AAIA's AI Beat Newsletter: Atlanta, GA and Seattle WA, USA Chapter events, this week’s handpicked stories/reports: Digital transformation 2025: What’s in, what’s out, AI-supported spear phishing fools more than 50% of targets

AI in business and the enterprise news:

Recent AI news stories that caught our (and Perplexity AI’s!) eye over the last week:

• Digital transformation 2025: What’s in, what’s out (CIO, January 7, 2025)

  • “This year CIOs will want to increase focus on developing AI-ready employees, improving data governance, and enhancing training efforts rather than take a moonshot approach to delivering AI-infused transformation.”

• Lenovo at CES 2025: Pioneering the Future with AI-Powered Innovation for Business, Gaming, and Creative Users (Lenovo, January 7, 2025)

  • “At the heart of Lenovo’s innovation is its Smarter AI for All vision, which integrates cutting-edge AI capabilities into its Copilot+ PCs and solutions. Leading this effort is Lenovo AI Now, a powerful on-device personalized AI assistant built on Meta’s Llama 3 model, which offers natural language processing for tasks like document summarization, knowledge base retrieval, and workflow assistance.”

• Education Min. declares 2025 as year of AI revolution in Israel (Jerusalem Post, January 12, 2025)

  • “The ministry has been developing specialized teacher training programs and innovative lesson plans designed to make AI accessible to students and teachers of all backgrounds and age groups across Israeli society. The ministry views artificial intelligence as a tool that empowers educators and creates a more personalized learning experience tailored to individual student needs.”

  • “To ensure the program's success, the ministry has partnered with thousands of mentors from Israel’s high-tech sector and forged collaborations with global tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Intel. Teacher training sessions that introduce AI tools and their practical applications are already underway.”

• AI may listen in on your next doctor’s appointment (QCity Metro, January 7, 2025)

  • “Like a growing number of doctors, Wilson uses an artificial intelligence tool that listens to her conversations with patients. It then transforms them into a clinical visit summary that she can review, edit and upload to a patient’s medical record in just a few minutes.”

  • “The goal? To allow doctors to spend less time doing paperwork and more time caring for patients.”

  • “She said the AI tool, known as DAX Copilot, is saving her more than an hour a day entering appointment details into patient medical records.”

• UK government's AI SWOT analysis favours AI opportunities (TaylorWessing, January 14, 2025)

  • “As the government itself points out, the Plan focuses less on AI safety issues and more on leveraging AI to help with productivity and growth, and to deliver more efficient public services at lower cost. This is alongside considering infrastructure needs, upskilling and attracting top AI talent, enhancing public trust in AI, reducing barriers to uptake, while still considering safety, governance and environmental issues.”

  • “The government's response is focused around three pillars – laying the foundations for AI to flourish in the UK, boosting adoption across public and private sectors, and keeping the UK "ahead of the pack".”

• Wall Street expects to shed 200,000 jobs as AI erodes human roles (Financial Post/Bloomberg News, January 9, 2025)

  • “Chief information and technology officers surveyed for BI indicated that on average they expect a net three per cent of their workforce to be cut, according to a report published Thursday.”

  • “Back office, middle office and operations are likely to be most at risk, Tomasz Noetzel, the BI senior analyst who wrote the report, said in a message. Customer services could see changes as bots manage client functions, while know-your-customer duties would also be vulnerable. “Any jobs involving routine, repetitive tasks are at risk,” he said. “But AI will not eliminate them fully, rather it will lead to workforce transformation.””

• AI-supported spear phishing fools more than 50% of targets (Malwarebytes, January 7, 2025)

  • “Now, researchers have conducted a scientific study into the effectiveness of AI supported spear phishing, and the results line up with everyone’s expectations: AI is making it easier to do crimes.”

  • “To this end the researchers developed and tested an AI-powered tool to automate spear phishing campaigns. They used AI agents based on GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to search the web for available information on a target and use this for highly personalized phishing messages.

  • “With these tools, the researchers achieved a click-through rate (CTR) that marketing departments can only dream of, at 54%. The control group received arbitrary phishing emails and achieved a CTR of 12% (roughly 1 in 8 people clicked the link).”

Got events, news, or reports for the AAIA community? Share them! Email details to [email protected]