This feeder also comes with extra plastic flowers and a little brush for scrubbing them, and the app sends reminders when it’s time to clean. You’ll find fun, seasonal touches in the app, like the ability to send digital bird holiday cards with the photos your feeder captures, and a tool that superimposes hats, clothes, and various accessories on the birds, which is actually funnier than it sounds. However, as with the Birdbuddy seed feeders, the big downside is that the feeder’s sensor doesn’t always pick up every bird that visits, which can definitely be a bummer when you see something interesting out the window but it doesn’t show up in the app.

Best Smart Birdhouse

There’s a metal grate with drainage holes that you can slot into grooves in the lower third of the Nest to make the cavity larger or smaller. The interested birds of my yard seemed very put off by the grate, so I covered it with a layer of craft mat moss, which was a success—a chickadee promptly moved in and laid seven eggs, which all hatched. I detail the experience in a separate review. This was the first time I’ve had an occasion to use the Birdfly app’s ability to collect images from its nest boxes and string them together in a “story” that’s shareable online, but I didn’t find it especially useful or accurate. No matter, though, because the video captures have been a truly fascinating and educational experience, and I wish I could afford to buy the Duo for everyone I know.

So far, the Duo has been rained on a bunch and survived a couple of heat waves, but the wood finish and black paint are peeling and will need refinishing before going up for next season. (The feeder comes equipped with a thermometer and hygrometer to keep an eye on conditions. I recently had to zip-tie an umbrella to mine during a heat wave, which likely saved some fledglings’ lives, though the lightweight construction and black-painted side and top probably contributed to the box overheating.)

Best App Interface

The Birdbuddy app still offers plenty of best-in-class features, like alerts for sick birds or cats, or for reminders when it’s time to clean. It also serves up bird facts and insights gathered over its use, such as what time certain species seem to prefer to visit. (Finches apparently like to visit my yard at 10 am daily.) There are unique seasonal additions like the ability to send holiday cards, or “dress up” visiting birds with hats, glasses, and sweaters. However, many of these features are now hidden behind a paywall for Birdbuddy Premium, which costs an additional $70 a year. You can still see “postcards” of the birds with many different views and video footage, and can still ID them via AI, but you will have to click a separate button.

However, my main problem with Birdbuddy has always been—and remains—the fact that the camera only captures a fraction of bird visits. In fact, while testing the Birdbuddy Home, I had it set up on a pole next to another brand’s feeder. I saw out the window that birds often visited one feeder and then the other, but on a particularly active day I noted that the other feeder had 127 image captures, while the Birdbuddy Home had … one.

The post The Smart Bird Feeders Everyone’s Talking About (and Actually Buying) (2026) appeared first on Seaside Success Stories.

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7 min read2 hr

The studio, located in the middle of the main hall, included bright lights, Reform-branded backdrops, plants, furniture, and charging points designed to make filming quick and easy. 

Rather than opening the space to everyone, Reform approached a select group of creators ahead of last week’s conference in Birmingham and invited them to use the studio to produce content throughout the event.

Bruce Hamill, who has more than 750,000 followers across multiple social media platforms, was among them.

While campaigning during the recent Makerfield by-election, Hamill filmed videos alongside Reform MP Sarah Pochin. Soon afterwards, party officials got in touch.

“People from the head office contacted me about doing this creator space because they said, ‘Look, we know what you do. We know you’re very anti-government. We know you’re anti-establishment, and you lean with us, and you’re a member. If we create a content creator space, would you be happy to come?'”

PoliticsHome only saw a handful of creators using the space during the conference. Hamill said that the party has gone “a little bit more out of their way to create this, but this was more of a logistical thing to see how this would work going into next year”.

Hamill was allowed to exclusively interview Reform leader Nigel Farage at this year’s conference.

The party is so keen to build links with online influencers that it is considering introducing dedicated content creator conference passes next year, PoliticsHome understands.

The move reflects the party’s growing focus on online political influencers as it seeks to cement its advantage on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, where younger voters increasingly consume political content.

Some creators who attended the conference complained to PoliticsHome about patchy WiFi and suboptimal lighting in the dedicated creators’ studio, but their overall verdict was positive: that the party understands the growing influence of independent political creators.

Jayden Palmer, a 19-year-old Reform member who recently debated Young Bob, representing Restore Britain, has built an audience of around 20,000 followers on Instagram and 15,000 on TikTok in little over a year. He was busy in the creators’ studio throughout last week’s conference.

He described social media as a “key pillar to the political world” with so many young people consuming news via social media. He described Reform as “first innovators” in this space and said they were “really focused” on engaging young people. 

Farage’s party was an early adopter of short-form video platforms including TikTok. Other parties have also since invested heavily in social media, with Labour expanding its No 10 New Media Unit during its time in government, hiring specialist videographers and working with content creators across Whitehall departments. Andy Burnham’s social media output has been praised as an impressive element of his communications strategy since he entered Downing Street in July.

The content creators at Reform conference told PoliticsHome that they are not advised by the party on what to post, instead finding that they can reach large audiences independently of the party or mainstream media channels. 

The party confirmed to PoliticsHome that it was not paying creators to produce content.

Hamill told PoliticsHome he has spent the past two years building credibility with audiences online, a period that has coincided with Reform’s rise in the opinion polls since the 2024 general election. Having previously worked in construction and vocational education, he shifted to focusing on his content creation work full-time last year.

His profile among Reform members is evident: As Hamill spoke to PoliticsHome in Birmingham, multiple members interrupted the interview to ask for selfies, praise his videos and encourage him to enter frontline politics.

“We need more MPs like you!” one member told him.

Hamill admitted he is seriously considering it.

“I’ve got to a point where I’m now like, well, maybe I need to start doing something about it as well. Put my head further above the parapet and actually stand and try and make a difference. So that’s something that’s definitely in the works.”

Palmer, who narrowly missed out on being elected as a Reform councillor earlier this year, said he would eventually like to run for Parliament.

“Right now I’m focused on helping the youth movement and getting as many young people involved in right-wing politics in general. I think I can offer real value,” the teenager said.

Despite their political ambitions, both Hamill and Palmer said they will challenge the party when necessary. 

“I have criticised them in the past when they’ve recruited certain people,” Hamill said.

“I even brought a petition up against them, trying to get more democracy in the membership.”

Asked about the undercover Channel 4 documentary that appeared to show Reform advisers discussing ways of getting overseas money into British politics while circumventing electoral rules, Palmer said it was a “massive story” and needed to be investigated by the party. 

“We need to really prioritise being a professional party,” he said.

Lee Harris wasn’t among those invited to use Reform’s content creation studio at party conference, but with more than 200,000 followers across different platforms, he is an influential profile on the British right wing. The Reform member and political commentator still appears regularly on mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC. However, he believes independent platforms increasingly offer greater reach and influence.

He sees his purpose as trying to unite the right and put an end to hostilities between Reform and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain.

“I hate the right-on-right attacks,” he said.

“So when I’m on independent media or when I’m on mainstream media, I always try to bridge a gap between the two. Because at the moment, I think it’s fair to say there is a bit of a fractured right wing. I don’t think Restore would do enough to win any seats personally, but I think they can do enough to do some potential damage [to Reform].”

Harris has more than 180,000 followers on X, formerly Twitter, but he no longer sees the platform as a primary focus. 

“Since January this year, they changed the algorithm,” he said. 

“Just to give you an idea, my reach dropped by about 70 or 80 per cent.”

His focus is now on video content on YouTube and Facebook, from which he then cross-posts to X. 

While Harris said he would remain on X because politicians and some journalists still use it to break news, he believes “X isn’t going anywhere, but it’s just not people’s focus anymore”.

Hamill agreed that “reach on X is terrible”, and Palmer said that he largely avoids the platform, in part because of the amount of racist abuse he receives when he posts there.

“With this rise of [Rupert] Lowe, Restore Britain, and ethno nationalism, people are saying I’m not British because I’m brown,” he said.

“They want a pure white country. Really hateful stuff has taken over.”

He accused X owner Elon Musk of tailoring the algorithm to promote Restore Britain.

“That has created a false environment and actually has gone against the original founding of what X was created for,” he continued. 

“If it stays that way, I think it will eventually die.”

Hamill said his mission is to make Westminster politics more accessible, having started out by sharing videos on breaking down energy policies for consumers.

“Being working class myself, coming through construction, working through education as well. I just saw that there was a bit of a gap in breaking down what they’re saying in Parliament, articles, bills, legislation, policy.”

He said people increasingly turn to independent creators because they trust them to explain complicated issues in a way they can understand.

Despite his criticism of parts of the mainstream media, Hamill added: “I’ve got a lot of respect for particularly investigative journalists who go undercover.”

However, asked about Channel 4’s recent undercover reporting involving Reform figures, he said that while party figures “shouldn’t be getting caught out with things like that”, the investigation was, in his view, “spin around Reform”.

The post Politics Home Article | Who Are The Influencers Being Signed Up To Promote Reform UK? appeared first on Seaside Success Stories.

Supply chain disruption cost businesses about $184 billion in 2025, according to the J.S. Held Global Risk Report, and most of that bill still buys faster detection, not faster action.

That figure is usually treated as weather (i.e. storms happen, costs follow.) Treated as a product specification instead, it highlights an operating model that can spot a problem hours or days earlier than it used to, and still cannot move until a person has opened a ticket, convened a call, and re-entered the same data into three systems.

Visibility platforms, control towers, risk scores, digital twins, and exception dashboards have defined the last decade of AI in the supply chain. That decade has been very good at collapsing the time between an event and awareness of it, but it has been far less good at collapsing the time between awareness and a commercial act.

Detection is a ‘solved-enough’ problem

Ask a chief supply chain officer where the AI budget went and the answer tends to follow a familiar list: demand sensing, ETA prediction, supplier risk scoring, inventory optimisation, and lane analytics. These tools work. Forecast error comes down. A vessel delay is flagged before the container misses the cut-off. A second-tier fab outage shows up on a heat map instead of in a customer email.

None of that accounts for the $184 billion. The bill is the interval after the flag: expedite or wait; split the order or accept the miss; retender the lane or pay the spot rate; consolidate two half-empty movements or ship both; swap ocean for air on the SKUs that actually justify the premium. These are bounded, repeatable decisions that sit inside policy, contract, and inventory limits the company already set—and they still queue behind a human inbox.

Surveys keep describing the same lag in different language. A 2026 Knosc survey of mid-market manufacturers and distributors found that supply-chain teams spend 28 percent of their working time responding to disruptions, most of it investigating what happened rather than changing what happens next.

Logistics executives still rank AI as a strategic priority (Capgemini’s 2025 research put an AI-driven “new-gen” supply chain among the top three technology trends for 70 percent of large-company executives) and then report that measurable financial impact remains rare. Gartner found in 2025 that only 23 percent of supply-chain organisations even have a formal AI strategy. The shortfall is not a shortage of models, but a shortage of authority granted to software.

The ticket is the product

Most current deployments are built around the ticket. The model produces a recommendation, the recommendation becomes an alert, the alert becomes a work item, and the work item waits for a planner already occupied with other work items. By the time the planner acts, the option set has narrowed—the alternative carrier’s capacity is gone, the consolidation window has closed, and the supplier’s next production slot is allocated.

That workflow is not a temporary step on the way to autonomy but the product companies bought. Vendors sold insight because insight is easy to demonstrate and easy to govern; action touches money, contracts, service levels, and blame. So the industry automated the part of the job that does not require a signature. FourKites and ABI Research reported in 2025 that only 27 percent of organisations allow AI to take autonomous action, while 52 percent confine it to decision support.

Adding another dashboard to a delayed shipment rarely moves EBITDA as a result. The decision cycle has not changed; it has only been decorated.

Bounded action as the next model

The firms set to take share are not the ones with the tidiest control tower but the ones that pre-authorise a narrow class of moves and let agents execute them while the exception is still cheap.

Retender a lane when the contracted carrier’s ETA slips beyond a threshold and a qualified alternate sits inside the approved rate band. Consolidate outbound waves when fill rates and cut-off times make a combined movement cheaper than two. Swap mode on a defined SKU set when the cost of air is lower than the cost of a missed retail window. Reallocate safety stock across two distribution centres when a forecast miss and a transport constraint line up.

None of that requires a strategy offsite. Each can be written as: if these conditions, then this action, within this spend cap, with this audit trail, and a human only if the case falls outside the fence. That is not a “lights-out” supply chain—it is the same discipline manufacturers already apply to machine control, where the agent may act inside the interlock and escalates outside it. The difference here is commercial rather than physical: the interlock is a policy object – category, supplier tier, mode, dollar limit, and service class – not a PLC.

Three conditions for real change

First, decisions have to be written as policies, not tribal knowledge. If the only place “we will pay air on A-items after 48 hours of ocean slip” lives is in a planner’s head, no agent can execute it. The work of the next two years is less model training than decision design: which moves are reversible, which are capped, and which suppliers and modes are pre-cleared.

Second, execution systems have to accept machine-initiated transactions. An agent that can draft an RFQ but cannot post it is still a detection tool. TMS, WMS, sourcing suites, and carrier APIs need to treat a bounded agent the way they treat a junior buyer with a spend limit—authenticated, logged, and reversible.

Third, accountability has to move with the action. If a retender inside policy goes wrong, the post-mortem should inspect the policy, the data, and the fence, not hunt for the person who “should have checked”. Until that cultural change happens, every agent will be designed to wait, because waiting is how careers survive.

The competitive split

For a while, both models will look alike on a slide—both will have AI, and both will have a control tower. The difference will show up in cycle time from detection to commercial act, and then in service and cost.

Companies that keep buying detection will know about the storm earlier. Companies that authorise bounded action will already have retendered the lane, consolidated the wave, and moved the A-items before the incident call is booked.

Disruption is not going away. Lead times in critical components, mode volatility, and multi-tier opacity are structural features of the network. What remains optional is whether the response waits for a human to open a queue. The product that created the lag was insight without authority. The product that ends it is an agent allowed to spend a little money, inside a fence, before anyone is free to look.

See also: JD.com expands physical AI in logistics with 3 million robots

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.

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Insider Brief

• Bulwark Dynamics raised $6.8 million in seed funding and signed an agreement with Japan’s Onomichi Dockyard to support serial production of its Caravel autonomous landing craft.
• Caravel is designed to autonomously deliver cargo across unimproved shorelines without ports, piers or cranes, and Bulwark said a 15-foot prototype completed transit, beaching, cargo offload and retraction without human intervention.
• The company is also developing 35-foot and 55-foot variants for larger cargo loads, with initial applications focused on resupplying U.S. and allied forces across the Indo-Pacific.

Bulwark Dynamics has raised $6.8 million in seed funding and will be working with Japan’s Onomichi Dockyard to build its Caravel series of autonomous landing craft.

Investors include SBI US Gateway Fund, Archetype Ventures, Nēnē Ventures and Onomichi Dockyard, according to the California-based company. Bulwark said the new funding will support continued development and testing of production vessels while it works with Onomichi to expand manufacturing capacity. The company indicated it is also hiring across engineering, test operations and business development in the U.S. and Japan.

Bulwark noted the memorandum of understanding with Onomichi covers serial production of the Caravel series and the companies plan to manufacture the vessels in Japan using Onomichi’s existing shipyard. The companies are also discussing a dedicated site for serial production of unmanned vessels.

Caravel

Caravel is an unmanned surface vessel designed to resupply military units over shorelines without requiring a port, pier or crane. Bulwark said the vessel can autonomously transit to shore, unload cargo and retract from the beach, including in areas where there is no GPS.

The company reported it demonstrated that full sequence with a 15-foot Caravel prototype in early 2026, completing unmanned transit, beaching, cargo offload and retraction without human intervention.

“In a contested environment, the attributes that make a logistics platform efficient are the same ones that make it a target: large, crewed, concentrated, and tied to a handful of fixed nodes,” Bulwark co-founder and CEO Nhat Lieu said in the announcement. “Sustainment has to survive to matter. Caravel takes people off the most exposed leg of the run and spreads the delivery across many low-cost hulls, so losing one is a bad day rather than the end of the resupply.”

Looking Ahead

Bulwark is also developing two larger versions and to support production at scale, the variants share major components, Bulwark noted.

Caravel 35: A 35-foot variant designed to carry one twenty-foot equivalent unit of containerized cargo.

Caravel 55: A 55-foot variant designed to carry two twenty-foot equivalent units.

Initially, the company is focusing on sustainment missions for U.S. and allied forces operating across the Indo-Pacific. Bulwark said the same autonomous landing capability could also be used for disaster relief when cargo must reach shorelines without port infrastructure.

Onomichi Dockyard, founded in 1943, operates two slipways in western Japan and has built bulk carriers, tankers, roll-on/roll-off vessels and ferries. Its group also includes Saiki Heavy Industries and delivers about 350,000 gross tons annually.

“Building unmanned systems at scale inside the theater, on the industrial base and supply chains an ally already has, does two things at once,” Lieu added. “It solves a problem the people running these missions have today, and it puts decades of allied know-how to work on American reindustrialization.” 

Image credit: Bulwark Dynamics

The post Bulwark Dynamics Raises $6.8M in Seed Funding to Develop Autonomous Landing Craft, Inks Agreement to Build in Japan appeared first on Seaside Success Stories.

Sony is one of the best, most enduring electronics brands we’ve tested. And that’s true across a huge range of categories—the brand makes some of the best OLED TVs, best soundbars, best wireless headphones, best mirrorless cameras, and best bookshelf speakers. There aren’t many other brands that can claim the same depth and breadth of quality products that Sony can—that’s why we’re always looking for Sony deals from the brand. Here’s where to find those valuable Sony promo codes and other Sony discounts.

Sony Promo: 45% off Bravia Televisions

Sony Bravia models rank among the best TVs we’ve reviewed, from premium models like the revolutionary Bravia 9 QLED and brilliant Bravia 8 II OLED, to the more mid-tier Bravia 5, all of which are available on hot Sony deals right now, with this new promo for up to 45% off.

Use Sony Coupons and Save 30% off Sony Headphones and Earbuds

Sony has been synonymous with portable audio since the Walkman, and wireless headphones like the WH-1000XM series offer great performance and durability. We’re constantly putting them atop our list of the best wireless headphones thanks to excellent sound, feature-rich design, and noise-cancelling that ranks among the best in the business. With Sony online coupons, you can get great deals on Sony’s latest WH-1000XM6 headphones, which we loved for their upgraded sound and class-leading noise canceling, as well as the still-great previous generation, the WH-1000XM5.

Looking for earbuds? Sony’s nimble, noise-killing WF-1000XM5 are also on sale, as are plenty of other options from the brand’s diverse lineup. Click the link to get 30% off Sony headphones and earbuds goodness with this Sony promo code and Sony coupons.

Up to $100 Off Sony Gaming Gear

Right now, Sony has awesome discounts and deals on some of the most essential gaming tech, like headsets, monitors, and earbuds. You can get up to $130 off INZONE H9 Wireless Noise Canceling Gaming Headset, and $20 off INZONE Buds Truly Wireless Noise Canceling Gaming Earbuds, INZONE H5 Wired Gaming Headset, and more. If you’re looking to upgrade your gaming monitor, you can get up to $100 off a 27 inch INZONE M9 II 4K 160Hz Full Array LED HDR Gaming Monitor.

Sony Discount: 15% off Sony Cameras and Lenses

Sony makes some of the best consumer cameras on the market. In fact, we recently named the Sony A7V the best mirrorless camera you can buy, and the previous A7 IV was similarly fabulous. Both are on great sales through these new offers, letting you grab serious image quality with 15% off our favorite Sony cameras and lenses.

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Love a great Sony deal? Join the My Sony Membership Program and you could earn Sony’s My Points rewards toward more good stuff by joining, making eligible purchases, or through other Sony promotional opportunities (full terms available here). It’s a free way to earn credits or receive other special benefits or offers. Join the My Sony Membership Program and start earning points today.

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9 min read26 min

Andy Burnham, say friends, runs towards problems, not away from them. In making social care reform a priority, the new Prime Minister is certainly doing that – he is charging straight at one of the most intractable issues in British politics.

Four previous efforts at reform in the last two decades have foundered. Public understanding of the issue is limited, indeed even experts can’t agree which of the series of interlocking problems is the most urgent. Is the main problem the ruinous consequences for some of having to pay catastrophically high care costs, usually in later life? Or that the creaking sector is a potentially fatal drag on the NHS? What about the huge skill shortages? Or the ever-increasing costs of caring for working-age disabled people now living long lives thanks to improved medicine?

The only point of agreement so far is that cutting this Gordian knot is going to require a very expensive knife. With no appetite for additional taxation, and borrowing levels already nudging the UK into the sights of bond vigilantes, it takes a bold leader to decide that this is the moment for another crack at social care reform.

Wes Streeting didn’t think it was worth an early fight. As health secretary he announced a National Care Service but then set a 10-year timeframe on defining what that meant.

Burnham has picked up the structure of that effort led by Louise Casey but wants to turbocharge the process.

Baroness Casey’s Independent Commission on Adult Social Care will now report a year earlier.

A ‘national conversation’ that seeks to engage voters has been launched, while at Westminster Burnham has initiated a fresh set of cross-party talks.

“There is a massive public job to be done to explain just how ungenerous and how unfair the current system is,” Sebastian Rees, a principal research fellow at the Institute For Public Policy Research, tells The House.

Rees believes this was a key barrier to Theresa May’s ill-fated proposals in 2017, branded as a “dementia tax”, which she was later forced to abandon. While Rees argues that May’s reforms were “relatively generous and relatively well thought through”, they ended up collapsing after her party failed to make the case to the public that the current approach was “disproportionate and unfair”.

“But if people don’t believe that to be true, then advocating for reform is very, very tricky.”

This plays out in the figures. Research by Ipsos published last year revealed that nearly one-third of the public mistakenly believe the NHS provides the majority of social care services for older people, with a similar figure incorrectly believing that social care is free at the point of need.

Labour MP Anna Dixon, who has spent the majority of her career so far working on the issue, agrees that the conversation needs to be approached from a different direction this time around: “This touches on so many people, and that’s the point that we keep failing to get across – that this is not something over there that affects a few people. Caring one way or another impacts us all, either at some point in our lives needing care, or giving care.”

Dixon tells The House that she hopes the groundwork being done now to build cross-party consensus will protect any progress that is made from party politics.

“I hope there will be a Labour government to see this through. But just making sure that there’s enough groundwork being done, enough consensus built, that if there were any change in government, that the progress wouldn’t be reversed and halted or put off as we’ve seen has happened before.”

Two sets of cross-party talks had already taken place with Casey under the Starmer administration. Liberal Democrat spokesperson Helen Morgan tells The House that while they were “broadly helpful”, she is not convinced that they moved the conversation forward, describing them as a “general talking shop”.

The House understands that there will now be quarterly cross-party talks for both health teams and leaders separately. The former will next meet after Parliament returns from conference recess in October, and party leaders will do so the following month. It is understood that Casey will attend the talks with the shadow health team, while Burnham will join the Baroness for the leader talks.

As Conservative health spokesperson at the time, Stuart Andrew attended the first cross-party talks on behalf of leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch. Speaking to The House before he was shuffled out of his shadow cabinet role, Andrew – who almost lost his seat in 2017 over May’s “dementia tax” proposals – thought that the dual approach being taken would encourage real reflection, allowing leaders to bring key discussion points they have considered with their health teams between the meetings, sharpening the focus.

While the talks are well-intentioned, there will be concerns that leaks and briefings could lead to them quickly breaking down. Andrew insisted the wish of the health teams was that any talks would not be leaked, allowing them to take place without fear that ideas would appear in the headlines the following day.

Andrew argued that “outlandish ideas” can sometimes breed a feasible and workable solution.

But without the confidence to be frank and open in these discussions, he did not believe parties would be able to “really get into the weeds”.

There is a massive public job to be done to explain just how ungenerous and how unfair the current system is

The shadow health secretary was positive about Casey’s ability to manage the talks and move the dial, praising the peer for visiting the constituencies of each health spokesperson to talk about social care in their area. Andrew believed first principles for reform would be discussed once Casey returned to the health teams with more information gathered.

He said Casey was working with a big team, including many individuals she has worked with for years. While the peer has been visiting constituencies, Andrew said her people had been going further afield as part of their work on the commission.

Working closely with government on the talks could be seen as a real opportunity for the Liberal Democrats. But The House understands that there is concern within the party that people don’t see raising taxes as translating into better outcomes. Working in coalition with other parties has not, of course, ended well for the Lib Dems in the past.

Speaking to The House, Morgan says the party is open-minded but makes clear there are red lines. “We wouldn’t sign up to anything that we thought would be damaging in the future,” she says, clarifying that this would apply both to the party and the country.

Morgan says the Lib Dems will be approaching the talks with three tests: reforming the carers’ allowance; a universal safety net, including free personal care; and protection from catastrophic costs, so that people aren’t faced with having to sell their house to meet their care needs.

When the cross-party talks were announced in July, Reform UK was not included, and while the party voiced anger at its exclusion from the talks, arguably such a move by Burnham could suit it well. 

While former MP and Tory defector Anne Marie Morris was brought onto Reform’s shadow team to carry out a social care review, she has now left her role. It is unclear how much progress, if any, was made on the area. The role of health spokesperson has also taken a back seat after David Bull took up a role at Talk TV and was made party chairman.

A source close to Reform tells The House that the party would be reluctant to touch the policy area due to the NHS attack line – one of the few levelled at the party that has stuck.

Louis O’Geran, external affairs manager at More in Common, also points to Reform tensions over the economy, an area over which the party’s voter base is split. He argues that the party “has to straddle this really awkward coalition when it comes to the economy, which is why on questions like this you tend to get split right down the middle on issues of taxation”.

Taxation is also a matter of contention for the Tories and one they made clear from the start.

Rees believes that cross-party talks can only take the country so far on the road to reform. 

“The biggest barrier is some sort of consensus on the funding model and the approach to funding is ultimately the thing that always brings down social care reform, and it probably calls into question trying to do this through cross-party consensus,” he says.

“My retort, whenever I hear, ‘You need different parties on board for this’, is if you’d taken that approach with the foundation of the NHS, we never would have had an NHS because at some point it requires some political bravery.”

Another sticking point for Burnham is how this all fits with his ambitions for devolution, Rees argues. While the conversation around public services has been very much geared towards moving decision making out of Westminster, the tide when it comes to social care seems to be moving the other way.

“Where we’re going with social care reform looks quite centralising: we think it should be a universal entitlement, we think everyone should be supported more, and there should be some national standards. And it will be difficult to tease out how you negotiate some of those tensions and trade-offs.”

In his first major speech as Prime Minister, Burnham said the failure of past governments to grasp social care reform had been a “major dereliction of public duty”, adding that it was “shameful that politicians have put point-scoring before fixing this issue”. 

Time will tell whether Burnham becomes yet another prime minister whose efforts to reform the system are resigned to a footnote in the history books. 

The post The House Article | How Burnham Plans To Win Cross-Party Agreement On Social Care appeared first on Seaside Success Stories.

M&T Bank has deployed AI copilots to more than 15,000 employees as the US regional bank applies AI to internal operations, customer service, software development, and risk management.

The bank uses AI to analyse call-centre conversations, draft reports, generate code, identify customer needs, and flag portfolio risks, according to Fast Company. M&T is also examining agentic AI applications in cybersecurity and fraud detection.

American Banker reported in September 2025 that 16,000 of M&T’s roughly 22,000 employees were already using Microsoft Copilot for tasks including drafting emails and reports and summarising call-centre conversations.

Before the wider rollout, M&T initially restricted employee access to public large language models. Chief data officer Andrew Foster told American Banker that the bank blocked the tools because employees could potentially enter sensitive company information into public-facing services.

M&T later evaluated enterprise providers and selected Microsoft Copilot, starting with a pilot involving about 800 employees before expanding access across the organisation.

Foster said using generative AI to summarise call-centre conversations saves about six minutes per call. Software developers at the bank also use GitLab tools to generate code, while employees remain responsible for reviewing AI-generated work.

M&T’s human-review requirement is also reflected in its 2026 Code of Business Conduct and Ethics. The policy requires employees to use approved AI tools and prohibits confidential, proprietary, customer, employee, or regulated information from being entered into unapproved systems. Employees remain responsible for the accuracy and appropriateness of AI-assisted work.

Building the technology and data foundation

M&T’s AI deployment follows a technology overhaul that began in 2018. The bank said more than half of its technology specialists were external workers at the time, compared with an 80% in-house technology workforce today.

M&T now has about 2,000 technologists working across more than 300 agile teams and has hired more than 1,000 technology specialists during the programme.

The bank has also replaced dozens of older platforms. M&T said technology outages have fallen by more than 80% since 2018, while the number of system upgrades completed annually has increased by 300%.

Technology spending exceeded $1.2 billion in 2025, nearly three times its 2017 level. Wisler told Forbes in August 2026 that annual technology releases increased from about 15,000 in 2018 to 65,000 in 2025.

Wisler joined M&T as chief information officer in 2018 before becoming senior executive vice-president for technology and operations in 2025. His current remit covers both technology and operational functions across the bank.

M&T’s data programme developed alongside the broader technology overhaul. Foster, who joined the bank in 2023, began building a data-lineage programme to track where information originates, how it is used, and how it moves between systems.

Foster told American Banker that the data-lineage work was not created in response to generative AI. He described it as a core capability for understanding M&T’s data estate.

The bank also established a Data Academy focused on data governance and data skills, with around 2,000 employees participating in the programme.

M&T has created an internal repository called Edison containing authoritative documents and information on bank policies. The bank also uses data-lineage software from Solidatus and Monte Carlo to trace information as it passes through databases, applications, and business-intelligence systems.

The lineage work gives M&T visibility into the source, meaning, quality, and governance of individual data elements, according to Foster. He said one application for that governed data is the bank’s use of Copilot.

M&T also uses retrieval-augmented generation with internal, governed data, according to American Banker.

Scaling AI into daily banking operations

Wisler told Forbes that M&T is pursuing generative AI through three routes: general employee use, AI capabilities embedded in existing applications, and proprietary systems built around the bank’s own data and processes.

M&T operates more than 1,800 applications, many supplied by third-party vendors. Wisler said one of the bank’s AI pathways is identifying useful AI capabilities already embedded within those applications.

M&T’s third pathway involves proprietary AI development around the bank’s own data and processes. Forbes reported that early applications include repetitive operational work, software development, fraud prevention, and cyber defence.

Fast Company’s September report also said M&T continues to assess both internally developed AI systems and external tools, including general enterprise software and technology designed specifically for banks.

Earlier workforce use cases centred on drafting, summarisation, call-centre work, and software development. Fast Company reported that newer applications include identifying customer needs and flagging portfolio risks.

Other large US banks have also expanded generative AI across employee workflows.

JPMorganChase launched its internal LLM Suite platform to more than 200,000 employees in 2024. By 2025, more than 65,000 employees in its Corporate and Investment Bank were actively using the platform, while more than 90% of its engineers were using AI coding assistants.

The bank also said AI-based transaction screening allowed it to review more than twice the previous transaction volume while reducing manual operator checks by half.

Bank of America is using a generative AI-enabled system called EricaAssist with more than 18,000 customer service employees. The tool summarises why a customer is calling, retrieves relevant information, and recommends possible next steps while keeping the employee responsible for the interaction.

Bank of America said in July 2026 that EricaAssist can deliver contextual guidance in under three seconds and has reduced average call times by nearly one minute. The bank plans to extend the system to additional servicing scenarios and business lines later in 2026.

(Photo by Alain Pierre-Lys)

See also: Bank of England reviews AI rules for agentic AI in finance

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Foundation models get most of the attention, but the infrastructure underneath them increasingly determines who wins the race to build and deploy them. That infrastructure question has stopped being purely technical. It now touches geopolitics, chip architecture, and where intelligence actually gets to run. Understanding how AI infrastructure powers the next generation of foundation models means looking at three distinct layers: the physical buildout racing to get chips online faster than rivals, the smarter matching of compute to workload inside data centers, and the push to bring foundation models out of the cloud entirely and onto the devices where physical action happens.

SPEED HAS BECOME THE DECISIVE VARIABLE IN THE GLOBAL BUILDOUT

A new financial analysis from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, built on a detailed model of data center economics across ten countries, arrives at a finding that reframes how the AI infrastructure race should be understood. Time to power, not energy costs or tax incentives, is what separates winning projects from losing ones. For a typical 100 megawatt US data center, each additional year of delay costs roughly $550 million in lifecycle value, about 5.5 percent of the facility’s total worth. A one-year delay costs more than doubling electricity prices, more than losing state tax incentives, and three times as much as moderate tariffs on servers combined.

The reason is straightforward once you look at the mechanics. Every month a data center sits idle is a month of GPU hours that could have been sold, capital that could have been earning a return, and compute that could have gone toward training a stronger model that attracts more customers and funds the next generation of research. That compounding advantage is why a facility in Abilene, Texas took delivery of its first Nvidia chips and was running an estimated 100,000 GB200 chips within six months, while a similarly ambitious European initiative was still finalizing its formal proposal process more than a year after being announced. The United States currently hosts around three-quarters of the world’s advanced AI computing clusters, but that lead is fragile enough that a nine-month improvement in typical project speed would let the US overtake the United Arab Emirates as the most competitive site in the world, while a one-year delay would drop it to fifth place behind the UAE, Finland, Canada, and India.

Grid connection delays sit at the center of the problem. New power sources took an average of five years to connect to the US grid in 2023, up from under two years between 2000 and 2007, and transformer wait times have stretched past two years in some cases. Behind-the-meter power, generating electricity on-site through gas turbines or solar microgrids rather than waiting on grid connections, has become the industry’s most common workaround. It can shave a year or more off time to first operation, though it carries higher operating costs and real environmental tradeoffs. The countries and companies that have found ways to compress this timeline, whether through streamlined permitting, load flexibility programs, or aggressive behind-the-meter deployment, are the ones actually converting their compute investments into usable training and inference capacity fastest.

NOT EVERY WORKLOAD NEEDS A GPU

While the geopolitical race focuses on raw buildout speed, a quieter shift is underway in how enterprises match compute to workload once that infrastructure is actually built. The rush to adopt generative AI pushed many organizations toward GPU-heavy architectures by default, on the assumption that all AI work demands the same level of compute intensity. That assumption doesn’t hold. Generative AI is just one segment of a much broader spectrum of AI use cases that includes traditional machine learning, statistical analysis, and rule-based systems, each with very different performance requirements.

Accelerated CPUs, general-purpose processors enhanced with integrated AI acceleration capabilities like optimized matrix instruction sets and expanded memory bandwidth, are emerging as the pragmatic answer for a meaningful share of that spectrum. They handle model training on smaller datasets, batch inference, and latency-tolerant AI services well, and because they build on familiar x86 architecture, they integrate into existing IT environments without the redesigned cooling and power infrastructure that dense GPU clusters require. According to a recent IDC study sponsored by Intel, more than 40 percent of organizations are already adopting this kind of hybrid strategy, reserving GPUs for genuinely high-demand cases like large-scale model training and high-concurrency, real-time applications while routing everything else to CPU-based systems that cost meaningfully less to run.

This matters for the foundation model conversation specifically because GPU availability remains constrained even as the physical buildout races ahead, and the high power density of GPU-dense systems can strain data center operations that weren’t designed around it. A workload-aware strategy, auditing existing AI workloads to identify where accelerated CPUs can substitute for GPUs without compromising performance, is becoming as much a part of infrastructure planning as the chip procurement itself.

FOUNDATION MODELS ARE MOVING OUT OF THE CLOUD ENTIRELY

The third major infrastructure shift is arguably the most consequential for where foundation models actually get used. Edge computing, processing data close to where it’s generated rather than in a distant centralized data center, has existed for decades in limited forms. What’s changed is the ability to deploy and run full foundation models directly on edge devices themselves, moving intelligence from the cloud onto local hardware.

Two forces have made this possible at the same time. Specialized AI silicon, including neural processing units and other high-performance modules, provides the raw compute. But it’s software techniques, particularly quantization, that do the real enabling work. By reducing the mathematical precision of a model’s weights, quantization allows state-of-the-art foundation models to shrink dramatically in size without a major loss in capability, letting edge devices host reasoning power that used to require a cloud connection entirely.

The applications this unlocks go well beyond faster response times. For autonomous vehicles and industrial robots that need to interact safely with the physical world, edge-first large language models eliminate cloud latency that would otherwise be dangerous in real-time movement, and processing sensitive data locally rather than transmitting it to the cloud creates a smaller attack surface for cyber threats, which matters enormously for regulated sectors like healthcare and defense. It also opens up environments where the cloud was never a realistic option to begin with, since removing the connectivity tether lets sophisticated AI run in deep-sea exploration, remote mining, and other settings where an internet connection simply doesn’t exist or can’t be trusted. These aren’t incremental improvements on cloud-based deployment. They’re use cases that were fundamentally impossible until foundation model intelligence could live at the point where physical action actually happens.

THE THREE LAYERS ARE CONVERGING

None of these three shifts operate in isolation. The speed of the physical buildout determines how much raw training capacity is available to produce the next generation of frontier foundation models in the first place. The workload-aware matching of GPUs and accelerated CPUs determines how efficiently that capacity gets used once it’s online, stretching scarce and expensive accelerator hours further across a growing range of enterprise AI applications. And the move to the edge determines how much of that trained intelligence actually reaches the physical world in a form fast and secure enough to be useful, rather than sitting locked behind a cloud API with too much latency for real-time action.

Together they describe an infrastructure landscape that looks very different from just training bigger models on bigger clusters and calling it progress. Getting compute online faster than competitors, deploying the right processor for each workload instead of defaulting to the most expensive option, and compressing trained intelligence down to something that can run locally on a robot, a vehicle, or a sensor in a location with no connectivity at all: these are now the actual battlegrounds where the next generation of foundation models will be built, deployed, and made useful.

THE OUTLOOK

The lead in any one of these three areas is far more fragile than it appears from the outside. A country with a commanding chip cluster advantage today can fall behind within a year if a rival streamlines its permitting process. An enterprise that GPU-maxes its entire AI stack will find itself paying for idle capacity that a workload-aware competitor is directing more precisely. And a foundation model that only runs in the cloud will simply be unavailable for an entire category of physical, real-time, or connectivity-constrained applications that a properly quantized edge deployment can already serve today. The organizations and countries that treat all three layers, speed, workload matching, and edge deployment, as parts of a single infrastructure strategy rather than separate technical decisions will be the ones that actually convert today’s compute investment into tomorrow’s usable AI.

References

Phillips-Robins, A., Tawil, T., and Winter-Levy, S. “The Compute Coalition: How to Build the Future of AI in the Free World.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 8, 2026. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/06/the-compute-coalition-how-to-build-the-future-of-ai-in-the-free-world

West, H. “Rethinking AI-Ready Infrastructure: The Strategic Role of Accelerated CPUs.” Intel Community, August 4, 2025. https://community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Tech-Innovation/Data-Center/Rethinking-AI-Ready-Infrastructure-The-Strategic-Role-of/post/1707348

“AI Foundation Models at the Edge: Enabling Real-Time Physical Intel.” SDG Group, April 6, 2026. https://www.sdggroup.com/es-mx/insights/blog/ai-foundation-models-at-the-edge-enabling-real-time-physical-intel

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