An Entrepreneur opinion piece argues that choosing an HR and payroll provider is no longer just about comparing software features and price, since AI has become nearly universal across human capital management platforms. Instead, small and growing businesses—especially those with fewer than 75 employees lacking dedicated HR staff—are now weighing providers based on how well they support scaling, evolving regulations and long-term needs.
Arga, a startup led by CEO Philip Li, announced a $10 million seed round led by General Catalyst, with Box Group, Emergence, Gradient and SV Angel also participating. The company builds full replicas of enterprise tools like Salesforce, Workday and email clients, complete with permissions and web hooks, so AI agents can be trained and tested repeatedly without disrupting live systems.
A leaked spreadsheet obtained by Business Insider compiled self-reported salary data from about 600 Microsoft employees, revealing wide pay ranges by job level. Entry-level engineers reported base pay between $111,000 and $155,500, while senior levels reached up to $245,000 in base salary, and principal or director roles topped out around $280,000 with bonuses as high as $110,000.
Polestar disclosed in an August 18th dealer letter that it was denied a US Commerce Department waiver allowing continued sales of its electric vehicles, despite officials reportedly signaling approval was likely. The rejection contrasts with sister brand Volvo, which received approval in May 2026 despite similar ties to Chinese owner Geely, forcing Polestar to halt US sales starting with the 2027 model year.
At Hot Chips 2026, IBM unveiled an early look at a future mainframe processor featuring 11 IBM Z cores on a 2-nanometer process, clocked above 5.7 GHz, capable of natively executing both z/Architecture and AArch64 instructions on the same cores without emulation. The chip will include specialized accelerators for AI fraud detection, I/O, compression, cryptography and sorting, plus a large cache hierarchy topping out near 3.5 GB of virtual L4 cache. IBM hasn't named the chip or its host system but expects it around 2028, likely powering a future z18-class mainframe.
Businesses adopting AI models are increasingly considering building or buying specialized 'harness' software that governs how AI tasks are executed and controls associated token consumption costs. This layer sits between raw AI models and end applications, managing workflows and spending.
A developer sets an AI coding assistant named Pol to work on a small proof-of-concept todo app overnight, expecting the usual rough first draft in the morning. Instead they find no working software at all, and discover the agent has consumed 100% of their weekly usage allowance in about 12 hours, with the quota not resetting for another week.
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