Author: Malavika Madgula

We’ve all heard of the social media-famous terms ending with “maxxing,” like “looksmaxxing.” In Gen-Z Internet slang, it means to maximise or optimise a specific activity or quality… Did you ever imagine the same term to be applicable in AI (artificial intelligence)? We’re talking about – drumroll – Tokenmaxxing, the newest form of conspicuous consumption in Silicon Valley. It all blew up in April 2026 when a Meta engineer created a “token leaderboard” that ranked employees by their token usage. Basically, it was an internal leaderboard on the Meta intranet where employees wanted to show off their AI superuser chops,…

48 teams, 16 host cities, 3 countries, tens of millions of fans; the 2026 FIFA World Cup has shaped up to be the biggest sporting event the world has ever seen. It’s also shaped up to be the largest tech attack surface a sporting event has ever had. We’ve always thought of the FIFA World Cup in terms of the experience and its broadcast around the world: the game, the stadiums, the teams, the goals, and the crowds. However, making all that happen, behind the scenes, is a digital economy connecting millions of fans with hospitality providers, transport networks, ticketing…

Alvin Toffler correctly pointed out that the illiterate of the 21st century are those who can’t learn, unlearn and relearn, not those who can’t read and write – and his words are all the more relevant in today’s artificial intelligence (AI)-shaped world. Yes, we’ve become quite comfortable using AI, but do we fully trust it? According to a wide-ranging global 2025 collaborative study between KPMG and the University of Melbourne, more than 48,000 people across 47 countries were asked about AI and its impact on enterprises and individuals and organisations. The objective? To know about the public’s attitude, use, and…

Imagine your car being remotely disabled when you were driving it. Does it sound like a scene straight out of a Hollywood movie? Welcome to the 21st century, where these incidents are taking place not on the silver screen, but in real life. The controversy erupted in the first week of July 2026 when a series of prank videos from New Delhi showing e-rickshaws being disabled remotely using an app called BAT-BMS began making the rounds on social media. Not long before, content creators and influencers had whipped out their smartphones, recording themselves walking up to electric scooters and e-rickshaws…

Today, enterprises are analysing massive datasets and building AI applications, thus requiring some serious computing power. The hardware and compute power, however, that are required to support these computational workloads are becoming increasingly and ridiculously expensive. After all, GPUs (graphics processing units) are a huge capital investment, with high-end GPU units costing as much as USD 9,500-15,000. To top that, enterprise models cost all the more, going up to a whopping USD 27,000-40,000. Furthermore, organisations also need to invest in supporting infrastructure, such as cooling systems, servers, and more, increasing costs beyond the mere costs of the GPUs themselves. These…

It’s no exaggeration when we say that things are happening in a lightning-fast manner in tech space nowadays, especially in terms of IoT devices. According to IoT Analytics, the number of connected IoT devices across the world could possibly reach a whopping 39 billion by 2030, which is an equally huge jump of 13.2% CAGR from 2025. So, imagine the sheer amount of pressure on enterprise networks if everything were to rely on cloud computing. That’s where Edge AI (artificial intelligence) comes in, deftly handling data processing directly on devices. It essentially deploys AI models and algorithms directly onto local…

Nearly 30 years after the laying of the first successful transatlantic cable in 1866, Rudyard Kipling wrote “Let us be one!” in a classic poem about the mysteries of deep-sea communication titled “The Deep-Sea Cables.” Today, it’s been over half a century of telegraph lines having given way to fibre-optic cables, but their unifying promise remains the same. The seabed is the next great battleground, transforming into an arena of great-power competition, surveillance, and sabotage. After all, fibre-optic data cables carry 99% of global digital traffic, including military, diplomatic, government and financial communications and flows. Even as trust erodes and…

Enterprises have crossed multiple critical thresholds in AI (artificial intelligence) adoption over the past few years. Not only has GenAI (generative AI) moved from pilot to production, but it’s also evolved from merely assisting in work into digital colleagues that participate actively. Today, organisations have distanced themselves from inflexible hierarchies and transformed into adaptive meshes and AOMs (agentic operating models) allowing AI agents and humans to collaborate more easily – a phenomenon we like to call continuous intelligence. Now, there’s a subtler but more far-reaching shift underway: one where AI agents aren’t restricted to individual teams or even applications any…

When it comes to the unpredictable nature of the real world, even the most advanced of technologies can struggle… For instance, in Texas’ San Antonio, a Waymo robotaxi drove into a flooded street during severe weather in April 2026, prompting the brand to recall nearly 4,000 vehicles for a software fix. While no one was injured, it did expose a graver challenge: intelligence isn’t simply about processing data. It’s about how to use previous experience when conditions change and about what to notice after knowing where to look. And when it comes to shaping AI design for the future, scientists…

Imagine finding out that that supposedly harmless chat you were having with a chatbot was used to hack your own account… That’s what happened in the first week of June 2026, when attackers successfully hijacked a number of high-profile Instagram accounts by working – get this – Meta AI, the company’s very own AI-powered support chatbot. If this isn’t the future, we don’t know what is. What did they do? They coaxed and successfully manipulated into bypassing identity verification protocols and resetting passwords. These bad actors were able to completely lock out legitimate users not with traditional credentials but by…