Organizations are investing billions in AI, and employees are increasingly using the technology. Yet only a small minority of companies are reporting meaningful or measurable gains from its use. It's the gen AI paradox: The technology can be found nearly everywhere'except on the bottom line. This is not an AI capability problem. We've created systems that can reason, create, and even act. Instead, it's an experience problem: We're stuck using search bars and chat boxes bolted onto interaction paradigms designed for a pre-AI era. If organizations are to realize AI's potential, they must learn to create new kinds of AI experiences that employees and customers will enthusiastically embrace. Doing so will require leaders to rethink a host of long-standing assumptions. For decades, software operated on a basic model: users specified structured inputs, and the system responded with structured outputs. Generative and agentic AI fundamentally breaks this model. Systems now interpret intent, generate novel outputs, and require user input to interact with and refine those outputs. This is a massive interaction shift: the interface is no longer a fixed set of 'command and execute' controls; rather, it is a 'collaborate and iterate' model....

China is pledging to use 'extraordinary measures' to support the country's bid to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, quantum technology and other cutting-edge technological fields, according to its 15th five-year plan. Many researchers noted an air of confidence in the plan. 'Five years ago, the sentiment of the Chinese science policymakers was still very much like, we don't want to be too far behind the US, we are still doing the catching up,' says Meicen Sun, an information scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 'Now, there is this more palpable sentiment that there's a real chance we can be a true leader,' she says. The government has promised to boost its research and development (R&D) expenditure over the next five years. And the country's science budget is also expected to increase to 426 billion yuan (US$62 billion) this year, a rise of 10% from 2025. The Chinese government now considers science to be as important as other top-level national goals, such as boosting defence, economic growth and the country's international influence, says Stefanie Kam, who researches Chinese politics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore....

The White House has received reports in recent weeks that President Trump's personal phone number has been offered for sale to deep-pocketed interests seeking influence, two administration officials told us. 'It's honestly just wild,' one of them said. 'I've heard of CEOs offering money for his number. I've heard of crypto bros offering cryptocurrency for it.' Journalists have taken to horse-trading among themselves, offering the contact information of other world leaders'or sometimes even dozens of bold-faced names'just to get the most important one saved into their phones. 'It's out of control,' said the second official, who, like others we spoke with for this story, requested anonymity to talk frankly on the issue. 'It's like a wrecking ball.' No one foresaw this at the start of Trump's second term, when the number was closely held by the president's friends and a handful of journalists who used it sparingly. So many people now call Trump on his private iPhone that his advisers have stopped trying to keep track. Sometimes in meetings, he will leave his phone face up, allowing staff to gawk at the flashing notifications of incoming or missed calls that pile up on his screen. Only some of them are from numbers that have been saved in the device. 'It is literally call after reporter call,' the first official said. 'It is just boom, boom, boom.'...

President Trump prides himself on being a rule breaker, but he is discovering a rule he can't break: Good statecraft demands clear objectives. Trump has billed the war with Iran as a one-time opportunity for Iranians to take back their country. This implies regime change, yet the administration's ambitions have in fact been vague and inconsistent. By offering a grab bag of justifications and intentions, the United States has been squandering an opportunity to declare a goal that is both necessary and achievable: Instead of changing Iran's regime, the U.S. should fatally weaken it. Tehran is counting on the cost of this war exceeding Trump's willingness to fight it. If Iran's regime survives, it will be even more determined to rebuild and wreak vengeance, at least in the short term. Some argue that the only way to stop Iran from menacing the region and its people is to crush this regime. But the regime's tenacity cannot be underestimated. There are no limits to what Iran's leaders will do to survive, as demonstrated by their massacre of up to 36,500 Iranian protesters in the streets in January....