volumes in the FMCG sector.
The automation solution is built around AI-based vision systems that identify products directly from images using shape, colour and visual characteristics. The technology removes the need for labels or manual scanning, even when packaging orientation or appearance shows minor variations.
According to the company, the system improves the speed and accuracy of warehouse operations while reducing manual work and optimising storage space. These efficiency gains allow better use of operational resources.
The investment enables Aquila to scale logistics operations without proportional increases in resources. The company reports improved internal efficiency, stronger service quality for customers and the creation of medium-term competitive advantages.
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Companies are reporting net job losses linked to AI adoption, with research showing a sharper impact than in other major economies. A Morgan Stanley survey found that firms using the technology for at least a year cut more roles than they created, particularly across the UK labour market.
The study covered sectors including retail, real estate, transport, healthcare equipment and automotive manufacturing, showing an average productivity increase of 11.5% among UK businesses. Comparable firms in the United States reported similar efficiency gains but continued to expand employment overall.
Researchers pointed to higher operating costs and tax pressures as factors amplifying the employment impact in Britain. Unemployment has reached a four-year high, while increases in the minimum wage and employer national insurance contributions have tightened hiring across industries.
Public concern over AI-driven displacement is also rising, with more than a quarter of UK workers fearing their roles could disappear within five years, according to recruitment firm Randstad. Younger workers expressed the highest anxiety, while older generations showed greater confidence in adapting.
Political leaders warn that unmanaged AI-driven change could disrupt labour markets. London mayor Sadiq Khan said the technology may cut many white-collar jobs, calling for action to create replacement roles.
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WhatsApp has been formally designated a Very Large Online Platform under the EU Digital Services Act, triggering the bloc’s most stringent digital oversight regime.
The classification follows confirmation that the messaging service has exceeded 51 million monthly users in the EU, triggering enhanced regulatory scrutiny.
As a VLOP, WhatsApp must take active steps to limit the spread of disinformation and reduce risks linked to the manipulation of public debate. The platform is also expected to strengthen safeguards for users’ mental health, with particular attention placed on the protection of minors and younger audiences.
The European Commission will oversee compliance directly and may impose financial penalties of up to 6 percent of WhatsApp’s global annual turnover if violations are identified. The company has until mid-May to align its systems, policies and risk assessments with the DSA’s requirements.
WhatsApp joins a growing list of major platforms already subject to similar obligations, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X. The move reflects the Commission’s broader effort to apply the Digital Services Act across social media, messaging services and content platforms linked to systemic online risks.
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France has unveiled a new push to reduce Europe’s dependence on US and Chinese technology suppliers, placing digital sovereignty back at the centre of the EU policy debates.
Speaking in Paris, France’s minister for AI and digital affairs, Anne Le Hénanff, presented initiatives to expose and address the structural reliance on non-EU technologies across public administrations and private companies.
Central to the strategy is the creation of a Digital Sovereignty Observatory, which will map foreign technology dependencies and assess organisational exposure to geopolitical and supply-chain risks.
The body, led by former Europe minister Clément Beaune, is intended to provide the evidence base needed for coordinated action rather than symbolic declarations of autonomy.
France is also advancing a Digital Resilience Index, expected to publish its first findings in early 2026. The index will measure reliance on foreign digital services and products, identifying vulnerabilities linked to cloud infrastructure, AI, cybersecurity and emerging technologies.
Industry data suggests Europe’s dependence on external tech providers costs the continent hundreds of billions of euros annually.
Paris is using the initiative to renew calls for a European preference in public-sector digital procurement and for a standard EU definition of European digital services.
Such proposals remain contentious among member states, yet France argues they are essential for restoring strategic control over critical digital infrastructure.
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Microsoft has unveiled Maia 200, a next-generation AI inference accelerator built to boost performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness at scale. Built on TSMC’s 3-nanometre process, the chip boosts speed, efficiency, and memory throughput for advanced AI models.
The new accelerator will power Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure across Azure, Microsoft Foundry, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, including workloads for OpenAI’s latest GPT-5.2 models.
Internal teams will use Maia 200 for synthetic data generation and reinforcement learning, accelerating AI development. Maia 200 is being rolled out in Microsoft’s US Central data centre region, with further deployments planned across additional global locations.
A preview version of the Maia software development kit is also being released, offering developers access to PyTorch integration, optimised compilers, and low-level programming tools to fine-tune AI models across heterogeneous computing environments.
The system introduces a redesigned networking and memory architecture optimised for high-bandwidth data movement and large-scale inference clusters.
Microsoft says the platform delivers significant improvements in performance per dollar, scalability, and power efficiency, positioning Maia 200 as a cornerstone of its long-term AI infrastructure strategy.
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Google’s health-related search results increasingly draw on YouTube rather than hospitals, government agencies, or academic institutions, as new research reveals how AI Overviews select citation sources in automated results.
An analysis by SEO platform SE Ranking reviewed more than 50,000 German-language health queries and found AI Overviews appeared on over 82% of searches, making healthcare one of the most AI-influenced information categories on Google.
Across all cited sources, YouTube ranked first by a wide margin, accounting for more than 20,000 references and surpassing medical publishers, hospital websites, and public health authorities.
Academic journals and research institutions accounted for less than 1% of citations, while national and international government health bodies accounted for under 0.5%, highlighting a sharp imbalance in source authority.
Researchers warn that when platform-scale content outweighs evidence-based medical sources, the risk extends beyond misinformation to long-term erosion of trust in AI-powered search systems.
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The organisation Google.org has selected twelve recipients for its $20 million AI for Science fund, which aims to accelerate research in health, agriculture, biodiversity, and climate.
The initiative backs academic, nonprofit, and startup teams using AI to turn scientific insights into real-world solutions. In health and life sciences, projects target genetic decoding, neural mapping, disease prediction, and faster detection of drug resistance.
Research groups are applying advanced AI models to unlock hidden regions of the human genome, simulate disease pathways, and dramatically reduce detection times for life-threatening pathogens, shifting medicine towards earlier intervention and prevention.
Agriculture and food systems are another focus, using AI to breed resistant crops, improve nutrition, and cut livestock methane emissions. Projects seek to strengthen food security, boost sustainability, and support climate resilience.
Biodiversity and clean energy efforts target species mapping, conservation planning, fusion research, and large-scale carbon capture. Open science principles ensure datasets and tools remain accessible, scalable, and capable of driving wider breakthroughs.
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