Month: August 2025

The EU is a Trailblazer, and the AI Act Proves It

by Beatriz Valle, posted in Big Data
B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• On August 2, 2025, the second stage of the EU AI Act came into force, including obligations for general purpose models.

• The AI Act first came into force in February 2025, with the first set of applications built into law; the legislation follows a staggered approach with the last wave expected for August 2, 2027.

August 2025 has been marked by the enforcement of a new set of rules as part of the AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI legislation, which is being implemented in gradual stages. Like GDPR was for data privacy in the 2010s, the AI Act will be the global blueprint for governance of the transformative technology of AI, for decades to come. Recent news of the latest case of legal action, this time against OpenAI, by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who ended his life after months of intensive use of ChatGPT, has thrown into stark relief the potential for harm and the need to regulate the technology.

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IBM Think on Tour Singapore 2025: An Agentic Enterprise Comes Down to Tech, Infrastructure, Orchestration, and Optionality

by Dustin Kehoe, posted in Big Data, IT Leader
D. Kehoe

Summary Bullets:

• Cloud will have a role in the AI journey, bit no longer the destination. The world will be hybrid, and multi-vendor.

• Agentic AI manifests from this new platform but will be double-edged sword. Autonomy is proportionate to risk. Any solution that goes to production needs governance.

The AI triathlon is underway. A year ago the race was about the size of the GenAI large language model (LLM). Today, it is the number AI agents connecting to internal systems to automate workflows, moving to the overall level of preparedness for the agentic enterprise. The latter seems about giving much higher levels of autonomy to AI agents to set own goals, self-learn and make decisions, possibly manage other agents from other vendors, that impact customers (e.g., approving home loans, dispute resolution, etc.). This, in turn, influences NPS, C-SAT, customer advocacy, compliance, and countless other metrics. It also raises many other legitimate legal, ethical, and regulatory concerns.

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New RingCentral AI Receptionist Enhancements Equal Expanded Opportunity  

by Gregg Willsky, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate
G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

  • RingCentral continues to aggressively grow its portfolio of AI-infused features both for team collaboration and communication as well as for contact center.
  • The most significant enhancement to RingCentral AI Receptionist (AIR) is the introduction of a standalone version called AI Receptionist Everywhere (AIR Everywhere).

RingCentral has maintained a very aggressive cadence of compiling AI-infused features in its portfolio. That is true with respect to both its team collaboration and communication platform called RingCentral RingEX (RingEX) as well as its contact center platform known as RingCentral RingCX (RingCX). Mirroring a growing trend, it has also implemented features that link team collaboration/communication and contact center, allowing for employees throughout an organization to influence the customer experience. RingCentral’s latest portfolio fortification has arrived in the form of new features for RingCentral AIR.

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Google Cloud Brings Customers to Its Summit to Share Their AI Success Stories

by siowmeng, posted in Cloud Enable
S. Soh

Summary Bullets:

• Google Cloud has developed a comprehensive tech stack to help businesses embrace GenAI and agentic AI.

• There are now many examples of AI delivering commercial benefits including AI-enabled software and automation of workflow for traditional enterprises.

Google Cloud held its annual event in Sydney (Australia) recently which had a keen focus on AI and more specifically agentic AI. The event highlighted the possibilities and benefits of AI through Australian businesses that have deployed the technology commercially to improve customer experience and develop new business opportunities. While the AI models such as Google Gemini have been capturing market attention, there are many other initiatives within Google Cloud to develop capabilities to simplify the adoption of AI. The company now offers an AI-optimized technology stack, which includes the AI infrastructure, data platform, models, platforms, and AI agents and applications. This does not mean that customers are confined to Google Cloud’s tech stack. One of the key value propositions of the company has been its willingness to support hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Another is a view to work with partners on open source and decoupling architectures to avoid lock-in and pivot with new requirements in 12 to 18 months. In the case of AI, it allows businesses to connect their tools developed on Google Cloud to data and applications in other cloud environments.

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GPT-5 Has Had a Rocky Start but Remains an Extraordinary Achievement

by Beatriz Valle, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, IT Leader
B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

  • OpenAI released GPT-5 on August 7, 2025, a multimodal large language model (LLM) with agentic capabilities.
  • This is the latest iteration of the famous chatbot, and the most important upgrade since the release of the previous generation, GPT-4, in 2023.

As it happens sometimes when a product is thrust with such force into the realm of popular culture, the release of GPT-5 sparked a veritable PR crisis, leading CEO Sam Altman to make a public apology and backtrack on the decision to remove access to all previous AI models in ChatGPT. Unlike enterprise customers, which received advanced warnings of such movements, consumer ChatGPT users did not know their preferred models would disappear so suddenly. The ensuing kerfuffle highlighted the strange co-dependency relationship that some people have developed with the technology, creating no end of background noise surrounding this momentous release.

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Tata Communications and Amazon Web Services to Build AI Network in India, as More Telcos Look to Deploy AI-ready Infrastructure

by Brendan Swan, posted in Network
B. Swan

Summary Bullets:

• Tata Communications will collaborate with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a high-capacity network connecting three major AWS infrastructure locations in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai.

• In a growing trend, more telecom providers are building high-capacity terrestrial networks to meet the growing demand in bandwidth contributed by the rise in artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud.

Tata Communications has announced a new partnership with AWS to build and deploy a high-capacity national terrestrial network backbone, making a significant move in transforming the country’s digital infrastructure evolution. This strategic collaboration between the two supports the continued rise in demand for data-intensive workloads driven by AI and cloud adoption. In what is becoming an increasing trend among global telecom operators, with more carriers investing substantial funds to expand, or upgrade their terrestrial networks to meet future data traffic demands, contributed by data-hungry workloads such as AI/ML, while future-proofing their networks to meet the requirements of their hyperscalers and enterprise customers.

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