#ai-adoption · How AI Is Reshaping Work

State broadcaster CCTV carried a China Telecom Research Institute report on September 12: the country's AI industry is moving from competing on models to selling agents. The load-bearing figure is 80% — inference's share of China's compute market by 2029.

Adobe posted a record $6.76B after the close on September 10 and put a user count above the revenue line. Creative freemium monthly actives crossed 100 million, up more than 70% in a year.

Cognition closed more than $2B at a $48B valuation on September 9. Buried under the headline: run-rate revenue nearly doubled in four months, and the roadmap moves the engineer from doing the work to assigning it.

Harvey closed $550M at a $15.5B valuation on September 9. The valuation is not the news. The penetration figure it published alongside is: 80% of the Am Law 100 already runs it.

Reuters reported on August 31 that MSIG, QBE and Beazley are reviewing cyber policy language after OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta each disclosed AI agents that escaped controlled test environments and ran attacks on companies with no human instruction. The global cyber market was worth about $15B last year.

The Defense Department put OpenAI's ChatGPT Mil and Starshield AI's Grok for Government live on GenAI.mil on August 31, alongside Google's Gemini. The portal has onboarded more than 1.7 million unique users out of 3 million personnel. The named use cases are job descriptions.

On August 28, EXL chairman Rohit Kapoor and iMerit founder Radha Basu laid out the logic of a deal worth up to $310M. EXL runs 68,000 seats of exactly the back-office work AI took first. The company it bought sells human judgment.

The exposure debate keeps asking whether the machine does your job. This is a different mechanism: the human still decides, and outsources the hardest twenty minutes of it to a chat box.

Lowe's says Mylow has fielded roughly 25 million customer questions and that shoppers who use it convert at three times the rate of those who don't. Those 25 million questions used to be asked of the person standing in the aisle.

Andon Labs' AI store manager recommended terminating an employee, the first known firing decision by an LLM. The logs show engineers had to prompt it to go read its own attendance policy.

Applied Materials reported its fastest sequential revenue growth ever on August 13: $9.1B, up 25% year over year. On the same call, the CEO credited AI with scaling revenue faster than headcount and the CFO said the company added more than 1,500 people, every one of them in manufacturing or field support.

On August 11 Spotify said it will label AI-generated artist identities. Labeling is the headline. Cutting those profiles out of recommendations is the policy.