Airbnb has launched a new feature called “Reserve Now, Pay Later” that lets users in the U.S. reserve a property without paying up front, potentially allowing people to cancel their bookings with less hassle if their plans change. The feature is applicable to properties that have a “flexible” or “moderate” cancellation policy. Flexible policies let users cancel their reservation up to 24 hours before they check in, while moderate policies allow for no-fee cancellations until five days before check-in. Users will need to pay the full amount for their booking before the listing’s free cancellation period ends. Airbnb will send users a reminder to pay before that date. Citing a survey it conducted with Focaldata, Airbnb said 55% of those surveyed preferred a flexible payment option while booking a stay, with 42% saying they missed out on properties while trying to figure out payment logistics with other travelers.
Multiverse’s Model Zoo offers compact high-performing AI for device commands and for local reasoning—bringing powerful intelligence to home appliances, smartphones, and PCs via quantum compression
AI startup Multiverse Computing has released two AI models that are the world’s smallest models that are still high-performing and can handle chat, speech, and even reasoning in one case. These new tiny models are intended to be embedded into Internet of Things devices, as well as run locally on smartphones, tablets, and PCs. “We can compress the model so much that they can fit on devices,” founder Román Orús told. “You can run them on premises, directly on your iPhone, or on your Apple Watch.” Its two new models are so small that they can bring chat AI capabilities to just about any IoT device and work without an internet connection. It humorously calls this family the Model Zoo because it’s naming the products based on animal brain sizes. A model it calls SuperFly is a compressed version of Hugging Face’s open source model SmolLM2-135. The original has 135 million parameters and was developed for on-device uses. SuperFly is 94 million parameters, which Orús likens to the size of a fly’s brain. “This is like having a fly, but a little bit more clever,” he said. SuperFly is designed to be trained on very restricted data, like a device’s operations. Multiverse envisions it embedded into home appliances, allowing users to operate them with voice commands like “start quick wash” for a washing machine. Or users can ask troubleshooting questions. With a little processing power (like an Arduino), the model can handle a voice interface. The other model is named ChickBrain, and is larger at 3.2 billion parameters, but is also far more capable and has reasoning capabilities. It’s a compressed version of Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B model, Multiverse says. Yet it’s small enough to run on a MacBook, no internet connection required. More importantly, Orús said that ChickBrain actually slightly outperforms the original in several standard benchmarks, including the language-skill benchmark MMLU-Pro, math skills benchmarks Math 500 and GSM8K, and the general knowledge benchmark GPQA Diamond.
Paradigm reimagines spreadsheets with AI agents in every cell, automating data collection and enhancing flexibility using multiple AI models for powerful, cost-effective workflows
Paradigm is an AI-powered spreadsheet equipped with more than 5,000 AI agents. Users can assign different prompts to individual columns and cells, and individual AI agents will crawl the internet to find and fill out the needed information. Paradigm works with AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google’s Gemini and supports model switching. Paradigm attracts users ranging from consultants to sales professionals and finance folks and operates on a subscription model with tiers based on usage. “We want to support every single model because we want our users to be able to have the highest reasoning outputs when they need it, but also the cheapest outputs,” founder Anna Monaco said. “It’s just a constant cycle of evaluating different models, working closely with model providers to make sure our limits are high enough, and then giving some of that power to our users.” Monaco said that she doesn’t really consider the competition because Paradigm doesn’t think of itself as an AI-powered spreadsheet. She said she thinks of it as a new AI-powered workflow that happens to be in the familiar form of a spreadsheet but won’t necessarily stay that way forever.
Orion and GiftingNetwork integrate to empower advisors with branded DAF platforms, facilitating multigenerational giving and tax-efficient philanthropic planning via modern, mobile-first technology
Orion, a premier provider of transformative wealthtech solutions powering the growth of financial advisors and the enterprise firms that serve them, and GiftingNetwork, provider of comprehensive philanthropic solutions, announced an integration partnership that empowers Orion advisors to offer personalized, white-labeled donor-advised fund (DAF) solutions that drive deeper family engagement, align wealth with values, and retain assets across generations. Unlike traditional DAF offerings, GiftingNetwork enables Orion advisors to create their own firm-branded DAF experience, backed by a growing network of DAF sponsors and charities and supported by cutting-edge, mobile-first technology. Advisors gain full control over the philanthropic journey, offering clients a values-based extension of their financial plan with potential tax benefits, such as donating appreciated assets without incurring capital gains taxes and securing immediate charitable deductions. Orion advisors can now launch white-labeled DAFs, facilitate multigenerational giving conversations, and serve nonprofit clients with tailored capabilities. These offerings further Orion’s commitment to delivering modern portfolio impact, combining behavioral finance, risk management, and personalized planning to align portfolios with each client’s goals, values, and emotional drivers. GiftingNetwork’s platform combines intuitive donor experiences with advisor-facing reporting dashboards, grant workflows, and philanthropic consulting. GiftingNetwork is part of Orion’s Premier Partnership Program, a strategic initiative to collaborate with select industry leaders to deliver cutting-edge solutions for advisors.
Saks Global’s AI-powered hyper-personalized homepage tailors content in real time using purchase intent, boosting revenue per visitor by 7% and conversion by 10%
Saks Global has released a new hyper-personalized homepage as part of the Saks Fifth Avenue online and mobile app experience. The personalized homepage is dynamically assembled based on each incoming visitor’s purchase intent so that the layout of the page, the content and the strategies seen by each customer is customized just for them. To guide the homepage features and recommendations, the company is using machine learning to refine recommendations in real time based on each customer’s predicted intent and preferences, continuously adjusting with any action on the site–from products viewed to pages visited. Since initially launching the personalized homepage to 5% of ecommerce traffic, the company has gradually scaled the release to more visitors, achieving a significant milestone of directing 100% of Saks.com traffic to the personalized homepage. Performance of the homepage has exceeded expectations, driving a 7% increase in revenue per visitor and improving conversion by nearly 10%. Through its industry-leading personalization strategy, Saks Global aims to make each consumer’s browsing and purchasing more inspiring and convenient by meeting them with more relevant products, brands and categories as soon as they land on the homepage. To accelerate Saks Global’s personalization strategy and build upon its success to date, the company mobilized a team of cross-functional experts to drive a new project focused on rapid experimentation and AI-driven innovation to deliver personalized customer journeys across channels. The team prioritizes improvements to the digital customer experience, developing new features, content templates and recommendation algorithms by leveraging user experience (UX) research, data-informed insights and A/B testing. Onsite and off, the team’s goal is to drive strategies that personalize the customer experience to enable growth.
Ninth Wave’s next-gen portal offers FIs deep insights into data usage, access management, and fintech activity, empowering secure, compliant monetization of permissioned open finance data
Ninth Wave, a leading provider of open finance connectivity solutions, has launched its next-generation Ninth Wave Portal. The Portal closely monitors and measures all aspects of open finance data, giving financial institutions (FIs) full control over data sharing and providing deeper insights into security and usage patterns. It will enable FIs to monetize data sharing if they choose, creating new revenue streams from open finance. The platform enables banks to securely manage and monetize permissioned data through value-added services, unlocking new revenue streams. The Ninth Wave Portal serves as the financial institution’s window into their open finance ecosystem, removing guesswork and increasing transparency. It ensures data interactions are securely integrated, permissioned, and compliant with privacy requirements. The Ninth Wave Portal’s Analytics and Intelligence feature detects all data requests originating from external applications made on behalf of financial institutions’ customers, and identifies the following: Which applications are accessing data from the FI; Which fintech applications are accessing data through aggregator partnerships; What is the volume of requests per application; How many customers are taking advantage of the connectivity and who are they; What are the performance and uptime statistics for the open finance APIs.
Tariffs disrupt Adyen’s growth, with lost de minimis exemptions hitting cross-border e-commerce; suggesting payments industry faces headwinds as inflation and trade wars raise costs
Adyen’s financial outlook has been hit by tariffs and the global trade war, with CEO Ingo Uytdehaage noting that “the tariffs are impacting some of our Asia Pacific merchants.” First-half 2025 net revenue came in at $1.27 billion versus a $1.3 billion forecast, and earnings before interest, taxes and amortization were $635 million, below estimates. The firm said its earlier forecast of “slight net revenue growth” is now “unlikely” amid macro uncertainty. While Adyen reported wallet share gains and new customer wins, analysts warned that “the downward revision in full year net revenue growth guidance and commentary suggesting a persistent macro headwind… will likely overshadow the positive data points.” To offset U.S. tariff exposure, Adyen plans to route more transactions from China to non-U.S. consumers. A key pressure point is the suspension of the U.S. de minimis rule, which had exempted imports under $800 from tariffs—impacting large Chinese e-commerce firms like Temu and Shein and thus slowing APAC merchant growth. Analysts caution that cross-border e-commerce and discretionary online retail are most at risk, while a weaker dollar could provide some relief. “Tariffs are a tax on imports and are increasing the price of goods… they will very directly reduce commerce and consequently payments,” said Eric Grover of Intrepid Ventures. Adyen’s exposure outside the U.S., particularly in Asia, makes it more vulnerable, and with inflation rising and labor markets weakening, its underperformance may be an early warning for the wider payments industry.
Private AI from Magic Research harnesses legacy hardware in a distributed mesh, orchestrating neural network shards to deliver supercomputer-level inference with 90% lower costs and full data control.
Magic Research, has launched an artificial intelligence platform for on-premises use that it claims can cut costs by up to 90% from comparable cloud-based services. Called Private AI, the platform is intended to give organizations complete control over their data, infrastructure and brand by operating securely behind a firewall and leveraging existing computing resources. The proprietary technology underlying Private AI is Fabric Hypergrid, a distributed computing mesh that taps into existing hardware on a network, including legacy graphic processing units, central processing units and accelerators, to create the equivalent of an AI supercomputer at a small fraction of the cost. Hypergrid can “shard neural networks during the inference process,” said Humberto Farias, founder and chief executive of Magic Research. Sharding is an architecture originally created for database management systems that breaks monolithic databases into smaller, faster, more manageable pieces called shards that each hold a subset of the dataset. During the inference process, a dynamic model router analyzes the AI task and matches it with the best available computational resource within the private network. The Hypergrid layer then orchestrates the workload, performing model acceleration and distributing shards of the neural network across the available hardware before reassembling the results. The model-agnostic platform provides a white-labeled AI chatbot experience with customizable user interfaces, workflows, models and permissions. A component called GatewAI, enforces policies, filters content, logs activity and ensures alignment with industry-specific regulations like FERPA, HIPAA, GDPR and SOC 2.
Anthropic’s command-line coding tool can now be purchased as part of a broader enterprise suite, allowing for more sophisticated integrations and more powerful admin tools
Anthropic announced a new subscription offering that will incorporate Claude Code into Claude for Enterprise. Previously available only through individual accounts, Anthropic’s command-line coding tool can now be purchased as part of a broader enterprise suite, allowing for more sophisticated integrations and more powerful admin tools. “This is the most requested feature from our business team and enterprise customers,” Anthropic product lead Scott White told. The integration positions Anthropic to better compete with command-line tools from Google and GitHub, both of which included enterprise integrations on launch. Launched in June, Claude Code has quickly become one of the most popular command-line programming tools, offering a more agentic approach than traditional IDE-based tools. That popularity has come with some growing pains, as individual users of the service have struggled with unexpected usage limits. The new enterprise offering is partially a response to these issues, allowing businesses to set granular spending controls that can be scaled up for intense usage. Anthropic is particularly bullish about integrations between Claude Code and the Claude.ai chatbot, which can now be managed more flexibly in an enterprise context. Businesses that subscribe to the new bundle can develop Claude Code prompts in conjunction with the Claude chatbot, or integrate the command-line tool more deeply into internal data sources.
Strategic integration of on-demand payment app DailyPay with Workday HCM and Payroll empowers frontline and hourly employees with real-time access to earnings
DailyPay has been selected as Workday’s Strategic Partner for On-Demand Pay in the United States and Canada. Through this collaboration, employers can give workers, including frontline and hourly workers, real-time access to their money as they earn it. DailyPay’s solution has been integrated with Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Workday Payroll since 2023. The companies are now offering a more connected experience for joint customers that empowers employees with access to their earnings on their own schedule, when they need it most. Matthew Brandt, senior vice president, global partners, Workday. “By giving employees access to their earned wages on their own terms, this partnership is helping to remove a major source of stress—and empowering a workforce that’s more resilient, engaged, and productive.” DailyPay’s easy-to-use platform, lets employees instantly access the pay they have already earned. This benefit is a win-win for businesses and workers alike: employers can build a more engaged and productive workforce, while employees gain greater control of their finances and feel more satisfied and empowered at work.