Jon Victor

San Francisco

Reporter at The Information

Reporter @theinformation. Contact me on Signal: @ jon.597

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Articles

Software’s New Turf Wars

5 days ago | theinformation.com | Jon Victor

The rise of new artificial intelligence–powered business software threatens the future of long-established software firms. Their response is to jump into new markets with their own AI-powered software. That’s pitting companies against each other in new ways. ServiceNow earlier this week announced an AI agent to handle sales management, pitting it directly against Salesforce, which does a big business in selling software for that category.
Software’s New Turf Wars

5 days ago | flipboard.com | Jon Victor

3 hours agoThese free AI tools will help you with your calendar, writing tasks, customer service, and much more. Running a small or medium-sized business (SMB) often means juggling many roles—from marketing and customer service to HR, admin, and content creation. Luckily, AI tools can reduce much of the …
Why Voice AI Is Hard to Listen To

6 days ago | theinformation.com | Jon Victor

Artificial intelligence has gotten great at automating customer support emails and text chats. But automating customer support phone calls is far more challenging because AI that can understand and generate human-sounding speech is still too costly, slow and unreliable, said Jesse Zhang, CEO of Decagon, a developer of AI for customer support. Decagon gets around the voice AI limitations by transcribing audio to text, then feeding it into an AI model that processes text.
Booking Holdings’ CEO Is Hedging His AI Bets

1 week ago | theinformation.com | Jon Victor

We’ve written a lot about the possibility that consumers could soon use ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots for tasks like booking travel or ordering food, depriving app developers of ad revenue and eroding their relationship with customers.
Palantir Raises Full-Year Outlook as Revenue Surpasses Guidance

1 week ago | theinformation.com | Jon Victor

Source: The InformationPalantir said Monday that first-quarter revenue rose 39% year over year to $884 million, fueled by strong demand from U.S. businesses and government agencies for its data-analytics software. U.S. commercial revenue grew 71% to $255 million, while U.S. government revenue grew 45% to $373 million. The results surpassed Palantir’s forecast for $860 million in total revenue.
Airbnb Posts 6% Revenue Growth as Uncertainty Weighs on Travelers

1 week ago | theinformation.com | Jon Victor

Source: The InformationAirbnb reported its slowest revenue growth since the start of 2021 as economic uncertainty prompted travelers to pull back on spending in the first quarter, particularly in the U.S., the company said. Airbnb reported $2.3 billion in revenue, up 6% year over year, compared with 12% year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter of 2024. Its operating cash flow also fell slightly, to $1.8 billion, from $1.9 billion in the first quarter of last year.
Microsoft's Move to Make People Pay for AI Starts to Pay Off

1 week ago | theinformation.com | Jon Victor

Earlier this year, Microsoft stopped trying to convince consumers to pay extra for artificial intelligence features in its popular Office 365 software, instead opting to add the AI features by default while increasing the lowest price of the software by 30%. That strategy is showing early signs of wringing a few extra bucks out of individual Office customers.
A 220,000-Person Company’s Tactics for Keeping AI Costs Down

2 weeks ago | theinformation.com | Jon Victor

Businesses looking to expand their internal use of artificial intelligence from a select few testers to a large number of workers are hypersensitive to increased costs. Over the last couple of years, that has meant many of their AI projects have never made it out of the pilot phase. Veolia, a 220,000-person provider of water treatment, waste management and energy services, seems to have found a middle ground.
Inside Palantir’s Mission-Driven Culture

2 weeks ago | theinformation.com | Jon Victor

Most companies valued at more than $200 billion have imposed a high degree of structure on their organizations as they have grown. That’s not the case at Palantir Technologies. Experienced staff get a say in which projects they work on, according to five people who have worked at the data analytics firm. Performance reviews don’t always occur at scheduled times of the year. The company has no guidelines on in-office work for its roughly 4,000 employees, unlike most other companies nowadays.
How ClassPass Got Its Support Bot on Par With Humans

2 weeks ago | theinformation.com | Jon Victor

When it comes to using artificial intelligence for customer support, businesses are learning that the technology isn’t something you set and forget. Instead, they need to keep an eye on how the AI is performing and make improvements even after it goes live. ClassPass, which operates a subscription platform for fitness classes, learned that lesson after its AI bots, released in January 2024, initially performed worse than human agents on customer satisfaction surveys sent after the conversations.