The AI Pulse
Issue #68 — 2nd March 2026
Editor: Professor Alan Brown
This week’s AI Pulse is supported by Sopra Steria Next. Their free AI literacy course is the foundation every business leader needs in 2026. The three-part course helps leaders understand AI clearly – with early participants increasing their AI literacy by 64%. Click the link below to find out more.
Highlights in this edition include:
AI for Good
AI tools are being prepared for the physical world (The Economist) - Moving from digital screens to the physical world, “Physical AI” combines advanced software with robotics to automate complex industrial tasks, revolutionizing manufacturing and logistics efficiency.
UK Government unveils AI research strategy (UKAuthority) - UK Research and Innovation’s £1.6 billion strategy funds AI development through 2030, focusing on healthcare, skills, and infrastructure to drive economic growth and scientific breakthroughs.
Digital Ireland – Connecting our People, Securing our Future (gov.ie) - Ireland’s updated strategy aims to make the nation a global digital leader by 2030, focusing on AI adoption, cybersecurity, digital skills, and modernizing public services.
Bias and Ethics
Vulnerability in the age of AI (Ada Lovelace Institute) - Research explores how AI systems can create new forms of vulnerability for individuals and communities, emphasizing the need to prevent harm rather than just respond to it after damage is done.
AI Will Never Be Conscious (Wired) - Michael Pollan’s new book argues that while AI can perform many human-like tasks, it fundamentally lacks the capacity for genuine consciousness or personhood.
Cyber Security
Local Government Reorganisation Digital and Cyber Playbook (Local Digital) - Local Digital released a new playbook that gives councils practical tools and templates to handle the tricky digital and cybersecurity challenges that come with government reorganization.
Government cuts cyber-attack fix times by 84% and launches new profession to protect public services (GOV.UK) - The UK government launched a vulnerability monitoring service that cuts cyber-attack response times by 84% while creating a new Cyber Profession to strengthen defenses across public services.
Ukraine’s new world of warfare (Engelsberg ideas) - Ukraine’s battlefield is showcasing a new era of warfare driven by AI and rapid technological innovation, yet European NATO allies appear dangerously unprepared for these evolving military realities.
AI for Cybersecurity: Promise, Practice, and Pitfalls (IEEE) - AI is transforming cybersecurity by speeding up threat detection and automating responses, but organizations must also guard against AI systems becoming targets themselves.
Data & Decision Making
Reliability of LLMs as medical assistants for the general public: a randomized preregistered study (Nature) - A Nature Medicine study found that when everyday people used AI chatbots to diagnose medical conditions, the AI alone outperformed humans working with AI assistance, raising questions about how we should integrate these tools into healthcare.
AI isn’t failing, people are failing with AI (CIO) - Companies are rushing AI into tasks without proper data or safeguards, leading to project failures that have more to do with poor implementation than the technology itself.
Innovation & Collaboration
The AI Enterprise: Code Red (Bain) - Bain is urging executives to tackle four critical questions about AI implementation before their competitors gain an insurmountable advantage in the rapidly evolving business landscape.
New IT roles emerge to tackle AI evaluation (CIO) - Organizations are creating specialized teams to evaluate AI systems after discovering that agents making real-world decisions can behave unpredictably, even when they initially pass standard tests.
Characterizing Model Jaggedness Supports Safety and Usability (Stanford University) - AI models are “jagged”: they master complex tasks but fail at simple ones. This paper proposes measuring this unevenness to improve AI safety, governance, and development.
The Price of initiative just collapsed (Martha Lane-Fox) - The cost of experimenting with AI tools has dropped so dramatically that the biggest advantage now goes to people willing to actually try them, not those with the biggest budgets.
The future of software engineering (Thoughtworks) - A distinguished group of software engineers met at a retreat to wrestle with the questions that matter most as AI reshapes how we build software. This report is a synthesis of key themes and takeaways from across all breakout sessions.
Productivity & Efficiency
Look for New Ways to Create Value When Deploying Gen AI (Harvard Business Review) - Companies are seeing productivity gains from generative AI, but competitors are quickly copying these improvements, which means the real winners will be those who use AI to create entirely new business models rather than just speeding up existing work.
ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users (TechCrunch AI) - OpenAI’s ChatGPT now serves 900 million people weekly while the company secured $110 billion in funding, signaling AI’s rapid mainstream adoption and massive investor confidence in its commercial potential.
Finding value with AI and Industry 5.0 transformation (MIT Technology Review) - MIT Technology Review explains how companies can unlock Industry 5.0’s potential by connecting isolated data systems and redesigning their tech infrastructure to put people at the center of digital operations.
AI’s Big Payoff Is Coordination, Not Automation (Harvard Business Review) - AI’s biggest business impact won’t come from replacing workers, but from helping fragmented teams, tools, and data actually work together smoothly—unlocking entirely new competitive strategies.
The Demand Machine: The Realities of AI-Powered Public Service (New America) - AI will likely create more work for government agencies before it makes them more efficient, as citizens expect faster, more personalized services that require significant upfront investment and redesign.
How AI agents could destroy the economy (TechCrunch AI) - Citrini Research paints a dystopian scenario where AI agents could double unemployment and slash stock market values by over a third within two years, forcing business leaders to confront automation’s potential economic disruption.
Regulation and Compliance
The Challenge of Evaluating AI Products in Healthcare (Tech Policy Press) - As AI tools move into hospitals and clinics, regulators are scrambling to figure out how to test their safety and effectiveness—a complex puzzle that could determine whether these technologies help or harm patients.
Trump orders US agencies to stop use of Anthropic technology amid dispute over ethics of AI (The Guardian AI) - Trump has banned federal agencies from using Anthropic’s AI technology over safety disagreements, while OpenAI quickly secured a new Pentagon contract despite promising to keep the same ethical safeguards that sparked the original dispute.
AI Sovereignty’s Definitional Dilemma (Stanford University HAI) - Governments are scrambling to control their AI destinies, but fuzzy definitions of what “AI sovereignty” actually means are making it nearly impossible to craft effective policies that work.
UK government commits £483m to Post Office for IT transformation (ComputerWeekly) - The UK government is investing £483 million to help the Post Office finally ditch its scandal-plagued Fujitsu Horizon IT system, marking a major step toward rebuilding trust after years of wrongful prosecutions.
In permanence crisis (Andrew Greenway) - A policy expert argues that governments need stronger institutional capabilities and civil service reforms to tackle long-term challenges effectively.
‘It’s not Robocop’: UK police embrace AI ‘efficiency’ in complex investigations (The Guardian) - UK police are using Palantir’s AI tools to crack complex cases faster, with detectives crediting the technology for helping convict a gang that stole £800,000 by connecting patterns humans might miss.
Sustainability
Key strategic decisions for your AI-ready data center (CIO) - CIO offers a practical roadmap for data center leaders wrestling with infrastructure choices as they prepare their facilities to handle AI workloads and performance demands.
UK activists plan protests over climate, social impacts of AI data centres (Reuters) - Activists are set to take to British streets on Friday for two days of protests against the expansion of data centres to serve booming demand for AI, and the impact of the facilities on communities and the environment.
User Experience
Where Senior Leaders Are Struggling with AI Adoption, According to Research (Harvard Business) - New research reveals that senior executives are privately wrestling with continuous disruption, conflicting value definitions, and emotionally charged resistance as they attempt to scale AI across their organizations in real time.
AI Is Upending Marketing on Two Fronts (Harvard Business Review) - AI is forcing marketers to play by new rules as chatbots replace Google searches and AI agents start making purchases for humans, demanding strategies that work for both people and algorithms.
Building trust: How customer care leaders pull ahead with AI (McKinsey) - McKinsey reveals how smart customer service leaders are using AI to build deeper trust with customers, while their competitors struggle with clunky chatbots and frustrated callers.
Workforce & Skills
The AI-driven workforce is here. How should your industry transform itself? (WEF) - Workforce transformation is an imperative – but it must be systemically implemented. Organizations that invest in such overhauls by enhancing human capabilities with technology report an improved bottom line.
Is the AI and Data Job Market Dead? (Towardsdatascience) - Despite headlines claiming AI and data jobs are vanishing, smart professionals are adapting by focusing on business impact over technical skills alone, positioning themselves for the market’s inevitable rebound.
Leading a skills-based transformation powered by AI (McKinsey) - McKinsey explores how AI can help companies shift from traditional job-based structures to skills-focused organizations, potentially making hiring and workforce planning more agile and effective.
How to get AI democratization right (CIO) - CIOs are discovering that democratizing AI—letting business users build their own AI solutions—can drive real organizational change, but success hinges on getting the governance and training right from the start.
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