AI Intelligence Brief

Tue 19 May 2026

Daily Brief — Curated and contextualised by Best Practice AI

90Articles
Editor's pickEditor's Highlights

Google and Blackstone Invest, StanChart Cuts Jobs, and Musk Loses in Court

TL;DR Google and Blackstone are launching a new AI cloud company with $5 billion in equity. StanChart plans to cut over 7,000 jobs, leveraging AI to replace lower-value roles. Elon Musk lost a legal case against OpenAI, impacting the lab's public plans. AI-related data breaches now surpass stolen credentials in cyber incidents, according to Verizon.

Editor's highlights

The stories that matter most

Selected and contextualised by the Best Practice AI team

7 of 90 articles

Economics & Markets

21 articles
AI Investment & Valuations8 articles
Editor's pickTechnology
Let's Data Science· Yesterday

AI Optimism Drives Concentrated Corporate Investment | Let's Data Science

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Economic Letter finds that U.S. business spending related to artificial intelligence grew substantially in 2025 among publicly traded firms. According to BEA data cited in the Economic Letter, spending on information processing equipment, software, ...

Editor's pick
The Economic Times· Yesterday

Michael Burry sounds fresh AI stock alarm: Michael Burry’s AI crash warning grows louder: Is Nvidia-driven hype and record venture capital funding pushing Wall Street toward another dot-com disaster? - The Economic Times

Michael Burrys AI bubble warning is shaking Wall Street after fresh data showed 87% of venture capital funding now flows into artificial intelligence companies. The “Big Short” investor compared todays AI investment boom to the dangerous dot-com bubble before the 2000 market crash.

Editor's pickFinancial Services
Business Insider· 2 days ago

Citadel's Ken Griffin Says AI Is Now 'Real' After Years of Skepticism - Business Insider

Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin was one of the most prominent AI skeptics. Now he's had a change of heart, calling it "profoundly more powerful."

Editor's pickPharma & Biotech
OpenPR· 2 days ago

AI Protein Design Market 2026-2033 | Market Growth to FY (Q2) - Generate:Biomedicines, Insilico Medicine, Arzeda Corp., Cradle, Profluent, A-Alpha Bio Inc., Schrödinger Inc

Market Growth Size 2026 2033 Global AI Protein Design Market reached US 1 18 Billion in 2024 rising to US 1 5 Billion in 2025 and is expected to reach US 6 98 Billion by 2033 growing at a CAGR ...

AI Market Competition6 articles

Labor, Society & Culture

16 articles
AI & Employment9 articles
Editor's pickFinancial Services
Reuters· Yesterday

StanChart to cut over 7,000 jobs, boost AI to replace 'lower-value human capital' | Reuters

And banks globally are scrambling to integrate frontier AI models and fend off rising cyber threats.

Editor's pickEducation
Guardian· 2 days ago

Third of university students in Great Britain think AI job losses will cause social unrest, poll finds

Tracker of attitudes towards artificial intelligence also finds almost half of the public would prefer to avoid it One in three university students think AI will wipe out jobs so rapidly it will trigger civil unrest, according to a survey by King’s College London (KCL). Students are among the heaviest users of AI, the poll found, with 77% using it at least a few times a month – compared with 46% of workers – and 27% using it daily or almost daily. Continue reading...

Editor's pickProfessional Services
MIT· Yesterday

Companies Don’t Have to Slash Jobs Because of AI

Harry Haysom/Ikon Images | Carolyn Geason-Beissel “If AI is going to destroy all the jobs, why don’t we just stop?” That was the rhetorical question my college-age son asked after we talked about the possibility of drastic changes to career paths and society thanks to AI (technically, generative AI). It was in line with what […]

Editor's pickTechnology
Business Insider· Yesterday

Palo Alto Networks CEO Says AI Won't Reduce His Need for Engineers - Business Insider

Nikesh Arora says AI changed is changing hiring plans, but the cybersecurity CEO says he needs more engineers.

Editor's pickProfessional Services
Daily AI News May 18, 2026: How to Slash Accessibility Compliance Costs· 2 days ago

Gen AI Could Fix Performance Reviews—or Make Them Even Worse

This article explores how generative AI can assist managers in creating more comprehensive, data-driven employee performance evaluations.

Technology & Infrastructure

27 articles
AI Agents & Automation8 articles
AI Models & Capabilities5 articles
AI Security & Cybersecurity7 articles

Adoption, Deployment & Impact

16 articles
AI Adoption Barriers & Enablers5 articles
Editor's pickTechnology
VentureBeat· 2 days ago

Context architecture is replacing RAG as agentic AI pushes enterprise retrieval to its limits

Redis built its name as the caching layer that kept web applications from collapsing under load. The problem it is targeting now has the same structure but is harder to solve: production AI agents failing not because the models are wrong, but because the data underneath them is scattered, stale and structured for humans rather than machines. Retrieval pipelines built for single queries cannot absorb the volume agents generate. The gap Redis is targeting is structural: agents make orders of magnitude more data requests than human users, but most retrieval layers were built for the human-scale problem. Redis Iris, launched Monday, is the company's answer: a context and memory platform that sits between an agent and the data it needs to act. The platform combines real-time data ingestion, a semantic interface that auto-generates MCP tools from business data models, and an agent memory server built on Redis Flex, a rewritten storage engine that runs 99% of data on flash at a tenth of the cost of in-memory storage alone. The announcement lands as enterprise RAG infrastructure is in active transition. VentureBeat's Q1 2026 VB Pulse RAG Infrastructure Market Tracker found buyer intent to adopt hybrid retrieval tripling from 10.3% to 33.3% between January and March. Retrieval optimization surpassed evaluation as the top enterprise investment priority for the first time. Custom in-house retrieval stacks rose from 24.1% to 35.6% as enterprises outgrew off-the-shelf options. Redis is not the only infrastructure vendor reading those signals — several data platform providers have repositioned around agent context layers in recent weeks. The scale mismatch is the structural argument behind the launch. "Companies will have orders of magnitude more agents than human beings," Rowan Trollope, CEO of Redis, told VentureBeat. "Orders of magnitude more agents than human beings means orders of magnitude more load on back end systems." From cache to context Trollope traces the parallel back to the mobile era: When legacy backends built for branch tellers suddenly had to serve a million smartphone users, Redis became the caching layer that absorbed the load without a full rebuild. What is different this time is that agents cannot write their own middleware. In the mobile era, a developer would sit with a database administrator, identify the queries an application needed and hard-code the caching logic into a middleware layer. Agents cannot do that. They need to find the right data at runtime, through interfaces built for them in advance, or they stall. "This is like the analogy of the grocery store in the fridge," he said. "If every time you have to go make your sandwich, you have to run to the grocery store to get the food, that's not very efficient. You put a fridge in every house, you store a little bit of food there. And that's kind of where we still tend to exist in the infrastructure stack." What Redis Iris includes Iris ships five components that together cover data ingestion, semantic access, memory and caching. Redis Data Integration. Now in general availability. RDI uses change data capture pipelines to sync data from relational databases, warehouses and document stores into Redis continuously, with connectors for Oracle, Snowflake, Databricks and Postgres. Context Retriever. Now in preview. Developers define a semantic model of business data using pydantic models and Redis auto-generates MCP tools agents use to query it directly, with row-level access controls enforced server-side. Trollope describes the shift from classic RAG as a directional inversion. "It's just a flip to let the agent pull the data instead of presupposing and stuffing it into the pipeline," he said. Agent Memory. Now in preview. Stores short and long-term state across sessions so agents carry context without re-deriving it on each turn. Redis Flex. A rewritten storage engine that runs 99% of data on SSDs and 1% in RAM, delivering petabyte-scale retrieval at sub-millisecond latencies. Redis Search and LangCache. The retrieval and semantic caching backbone underneath the platform. LangCache reduces redundant model calls by caching prompt responses. What analysts say The data industry is generally heading in the same direction now. Every major database vendor is making a context layer argument.  Traditional database vendors including Oracle are integrating context and memory layers to bring relational databases into the agentic AI era. Purpose-built vector database vendors including Pinecone are doing the same, building out a new knowledge layer for agentic AI context. Standalone context layers like Hindsight are also part of the emerging landscape. Trollope frames Redis's position as structurally different from that competition. "For us to win, no one else has to lose," he said. Many Redis deployments already run MongoDB or Oracle as the backend system of record. Iris reflects and caches from those systems rather than displacing them. Redis is launching Iris in the Snowflake marketplace with native connectors. Stephanie Walter, Practice Leader for AI Stack at HyperFRAME Research, puts the market context plainly. "The market is converging on the same conclusion: agents don't just need more tokens or better models. They need governed, current, low-latency context," Walter said. Her read on Redis's differentiation focuses on where Redis already sits in the stack, which is close to runtime, latency-sensitive operational state, and real-time data.,  "The pitch is not 'better RAG' as much as 'agents need live context, memory, and fast retrieval while they are actually working," she said. Whether it's Redis or another vendor, every context layer technology will face a governance challenge to be successful. "Agentic AI will not scale in the enterprise if every agent becomes a new cost center, a new data access risk, and a new governance exception," she said. "The winning context layers will be the ones that make agents faster, cheaper, and safer to run." For real-time clinical AI, getting context wrong is not an option Mangoes.ai is one company that has already had to answer those questions in production, under conditions where the cost of getting context wrong is measured in patient outcomes. Amit Lamba, founder and CEO of Mangoes.ai, runs a real-time voice AI platform deployed across large healthcare facilities where patients and clinicians ask live questions about treatment, scheduling and case history. Mangoes.ai built its stack natively on Redis from the start.  "Retrieval, memory, and session state all run through Redis, so we're not stitching together separate tools and hoping they talk to each other," Lamba said. The problem Iris's dynamic memory capability addresses is what happens across a complex session.  "Think about a one-hour group therapy session," Lamba said. "You need to know who said what, when, and be able to surface the right information to the therapist in the moment. That's not a simple retrieval problem." The platform runs multiple specialized agents in parallel, one for entity identification, one for relationship reasoning and one for integrating case history. "The dynamic memory capability maps almost perfectly to the problem we're solving," Lamba said. What this means for enterprises For enterprises that built their AI stack around RAG, the retrieval layer that got them to production is no longer enough to keep them there The RAG era is giving way to context architecture. The classic RAG model pushed data into the agent before the model was called. Production deployments are flipping that: agents pull what they need at runtime through tool calls, treating the data layer as a live resource rather than a pre-loaded payload. Teams still optimizing RAG pipelines are solving last year's problem. The semantic layer is now production infrastructure. The model that defines business entities, their relationships and the access rules between them needs to be built, versioned and maintained with the same discipline as a data pipeline. Most organizations have not staffed or structured for that work. The enterprises that define their context architecture now are the ones that will not have to rebuild it when agent workloads scale. Budget is already moving. VB Pulse Q1 2026 data shows retrieval optimization investment rising from 19% to 28.9% across the quarter, overtaking evaluation spending for the first time. Organizations that spent the previous year measuring their retrieval quality are now spending to fix it. The context layer is an active procurement decision, not a roadmap item. "The first buyer question should not be 'Do I need a vector database, long context, memory, or a context engine?' It should be 'What does this agent need to know, how fresh must that knowledge be, who is allowed to access it, and what does every retrieval cost?'" Walter said.

Editor's pick
Forbes· Yesterday

Council Post: Why Most Enterprise AI Fails After The Pilot Phase

AI does not usually fail in production. More often, the organization is not ready for it.​

Editor's pickHealthcare
TipRanks· Yesterday

Payer-Led AI Adoption Emerges as Key Theme in Healthcare Technology - TipRanks.com

According to a recent LinkedIn post from Ember, a conversation with Dr. Kevin Stevenson characterizes health care payers as the leading force in AI and technology i...

Geopolitics, Policy & Governance

10 articles
AI Policy & Regulation7 articles
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