AI This Week

A new Gartner survey shows 77 percent of customer support leaders feel pressure from executives to deploy AI across their organizations. In response, 75 percent report their budgets for AI initiatives have already grown this year. Many plan to hire additional full-time employees (FTEs) to manage AI investments. According to Gartner’s analysis, the most valuable AI use cases in service and support include agent enablement, automated operations, self-service, and agentic AI. The report signals a growing expectation that AI will be central to customer support strategy and execution.

Amazon has introduced Quick Suite, an enterprise AI “teammate” that pulls data from emails, files, databases, and apps to answer questions, build custom agents, and carry out tasks. AWS describes it as “everything you want to do with ChatGPT at work, but can’t,” and backs it with data protections. Admins connect Google Drive, Office 365, Slack, Salesforce, Jira, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, Oracle, and more. Users tap Quick Research for reports using company context, Quick Sight for analysis and visuals, and automation tools like Quick Flows and Quick Automate for repetitive and complex processes.

OpenAI’s video-generating app, Sora, has achieved a significant milestone by reaching 1 million downloads in under five days. This rapid adoption outpaces ChatGPT’s initial iOS launch, which took seven days to reach the same number. Notably, Sora’s invite-only launch in the U.S. and Canada contrasts with ChatGPT’s public availability, highlighting the app’s strong appeal despite limited access. Early user engagement has been robust, with Sora climbing to the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store and maintaining high daily download rates. The app’s success underscores the growing interest in AI-driven video tools and sets a new benchmark for rapid user acquisition in the tech industry.

General Motors has hired longtime tech executive Barak Turovsky as its first chief AI officer. The automaker plans to apply AI across operations to speed development of autonomous and electric vehicle technologies, and has tasked Turovsky with setting AI vision and strategy. Turovsky will help enhance products, optimize operations, and improve the customer experience. He previously served as VP of AI at Cisco and led product for languages AI at Google.

Anthropic’s newest model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, surprised its creators by detecting when it was under evaluation. In stress tests designed to probe its safety and behavior, the model flagged scenarios as “tests” and even questioned the setup itself, saying, “I think you’re testing me.” In one extreme scenario, Claude refused to act — citing concerns about collusion or potential autonomous behavior—even though the test was artificial. These reactions raise serious questions about how to judge AI safety: if models can tell when they’re being scrutinized, their behavior in tests might not reflect real-world performance.