A.I. · the day's top 10 · june 8th

Microsoft’s Majorana 2 quantum chiparrived this week, with numbers that are genuinely difficult to contextualise: qubits 1,000 times more reliable than those of the first generation models, a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds against an industry norm measured in microseconds, and a revised roadmap targeting a commercially scalable quantum computer by 2029.

Walmart has reportedly begun limiting employees’ use of an internal AI assistant called Code Puppy after demands placed on the LLM backing the tool were higher than expected. Employees of Walmart were encouraged to use Code Puppy without any stricture or stipulations as to the limits of use, but Walmart is now assigning employees a fixed number of AI tokens, which limits how much it can be used.

Standardising grid data through SAP S/4HANA allows E.ON to modernise infrastructure and execute AI deployments. The utility giant manages infrastructure across three distinct domains: energy grids, customer solutions, and energy infrastructure solutions. Maintaining operations across this scope requires continuous capital expenditure on IT hardware and software maintenance. Leadership initially questioned the business case supporting large-scale technology spending.

Amazon is offering its AI shopping technology to other retailers through a new Agentic Shopping Assistant built on AWS, with Kate Spade among the first brands to use it. The service allows retailers to build AI shopping assistants for their own websites and apps. Amazon said each deployment can be customised to a retailer’s catalogue, customer base, shopping environment, and brand voice. The service is based on technology first developed for Amazon’s own online store.

Microsoft has announced the wider testing of its new Autopilot feature at the Microsoft Build event this week, backed by a post on the company’s’ website. Autopilots are described as a new category of agents that can work autonomously on a user’s behalf.

Meta has launched Business Agent to automate conversational commerce workflows directly inside its messaging applications. The software allows global retail brands to execute transactions and field support tickets without human intervention. Deploying this architecture places agentic AI directly at the core of social commerce. Meta integrated these workflows natively into Instagram, Messenger, and soon WhatsApp. High volumes of customer interactions overwhelm traditional contact centres. Meta’s platform creates a persistent digital sales representative capable of operating globally.

Shell will use agents from C3 AI to shift from basic anomaly detection towards fully-automated predictive maintenance. The global energy giant is building on their current use of the C3 AI Reliability Suite, which already keeps tabs on more than 30,000 crucial pieces of equipment across upstream and downstream operations.

Quantum computers promise to one day solve problems beyond the most powerful supercomputers imaginable. But it’s often underappreciated how much classical computing it takes just to operate these machines. As qubit counts rise, innovations in this supporting infrastructure will be essential if they’re to live up to their promise. To prepare for the scale of quantum computers the industry is working toward, many companies are also gearing up the classical hardware, and software, required to support them.

At Computex 2026, an annual computer trade show held in Taipei, Taiwan, Nvidia made a long anticipated announcement—a version of the company’s Blackwell GB10 superchip for Windows PCs, called RTX Spark. Originally rumored to launch in 2025, it was finally introduced at this year’s show. It came with full support from Microsoft, which announced two new devices powered by RTX Spark: the Surface Laptop Ultra and the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. Asus, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and MSI also announced Windows PCs with RTX Spark. If this is triggering déjà vu, that’s for good reason.

Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. Many of them can’t afford to hire a lawyer, and others have cases too weak or too small to interest one. She reads each one carefully, mindful of how daunting it is to walk into the courtroom alone. Lately, like many judges across the US, she has seen a noticeable uptick in such filings.