• Yahoo Finance Video

    AI helps businesses fight 'fear of irrelevance': Builder.ai CEO

    Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are as dependent as ever on the latest technology trends that will enable their companies to prosper, from the fintech platforms that run their payment systems to leveraging social media to reach a broader audience. As part of Yahoo Finance's Small Business, Big Opportunities special, Builder.ai Founder and CEO Sachin Dev Duggal sits down with Akiko Fujita at the 2024 Milken Conference to talk about how businesses are fighting "the fear of irrelevance" in the transition to becoming digitally native and embrace new software that will help owners scale and grow. "What we're seeing is that depending on when you speak to that small-medium business, they're either really excited to go do something because they feel like they're gonna unshackle themselves," Duggal says. "Or they're actually quite fearful because they've heard of a bad experience, they've had a bad experience, and almost it becomes 10 times harder to then get them out of the shelf." But Duggal is largely seeing positive growth when businesses do enact these changes. One big factor is how SMBs are adopting AI and other large-language models like ChatGPT to automate certain workflows, including marketing and copyrighting promotional materials. Duggal cites increased productivity per employee and enhanced customer engagements as another pair of benefits from AI: "Now we're seeing this really nice hybrid between user interface (UI) elements, chat experiences, personalization, so that these small-medium businesses can talk to their customers in the way the customer wants to talk to them." Addressing fears of job replacement and workplace reductions fueled by AI, Duggal ultimately believes artificial intelligence is useful in cutting out mundane tasks and will benefit workers by "[putting] a cape on a human to make them superhuman. And so you are actually being more productive." Catch more of Yahoo Finance's coverage at the 2024 Milken Institute Global Conference and its Small Business: Big Opportunities special from this week. This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

  • Associated Press

    Family connected to house where Boston police officer's body was found outside in snow testifies

    A highly anticipated trial involving a woman accused of striking her Boston police officer boyfriend with her SUV and leaving him for dead in a snowbank outside a home entered its ninth day on Friday in Massachusetts. John O’Keefe died in the Boston suburb of Canton on Jan. 29, 2022. The case has garnered national attention because the defense alleges that state and local law enforcement officials framed girlfriend Karen Read and allowed the real killer to go free.

  • Reuters

    North Korea leader Kim Jong Un inspects artillery weapon system, attends test firing, KCNA says

    North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Friday inspected the country's artillery weapon system and attended the test-firing of such weapons, the North's state media KCNA news agency reported on Saturday. The KCNA report said Kim learned about the technically updated version of the 240 mm multiple rocket launcher system and watched the test-fire of controllable shells for multiple rocket launchers produced at different national defence industrial enterprises. "The updated multiple rocket launcher with high mobility and concentration of fire has an automatic fire combined control system and will be deployed to units of the Korean People's Army as replacement equipment from 2024 to 2026," KCNA said, adding such "a significant change" will soon be made in increasing the artillery combat ability of the North's army.