Author: TechBrunch

Salesforce on Tuesday announced the general availability of its AI agent development platform called Agentforce. The service is essentially a low-code or no-code way to deploy chatbots for your employees and customers. Salesforce says its new platform is already being used by companies such as OpenTable, Saks, and Wiley. “Agentforce doesn’t rely on human interaction to get the job done,” Salesforce wrote in a release associated with the news. “These agents can be triggered by changes in data, business rules, or pre-built automation.” Meanwhile, the company's site notes that the new service is a human-bot symbiosis. “Humans and agents work…

Best-selling author Margaret Atwood isn't worried about the unabated rise of generative AI. He told Reuters he was too old to worry about the impact on art. Her remarks follow a petition calling for an end to the unauthorized use of creative works to train AI models, which currently has more than 31,000 signatures. But Atwood's relaxed posture in Machine March isn't just due to age. This is supported by her critical assessment of the achievements of AI in specific artistic fields. “So far, AI is a shitty poet,” she told the news agency. “It's really bad. Like, worse than…

While it may not be a very sexy topic, facility management is at the heart of any business with a physical facility, and the larger the footprint, the more complex it becomes to manage. Portuguese startup Infraspeak has sought to address this issue with an all-in-one platform that provides facility managers and related service providers with insight and operational control into everything going on in a particular location. Founded in 2015, Infraspeak has raised around $20 million in funding and secured major clients including KFC, InterContinental and Primark. And to fuel its next phase of growth, the Porto-based startup announced…

Fixing the climate crisis is a vast, world-sized puzzle. But one particularly large piece of this ginormous conundrum is construction and real estate — which collectively amount for around 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Enter Munich-based data startup Emidat, which has built a software platform for automating the generation of validated Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) certificates for the construction sector. EPDs are a critical piece of the puzzle for understanding and mitigating the climate impact of the built environment. They require undertaking a product lifecycle assessment (LCA) to declare standardized info about the environmental impact of construction materials and…

Gaming company Krafton's Indian arm has backed IMM Investment's first India fund as an anchor limited partner as the battle royale BGMI maker expands its investments in the South Asian market. Seoul-based IMM Investment, which has supported Krafton and roughly half of South Korea's unicorn startups since their inception, has successfully raised its first Indian fund and brought in former Legend Capital partner Prakhar Khanduja to lead the company. Hired to run the department. Nihansh Bhatt, head of corporate development at Krafton India, told TechCrunch that the investment in the IMM fund will help gaming companies tap into new business…

Vinod Khosla has no doubts that humanity's future with AI is bright. The Sun Microsystems co-founder and prominent investor predicts that “the need to work will disappear” almost entirely due to AI. “It doesn't matter whether you're a primary care physician, mental health therapist, oncologist, structural engineer, accountant, etc., it's all available for almost free,” he said Monday in a conversation with TechCrunch editors. ” he said. – Chief executive Connie Loizos at the TechCrunch Disrupt annual conference. Asked why he was so optimistic about an AI-enabled future, Khosla said a world in which most human labor would be freed…

One of the more fascinating trends these days is the field that goes by various names, including national interest startups, American dynamism, and the New World. These startups develop technology in areas that are intended to be built, used, and created jobs in their home countries, such as the United States. We cover everything from aerospace and critical infrastructure to government, manufacturing and national security.This panel at Disrupt 2024 features Dcode Capital Managing Partner Rebecca Gevalt, Albedo Co-Founder and CEO Topher Haddad, and Biofire Founder and CEO Kai Kloepfer, who discuss how far Silicon Valley has taken the foundation of…

In the summer of 2020, a fire broke out on a Navy ship docked in San Diego Bay. For more than four days, the aircraft carrier Bonhomme Richard was in flames as helicopters dropped buckets of water from above, boats spewed water from below and firefighters rushed aboard to extinguish the blaze. Before the embers cooled, lidar (light detection and ranging) scans were taken to assess the extent of the damage and determine how the fire started. However, the investigation stalled because it was extremely difficult to send lidar scans. Current major cloud storage services (Google Drive, DropBox, iCloud, OneDrive)…

Vinod Khosla, founder and partner of Khosla Ventures and recently a prominent investor who was one of the first to check out OpenAI, spoke in an interview Monday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 focused on the future of AI. I got distracted. After speaking about the future and risks of AI, he took a moment to issue a stark warning about the upcoming US election and what's at stake for this country. In short, “our democracy is definitely at stake,” he said, along with other harsh words for Trump supporters, including Elon Musk. “can't believe it [Musk is] We support someone…

For people who party or go dancing, the risk of ingesting accidentally laced drugs is real. Presenting today on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, MabLab has created a test strip that detects five of the most common and dangerous additives in minutes. Co-founders Vienna Sparks and Skye Lamb met in high school and lost a friend to an overdose while in college. Sadly, this is a story that many people (including myself) can relate to. Thankfully, test strips are now a common sight at venues and health centers, with hundreds of millions shipped each year. In case…