Author Archives: David Birch

xxx In Congress, a series of bills have been proposed to ban chatbots from posing as lawyers, doctors, and other licensed professionals. The bills have yet to gain traction. From: How courts are coping with a flood of AI-generated lawsuits | MIT Technology Review. xxx

xxx To test whether AI was driving the increase in lawsuits filed by people without a lawyer, the authors of the study, Anand Shah at MIT and Joshua Levy at the University of Southern California, ran 1,600 randomly sampled court documents through Pangram, a commercial AI-text detector. The share flagged as containing AI-generated writing roseContinue reading “How courts are coping with a flood of AI-generated lawsuits | MIT Technology Review”

McKinsey’s April 2026 report on “How gen AI agents threaten retail banks’ customer relationships” shows around a third of consumers already using AI for financial advice at least monthly, primarily for understanding products, getting investment advice and comparing providers.

xxx A registry of artificial intelligence agents is being developed for 150,000 public officers in Singapore to use cutting-edge AI in their work without compromising data security. This registry is a safeguard to track the owners and activities of AI agents, which can make decisions and execute actions at machine speed.  It is part ofContinue reading “Singapore’s AI registry for public officers | The Straits Times”

xxx Police have launched a criminal investigation into an officer accused of using artificial intelligence (AI) systems to “create evidential material in a number of cases”. From: Derbyshire Police officer accused of using AI to ‘create evidence’ – BBC News. xxx

xxx New research from LINK, the operator of the UK’s ATM network, highlights just how much payment habits are shifting. Its latest findings show that a growing number of high street businesses are going cashless, with 14% of shops stopping the acceptance of notes and coins over the past 12 months. From: Cashless trend growsContinue reading “Cashless trend grows as one in seven UK high street shops ditch cash”

xxx When a customer authorizes an agent to make purchases, Stripe provisions an agentic network token from Mastercard or Visa scoped to the customer’s intent and shares it with the agent. The agent can then use these tokens across any seller accepting agentic payments and anywhere Mastercard or Visa is accepted. The network then handlesContinue reading “Supporting additional payment methods for agentic commerce”

xxx Agents might have turned out to be perfect optimizers who select a card for the consumer based on the best rewards proposition for that specific purchase. The “race to the bottom” on steroids. This could still happen, but is harder without an Agentic wallet. From: (18) Agentic Commerce hits speed bumps – by AndrewContinue reading “(18) Agentic Commerce hits speed bumps – by Andrew M. Dresner”

xxx Customer loyalty is dead. 76% of consumers are ready to switch their financial provider for better digital money-management features available through open finance, and 44% already have. That’s a tidal wave, and the result of surveying 8,000 consumers across 11 markets by Mastercard and FT Longitude. From: Bank Customer Loyalty is Dead: 89% ofContinue reading “Bank Customer Loyalty is Dead: 89% of Your US Customers Are Ready to Walk, 76% Global”

xxx The big change in financial services will come when customers use AI to assess offers from financial institutions for themselves. They will have access to AI as powerful as the banks have, because Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon (and companies like them) will be giving it to them. And this will mean individuals willContinue reading “Where are the customers’ bots? The AI paradigm shift in retail banking | HSTalks”