Chatbots stories

AI shopping assistants win over UK and US consumers, but most abandon tools instantly when product suggestions feel irrelevant or pushy.

UK retailers brace for GBP £1.05bn in post-Christmas returns as fashion fit woes, social commerce and ageing habits strain logistics.

NTT DATA’s 2026 foresight flags six AI trends driving an ‘age of mass intelligence’, reshaping autonomy, security and chip sovereignty.

Australians are turning to AI for romance and emotional support as dating app scams soar, with social engineering behind most threats.

Moltbook, the all-bot social network, faces scrutiny after researchers reportedly accessed its live database and user emails without checks.

Animoca partners with CryptoSlam’s Ethoswarm on Animoca Minds, a cloud platform for always-on AI agents aimed at non-technical users.

AI-powered tools are rapidly reshaping UK retail as most shoppers embrace chat-based assistants and retailers ramp up investment for 2026.

8x8 reports triple-digit growth in AI voice and messaging for CX, as contact centres scale automation beyond pilots across channels.

AI companions are edging into the mainstream, prompting doubts over whether digital pets could reshape - but not replace - traditional pet ownership.

Lonely UK daters increasingly turn to AI companions even as romance scams surge, with rising losses and growing trust in chatbots over humans.

Pearson says US could gain up to USD $6.6 trillion from AI by 2034, but only if employers urgently invest in reskilling and task-level redesign.

Big banks and AI leaders signal they will layer new AI tools on top of, not instead of, core enterprise software systems.

Nearly half of New Zealand’s online daters would consider dating an AI, as loneliness and mistrust reshape how Kiwis seek romance online.

Jelou lands USD $10m Series A to scale its WhatsApp-based transactional AI platform Brain across the US and wider Americas market.

Simwood launches on-net conversational AI agents for carriers and MSPs, embedding voice and WhatsApp bots directly into UCaaS networks.

ICS.AI launches UK public sector AI model promising guaranteed savings, citing Derby City Council’s projected GBP £12 million benefit.

ServiceNow expands its OpenAI partnership to make frontier models and voice-first AI core to enterprise workflows and automation at scale.

Jack Rankin hails ArvatoConnect’s AI push in Datchet as a way to reshape customer service while keeping skilled jobs rooted in the UK.

Four in five Australian organisations say they struggle to prove AI delivers business value, blaming poor data access and weak integration.

European banks expect AI to shrink staff only slightly, with most projected job losses coming through routine attrition, not mass cuts.