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95% of Companies Are Seeing Little to No ROI From AI - Here's What the Research Actually Shows
Multiple converging research reports paint a stark picture: despite tens of billions spent on AI, as many as 95% of companies are seeing little to no return on investment. The four problems blocking returns are consistent across organizations: employees default to automating tasks they dislike rather than high-value ones; token-based billing generates costs nobody budgeted for; humans remain the bottleneck to workflow change; and AI agents become less effective when denied access to the proprietary data they need. The companies breaking through share one characteristic - they treat AI adoption like an operating model transformation with executive accountability, not a software deployment. Read more
Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of Running 28.8 Million Fraudulent Claude Exchanges in the Largest Known AI Distillation Attack
Anthropic sent a letter to the US Senate Banking Committee on June 10, 2026 accusing operators affiliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen of running 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through 25,000 fraudulent accounts over 45 days - the largest known AI distillation attack in history. Distillation uses a stronger model's outputs to train a weaker one, allowing capability extraction without access to model weights. The campaign dwarfs previous attacks: DeepSeek ran 150,000 exchanges, Moonshot AI 3.4 million, MiniMax 13 million. The Commerce Department's export control on Anthropic's models came two days after this letter was received - that timeline is now part of the record. Read more
Toronto's Float Raises $85 Million CAD Series C at $550 Million Valuation to Build AI Into the Core of Canadian Business Finance
Float Financial closed an $85 million CAD Series C led by Inovia Capital on June 25, 2026, valuing the Toronto fintech at $550 million - a 70% jump from 18 months ago. Since its Series B, Float doubled its customer base to 7,500 Canadian businesses, grew revenue 120%, and quadrupled business account balances. Float Intelligence, the AI layer launched in April and embedded across clients' daily finance workflows, is the growth thesis: five years of financial infrastructure built for Canadian SMBs, with AI now running on top of it. Read more
Samsara Launches AI Ride-Alongs and Coaching Priority to Bring Personalized Safety Coaching to Every Commercial Driver
Samsara unveiled AI Ride-Alongs at its Beyond 2026 conference - a system that analyzes 22 collision-predictive driving behaviors across billions of miles of data, identifies specific unsafe actions in real time (including recognizing a vaping device and assigning targeted distracted driving coaching), and scales the personalized coaching that previously required a safety manager in the passenger seat. Coaching Priority ranks all drivers in a fleet of any size by risk level against 45+ factors, surfacing the top high-risk drivers for immediate safety team attention. In a demo of a 4,000-driver fleet, the system identified 300 requiring priority intervention. Read more
📢 The Signal Behind the Noise
This week's edition asks a question that every CFO in North America is now asking out loud: where is the return? The 95% no-ROI figure and the Alibaba distillation story are two sides of the same coin - one showing that Western enterprises are mostly failing to extract value from their AI investments, while Chinese AI labs are systematically extracting value from Western AI models without paying for them. Float and Samsara show that the 5% getting returns share a common trait: they started with a specific, measurable problem, built the data infrastructure to support AI, and measured outcomes rigorously. That playbook is available to every organization. Most just haven't run it yet.
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