With luxury consumers rapidly embracing AI, the strategic question for merchants is no longer whether agents will mediate the journey, but who controls how brands are perceived.For decades, the strategic playbook for luxury brands has centered entirely around physical and digital destinations. The flagship boutique served as the sacred front door where desire was meticulously manufactured, while e-commerce platforms operationally extended that footprint downstream without altering who held the keys to brand identity. However, a groundbreakin...

Is AI Good At Stock-Market Timing? A New Study Casts Doubt.Research finds that while large-language models may work well initially, they don’t outperform the market over long periods and in changing conditionsLarge-language models may be immune to human emotions like fear and greed, but they still struggle to beat the market over longer periods.Researchers recently backtested a range of LLM-based trading strategies over 20 years and found that they mostly failed to outperform simple buy-and-hold investing. The reason sounds surprisingly hum...

These top brands all ditched their names from their logos, but we instantly know who they are.Textless logos are often the sign of a brand that has supreme confidence. Many brands will use both a symbol and a wordmark in a lockup, but ditching the type to use a symbol alone is sometimes only possible when a brand's become firmly established.For a textless logo to work, consumers need to recognise and respond to the design components that make up the brand identity. That usually takes time. Brands such as Nike, Apple and Mastercard all used t...

Goldman Sachs advised on 233 deals worth $1.2T in 1H 2026, roughly 50% more volume than second-placed J.P. Morgan at $819B across 217 deals.Morgan Stanley sits third at $673B across 190 deals and Bank of America fourth at $482B across 149 deals.Rothschild & Co (175) and Jefferies (155) worked on more deals than every bank outside the top three, at average sizes under $1.4B.Wells Fargo is the outlier on average deal size at $7.7B across just 37 mandates.[wallstreetprep]

X Square Robot’s open embodied AI stack unifies data, world models, and action.Unlike artificial intelligence powered by large language models, robotics still lacks a clear “recipe” for achieving general-purpose capability. While LLMs demonstrated that pretraining on massive datasets can produce broad intelligence, robotics has remained fragmented—built from separate systems for perception, planning, and control that rarely combine into adaptable, transferable behavior. The central challenge in embodied AI is finding a unified approach t...

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has been testing whether an AI model can allocate money itself, with early results showing the best-performing system topped a traditional 60/40 portfolio by 0.7 percentage point a year with lower volatility.As investors increasingly turn to artificial intelligence for help with everything from stock picking to risk management, JPMorgan Chase & Co. has been testing whether a model can do something more ambitious: allocate money itself.The early results are encouraging. Researchers at the bank built an array of AI...

Tougher vetting in Singapore, Malaysia and Japan reflects Washington’s push to close export-control loopholes.Nvidia has more than halved the number of Asian customers authorised to buy its AI chips after creating a new “white list” of companies that have passed tougher compliance checks aimed at preventing the products from reaching China.The $5.1tn chipmaker has over the past few months intensified due diligence in Singapore, Malaysia and Japan, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.The renewed vetting excluded more tha...

Central Saint Martins graduates Domenico di Paolo and Kieran Feechan have created a novel listening device in the form of Imago, which turns a critical eye on the use of AI in music.Looking a bit like a crystalline record player, Imago presents listeners with a circular touchscreen lit up with three glowing dots that they can slide around with their fingers to modify a composition.Feechan and di Paolo think of Imago as a cross between a "deep listening device" and a synthesiser. It lets listeners explore a unique soundscape carefully curated...

1. (PDF) Deloitte - 2026 MZ 세대 트렌드 보고서 : 안정성과 웰빙을 향한 가치관 재편◦ 경제적 스트레스 누적으로 인한 메이비 레이터(Maybe Later) 현실 고착화: 지속적인 생활비 인플레이션과 주거비 불안 여파로 인해 조사 대상의 과반수가 결혼, 출산, 주택 매매, 고등 교육 등 주요 인생 과제를 무기한 연기하는 기조 확인.◦ 전통적 수직 승진 모델 거부와 지속 가능한 성장 지향성 부각: 관리직 진입을 극심한 번아웃과 과도한 책임 유발 요인으로 판단하여 기기하는 대신, 일과 삶의 균형 사수를 위해 수평 이동이나 더 낮은 타이틀을 전향적으로 수용하는 기류 안착.◦ 일상적...