Atome to Get $75 Million From Lending Ark as Credit Demand Grows
Atome, Southeast Asia's biggest buy now, pay later provider, secured a $75 million asset-backed financing facility from Lending Ark, as demand for affordable credit grows in the Philippines.
The financing will help Atome to broaden its credit offerings and expand financial access in the Philippines, according to a statement on Monday. Atome is owned by Singapore-headquartered Advance Intelligence Group, which is backed by investors including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Warburg Pincus and Northstar.
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The Verge
41 minutes ago
- The Verge
Apple keeps pulling its own ads
Apple has taken down a new ad just one day after posting it, making it the fourth one removed in just over a year, as spotted earlier by MacRumors. The nearly eight-minute-long ad, titled 'The Parent Presentation,' featured comedian Martin Herlihy giving students advice on how to convince their parents to buy them a Mac. Apple posted the ad on Friday, but it disappeared from YouTube and the company's webpage for college students on Saturday. The iPhone maker also released an accompanying 81-slide presentation template that's supposed to give parents '45 undeniable reasons why a Mac is essential to college,' which still remains available for download on its site. Last May, Apple apologized for its 'Crush!' commercial, which showed a hydraulic press flattening a piano, record player, paint, and other creative tools, only to lift and show its new iPad Pro at the end. It was meant to demonstrate how many creative tasks can be completed with the device, but it sparked widespread backlash instead. Apple pulled the commercial from TV before removing it from YouTube. Months later, Apple pulled a 10-minute ad, called 'Out of Office OOO,' which showed a group of coworkers using Apple products on a business trip in Thailand, after receiving criticism from Thai citizens and lawmakers for portraying the country in a stereotypical and outdated way. Then, in March of this year, Apple took down an iPhone 16 ad with Last of Us star Bella Ramsey. Apple used the ad to show off an AI-upgraded Siri with features that aren't available yet, like recalling the name of someone they met months ago. Unlike the other ads pulled by Apple over the past year, there's no clear reason why 'The Parent Presentation' was taken down — other than some users on social media calling it 'cringe,' or raising questions about who the commercial's target audience was. The Verge reached out to Apple with a request for comment but didn't immediately hear back.
Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
The Services Industry Is Moving From Relocation To Reinvention
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AI gives us the ability to fundamentally reshape both our business functions and processes. AI Enables Three Layers of Change AI can be categorized by its type or by the intent behind its use. When it comes to business models and services, we find it most useful to focus on intent – what you're trying to achieve with AI. At Everest Group, we see AI impacting enterprise services in three distinct ways: It's this third category, Systems of Execution, that signals the pivot from augmentation to automation. From evolution to reinvention. Reinvention Will Redefine Services Firms will be doing all three categories. Most firms have their employees and associates already using ChatGPT and other tools. As more tools become available, it's inevitable that employees will adopt them. And so, most firms are seeking to both govern that use and encourage it, because we want people to be more productive and more effective. 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Reinvention does. It requires a top-down commitment to rethink how work gets done, often by the very people whose roles may be transformed or replaced. That's a difficult conversation. People can't imagine a world in which they don't have a role in it. It requires significant senior executive commitment and push-through to do that. It's far easier to augment current teams or embed AI into existing tech than to reimagine entire workflows. But if we are to realize the full value of AI, this is the work ahead. We must also recognize that this is not a 'Big Bang' transformation. Reinvention will happen process by process, use case by use case, sliced into thin, manageable initiatives. This modular approach is essential for scale and sustainability. Yet, it remains a complex and deeply strategic endeavor. Unlike past transformations, reinvention cuts across the technical, operational, organizational, and human layers of the enterprise. 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Forbes
an hour ago
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The AI Hype Trap: Why Most CEOs Struggle To Unlock Real Business Value
Diganta Sengupta is a seasoned technology leader with deep expertise in artificial intelligence, Gen AI, Cloud computing, and blockchain. While collaborating with clients on cutting-edge AI initiatives, I've had a front-row seat to the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI (GenAI). There's no doubt that it's a transformative force, and the excitement is palpable. Leaders see GenAI as a powerful enabler of innovation, efficiency and even cultural change within their organizations. But beneath the surface of this enthusiasm, a more sobering reality has started to emerge. I observed leadership become enthusiastic about leveraging AI to unlock insights from massive operational datasets, but the reality quickly became evident. Despite deploying advanced models, the organization lacked the foundational elements for scalable impact. In other words, data was siloed, inconsistent and often not AI-ready. Teams were stretched thin across too many pilot projects without clear alignment to business workflows. Flashy prototypes drew attention but failed to deliver lasting value without reengineering the underlying processes. This mirrors a broader trend. Seventy percent of CEOs fear that flawed AI strategies could lead to their removal, while 54% fear that competitors may already have more advanced AI implementations. AI systems learn from historical data. If that data encodes human biases against certain demographics, regions or business units, the AI will reproduce and even amplify those biases. While developing a prototype using certain datasets for a utility company, for example, I grappled with significant challenges around bias and fairness. These issues persisted despite the presence of seemingly robust governance frameworks. As we trained our AI models on historical operational and customer data, I noticed embedded biases tied to region, demographics and internal processes. 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Tackle hallucinations with robust validation pipelines, keep human-in-the-loop review for critical outputs and ongoing monitoring of model performance. This is where the challenge becomes even more complex. In many of my AI pilots in the oil and gas sector, I've repeatedly seen issues like inconsistent formats, missing metadata and a lack of standardized governance across departments severely impact model performance. Despite having large volumes of rich data, much of it couldn't be used without extensive manual cleanup. Efforts to unify data governance were often sidelined in favor of launching high-profile AI initiatives. A Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey similarly found that most companies' data is largely not ready for enterprise-wide AI, citing poor data quality as a key barrier. Without strong cross-functional data stewardship and quality assurance, even the most advanced AI models fall short. Before spending on fancy models, CEOs must champion cross-functional data governance, setting up practices on creating common taxonomies, automated data-quality checks and centralized platforms. Only then can AI be relied upon to deliver accurate, actionable insights. Working on the previously mentioned utility AI project also brought light to another critical and often underestimated concern—security and governance challenges that surround enterprise AI deployments. As we integrated sensitive operational and customer data into AI workflows, it became clear how vulnerable these systems can become without rigorous controls. Inadequate access management, insufficient encryption and lack of monitoring can create openings for potential ransomware attacks and unauthorized data exposure. In one survey, 35% of respondents cited mistakes or errors with real-world consequences and 34% pointed to not achieving expected value as top barriers. Both are rooted in security vulnerabilities and governance shortcomings. CEOs must elevate AI risk management to the same level as financial or operational risk. This includes rigorous model-risk frameworks, data-privacy impact assessments and alignment with evolving regulations such as the EU's AI Act. To harness the full potential of AI, I recommend applying practical, accountable strategies that organizations can adopt to drive real, scalable impact. • Establish cross-functional data governance. Form a governance council with IT, compliance and operations to ensure data ownership, accountability and consistent standards. • Implement data quality controls. Deploy automated checks for outliers, schema validation and data freshness to improve input reliability and mitigate bias. • Address LLM hallucinations with RAG. Use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt chaining and fallback mechanisms to reduce hallucinations. • Align AI projects with business goals. Prioritize initiatives tied directly to key KPIs (for example, safety, cost reduction, etc.), which can improve adoption and leadership support. • Pivot away from noncritical use cases. Reallocate resources from low-impact projects to high-impact workflows like downtime alerts for field engineers. • Focus on responsible AI deployment. Emphasize transparency, accountability and strategic value delivery to build trust and ensure scalability. CEOs who view AI adoption as a multidimensional transformation rather than a plug-and-play technology will be the ones ready to move beyond the hype and truly harness the AI power. The future of competitive advantage lies not just in having AI, but in embedding it thoughtfully and responsibly into the fabric of the enterprise. This will help transform AI from a conceptual promise to a tangible asset and help drive innovation and growth for the organizations. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
