TechInformed

you vibe-coded anything? As CTO, I’d have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out if [an idea] was worth pursuing. We’d have to have lots of meetings about who could work on it, who could spend time on it — sure, it might only take a couple of days in theory, but it would probably take a week or two in practice, and I’d have to weigh that against other priorities. So you had to load up a lot of justification before something was even worth thinking about trying.

As the World Cup has taken center stage this summer, millions have attended the games in stadiums across North America, and hundreds of millions more have watched from home. These fans are largely unaware of the unseen battalion of IT professionals working to keep cybercriminals from capitalizing on the worldwide event.

Sunrun, the San Francisco-based residential solar provider, is testing whether homes with solar panels and batteries can become part of the AI infrastructure stack. The companylaunched a distributed AI compute pilot July 8 to place compute nodes in homes equipped with Sunrun solar and battery systems, coordinate the sale of inference capacity to enterprise buyers and compensate participating homeowners.

After years of piloting chatbots, government agencies from Washington to Whitehall are now entering the agentic era. In early 2026, Sheldon Gold stepped into a newly created chief innovation officer role at the digital consultancy Mercator Digital. The role was created to focus on AI innovation and delivery for the firm’s clients and partners. For Gold, it’s a widening of a career built in design — most recently as Mercator’s head of design, leading interaction, service and product design.

AI data centers are making power demand harder to predict, not only larger, a report finds. Capgemini Research Institute saidnearly 80% of utilities expect more extreme and volatile demand patterns, while more than three-quarters say they struggle to forecast future needs accurately. According to the findings, this uncertainty is changing the data center capacity conversation.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is moving to tighten the approval process for radiofrequency devices sold in the U.S., aiming to close gaps that could allow restricted technology to reach customers through embedded components, software, imports or online marketplaces. The FCC is scheduled to consider draft equipment-authorization rules at its July 22 open meeting.

FactSet and Google Cloud have announced a partnership to bring Gemini models, Google enterprise search and Google Cloud infrastructure into financial-research and workflow tools used by investment professionals. FactSet is a Connecticut-based financial data firm. The partnership is focused on three parts.

Small businesses are already using generative AI at scale, according to U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey data, while the Chamber told House lawmakers that fragmented AI and privacy rules could raise compliance and litigation costs for firms navigating state-by-state obligations. The warning came inwritten testimony from Marty Durbin, the Chamber’s senior vice president for policy, before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s commerce, manufacturing and trade subcommittee.

California data brokers must begin processing consumer deletion requests through DROP on Aug. 1, giving registered brokers less than a month to connect the state’s privacy platform with their own data systems, service providers and reporting workflows. DROP, the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, allows California residents to send one deletion request to all active data brokers.

Before he was building AI for engineers, Gary Brotman was in PR — and before that, a club DJ. Now CEO of Secondmind, Brotman relocated from the US to the UK in 2019, leaving a role leading AI strategy at Qualcomm to steer the company toward helping automotive engineers cut through data-heavy, guesswork-driven design processes. The idea is to build systems that learn from the sparse signal inside a large dataset rather than from sheer volume.