Click the link below the picture

.

While AI is lauded by some as the biggest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution, enterprises — arguably the tech’s biggest potential customer base — have been slow to adopt AI.

While some investors predicted that 2024 would be the year we’d start to see more AI adoption by enterprises, that didn’t play out as budgets remained constrained and AI tech often remained in the “experimental” category.

Will that all start to change in 2025? Depends on who you ask.

TechCrunch talked to 20 venture capitalists who back startups looking to sell to enterprises about their predictions for 2025. They told us what they anticipate regarding enterprise budgets, trends worth following, and what it will take to raise a Series A in 2025, among other things. Here’s what they said.

What enterprise-related trends will you be paying attention to the most in 2025?

SC Moatti, managing partner, Mighty Capital: I’m really looking into this theme — AI adoption hinges on better data. As enterprises transition from AI experiments to large-scale deployment, the demand for high-quality data intensifies.

Aaron Jacobson, partner, NEA: Code agents for app development modernization are underhyped. Expect to see AI being used to re-platform mainframe apps to the cloud and upgrade older codebases.

Molly Alter, partner, Northzone: A key focus of mine is on spaces that were historically untouchable by venture funds because their business models demanded high COGS or OpEx. We’re seeing AI automate so much behind-the-scenes work that sectors like accounting services, or revenue cycle management, or white-glove legal services can now command software-like margins.

Marell Evans, founder and general partner, Exceptional Capital: Understanding trends in enterprise sales cycles — what is the duration certain organizations are trialing tools for before making decisions about internal adoption? In addition, understanding the different pricing models of AI [in relation to] traditional SaaS, consumption-based and/or outcome-based.

Mike Hayes, managing director, Insight Partners: An unappreciated metric and something that I think will gain traction in 2025 is TTFV, or time-to-first-value. I see this as a proxy for ease-of-implementation, so faster TTFV solutions should have a bigger advantage going into [the] new year.

What areas are you looking to invest in?

Liran Grinberg, co-founder, and managing partner, Team8: Enterprise resilience, whether in front of operational faults or malicious insider or outsider threats. The CrowdStrike software update incident demonstrated how fragile our digital world is, not only due to cyberattackers but also just mistakes.

.

Image Credits:Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Many Many More!

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

As a comparative psychologist, I’m used to assaults from my experimental subjects. I’ve been stung by bees, pinched by crayfish and battered by indignant pigeons. But, somehow, with Squirt it felt different. As he eyed us with his W-shaped pupils, he seemed clearly to be plotting against us.

Of course, I’m being anthropomorphic. Science does not yet have the tools to confirm whether cuttlefish have emotional states, or whether they are capable of conscious experience, much less sinister plots. But there’s undeniably something special about cephalopods – the class of ocean-dwelling invertebrates that includes cuttlefish, squid, and octopus.

As researchers learn more about cehpalopods’ cognitive skills, there are calls to treat them in ways better aligned with their level of intelligence. California and Washington state both approved bans on octopus farming in 2024. Hawaii is considering similar action, and a ban on farming octopus or importing farmed octopus meat has been introduced in Congress. A planned octopus farm in Spain’s Canary Islands is attracting opposition from scientists and animal welfare advocates.

Some of these species live alone in the nearly featureless darkness of the deep ocean; others live socially on active, sunny coral reefs. Many are skilled hunters, but some feed passively on floating debris. Because of this enormous diversity, the size and complexity of cephalopod brains and behaviors also varies tremendously.

Almost everything that’s known about cephalopod cognition comes from intensive study of just a few species. When considering the welfare of a designated species of captive octopus, it’s important to be careful about using data collected from a distant evolutionary relative.

Can we even measure alien intelligence?

Intelligence is fiendishly hard to define and measure, even in humans. The challenge grows exponentially in studying animals with sensory, motivational, and problem-solving skills that differ profoundly from ours.

Historically, researchers have tended to focus on whether animals think like humans, ignoring the abilities that animals may have that humans lack. To avoid this problem, scientists have tried to find more objective measures of cognitive abilities.

One option is a relative measure of brain to body size. The best-studied species of octopus, Octopus vulgaris, has about 500 million neurons; that’s relatively large for its small body size and similar to a starling, rabbit or turkey.

More accurate measures may include the size, neuron count or surface area of specific brain structures thought to be important for learning. While this is useful in mammals, the nervous system of an octopus is built completely differently.

Over half of the neurons in Octopus vulgaris, about 300 million, are not in the brain at all, but distributed in “mini-brains,” or ganglia, in the arms. Within the central brain, most of the remaining neurons are dedicated to visual processing, leaving less than a quarter of its neurons for other processes such as learning and memory.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

If you ask Nandan Nilekani, the key to being successful in today’s ever-changing job landscape is simpler than you think.

Nilekani co-founded Infosys, an information technology (IT) and consulting firm, in 1981, serving as CEO from 2002 to 2007 before creating Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identification system, in 2009. His contributions to the tech landscape helped him reach billionaire status, with a current net worth of $3.6 billion, according to Forbes.

As tech and AI changes workflows, and anxiety around the future of work looms, Nilekani says people should focus on building the soft skills that artificial intelligence can’t replicate.

“Be curious, connected and relevant,” he told LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky in a recent episode of “The Path” newsletter. “I get up every morning wanting to learn new things, and I keep my mind open.”

It’s a mantra that’s propelled Nilekani throughout his career. The 69-year-old grew up in India in the ’60s and early ‘70s, where parents had

strict rules for their kids’ careers, he said: either be a doctor or an engineer.

Nilekani chose engineering, but went to a college his father didn’t approve of, and chose electrical over chemical engineering, again, to his father’s dismay. He graduated from IIT Bombay in 1978 and became obsessed with a new technology, mini computers, shortly after.

He got a job at Putney Computer Systems, the company developing the new tech, under N.R. Narayana Murthy, who would later call on him to co-found Infosys, where Nilekani currently serves as a non-executive chairman.

Nilekani credits most of his success to his hunger for information and the excitement that learning new things brought him, insisting that curiosity made him successful, not a love for business. 

“I’m an accidental entrepreneur,” he told Roslansky. “It’s not that I set out my life to be an entrepreneur, but once I got into it, I realized this was my calling.”

Be inquisitive or be ‘stagnant’

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

For several years after World War II ended, the British government continued to ration certain foodstuffs, including eggs, dairy products and sugar. This not only popularized resourceful recipes such as the vinegar-based “Wacky cake”; it also kept the average diet within what we now recognize as modern guidelines for daily sugar consumption. Now a study shows this restriction conferred lifelong health benefits on people who were infants during rationing.

Scientists have long wondered how sugar affects the developing body and brain. But observational studies of families who consume less or more sugar can struggle to disentangle diet’s effects from those of related factors such as income or geographic location. “This type of experiment helps to remove some of that noise,” says Juliana Cohen, a nutrition researcher at Merrimack College and the Harvard School of Public Health, who was not involved in the work.

The study authors used the medical database U.K. BioBank to compare disease incidence in about 60,000 people born in the years before or after sugar rationing ended in September 1953. The transition sharply altered sugar intake without affecting other dietary factors—rationing of other ingredients ended on different dates—allowing the researchers to probe the effects of reduced sugar within the developmentally crucial first 1,000 days of life.

Infants conceived in the years before sugar rationing ended had a 35 percent lower risk of diabetes and a 20 percent lower risk of hypertension in their 50s and 60s compared with those conceived after, the team reported in Science. For ration-era kids who ultimately did develop these conditions, onset was four and two years later, respectively. The longer a person lived under rationing, the greater the benefit they saw—but the strongest effects came while in utero and past the first six months of life, when babies begin eating solid foods.

Many mechanisms could explain the results, says lead author Tadeja Gračner, an economist at the University of Southern California. People who consume excessive sugar might gain an unhealthy amount of weight or develop diabetes during pregnancy, putting their children at risk for obesity and insulin resistance. High sugar intake could also prompt a growing fetus to express different genes to similar effect. And children raised on sugary diets may simply come to prefer sweeter foods; in a separate study, Gračner’s team found that people exposed to rationing consumed less daily added sugar as adults than those who weren’t.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that kids younger than two avoid added sugar and that everyone else keep their daily intake to less than 10 percent of their total calories. But today’s American toddlers average far more (nearly six teaspoons of added sugar a day), and many pregnant people consume triple the recommended amount for adults. Cohen notes dietary change is difficult because our nutritional environment isn’t set up to support it—yet any reduction helps, and there’s no need to avoid sugar entirely.

“It’s all about moderation,” Gračner says. “A birthday cake, candy, a cookie here and there—these are all treats we need to enjoy.”

.

Lydia Whitmore/Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________