Texas Instruments to Invest $60 Billion in Manufacturing Sites
Texas Instruments TXN 0.24%increase; green up pointing triangle said it plans to invest more than $60 billion across three manufacturing sites in Texas and Utah.
The chip maker said the investment would go toward seven semiconductor fabs, expanding its U.S. manufacturing capacity to supply growing demand for semiconductors used in vehicles, smartphones, data centers, satellites and other electronic devices.
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TechCrunch
14 minutes ago
- TechCrunch
Grifin secures $11M to make investing less intimidating
Grifin, an investment app that simplifies investing by automatically purchasing stocks in brands where users regularly shop, announced on Wednesday that it has secured an $11 million Series A funding round, bringing the total amount raised to around $22 million. Alongside the announcement, Grifin also revealed it has surpassed 500,000 registered users, indicating that its approach to investing resonates with a lot of users. Grifin also claims approximately 1 million total app downloads and 100,000 monthly active users. The company declined to share its valuation. The investment and user growth mark important milestones for Grifin, reflecting investors' confidence in the company's business model and its capacity to disrupt traditional investing methods. The stock market can be intimidating for many Americans — reportedly only 62% of U.S. adults own any stocks directly. The new capital will be invested in building out the company's software engineering and UX design teams, as well as product development. Notable upcoming features include an AI chatbot that Grifin is working on, as well as family plans designed for parents who want to introduce their young adult children to investing. Grifin, founded in 2017 by Aaron Froug, Bo Starr, and Robin Froug, aims to simplify investing for those who find it daunting. Initially based on the concept of 'Stock Where You Shop,' the company evolved in 2024 to an adaptive investing model that automatically invests $1 from users' transactions into stocks related to their purchases. For instance, if a user shops at Walmart, $1 is invested in Walmart stock. Users can also manually adjust their investment amounts. The model has proven successful, as evidenced by Grifin's internal data showing a 234% increase in spending at Walmart six months after users bought its stock. Image Credits:Grifin Another approach Grifin takes to simplify investing is by providing educational material that offers users daily insights into financial literacy. The company plans to expand its educational offerings and develop an AI chatbot that can summarize articles on the platform and provide quick answers to user questions. The chatbot will also provide insights into individual accounts, answering queries such as, 'When did I make this investment?' or 'When did I receive a dividend?' The timing of the rollout is currently unknown, as Grifin wants to ensure that the chatbot delivers accurate answers before its launch. Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW 'AI can be an amazing feature, but it can also sometimes not give the correct things,' Aaron Froug, who is Grifin's CEO, told TechCrunch. 'So we're just making sure that we're dotting the i's and crossing the t's before we launch something like that.' The educational offerings are particularly important because of Grifin's user base. Many of its users are women between their late 40s and 60s, a group that traditionally has less confidence in their investing knowledge. There are also younger women users aged 18 to 24, which could be why Grifin is considering adding budgeting tools that give users insights into their spending. One of the most requested features is family plans, which would enable users to share their Grifin accounts with family members and introduce investing to younger users. Many younger generations have been hesitant to invest in the stock market. Although the market has improved in recent months, there are still risks involved. 'One of the cool things that we want to do with family plans as well is [allow] parents or grandparents to help fund the accounts for kids or the grandkids, so there isn't too much financial stress,' Aaron Froug added. The round was led by Nava Ventures with participation from Alloy Labs, Draper Associates, Gaingels, Nevcaut Ventures, and TTV Capital. In addition to the funding, Freddie Martignetti, partner at Nava Ventures, joined Grifin's board.
Forbes
15 minutes ago
- Forbes
From Chatbots To Workbots: Why NiCE's AI Strategy Focuses On Execution
NiCE is betting that AI agents that complete tasks—not just conversations—will separate winners from pretenders in the enterprise AI race The artificial intelligence hype cycle has reached peak saturation, with technology vendors scrambling to slap "AI-powered" labels on everything from refrigerator recipe suggestions to chatbots that rely on simple keyword matching. Yet, for all the breathless marketing rhetoric, most business leaders are still waiting for AI that simplifies operations and improves data analysis. NiCE, a customer experience platform provider, is making a calculated bet that the next phase of enterprise AI won't be about making chatbots sound more human. The next wave of business outcomes will leverage AI agents that can navigate complex business processes from start to finish with minimal human intervention. NiCE's CEO, Scott Russell said, 'Optimizing knowledge is not just critical for AI to truly thrive in your environment, but it's also the key for transforming service from reactive to proactive, identifying opportunities to solve issues and predict future needs.' NiCE's recent product launches and strategic moves reveal a move toward enhanced automation and agentic AI. The first wave of enterprise AI focused primarily on making data more accessible through conversational interfaces—essentially putting a chat layer on top of existing applications and knowledge repositories. While this represented significant progress in democratizing data access, it only scratched the surface of AI's potential business value. Organizations could ask questions and get answers, but the burden of reasoning through complex decisions and taking action remained entirely on human operators. Going forward, technology vendors, such as NiCE, will use AI to deliver solutions that can reason through multifaceted problems and take semi or fully autonomous action. This evolution from conversational AI to agentic AI represents the difference between AI that informs and AI that performs. Agentic AI enhances a company's ability to analyze context, weigh multiple variables, make informed decisions based on key business performance indicators, and execute actions across interconnected systems. Traditional conversational AI helps a customer service representative find relevant information. Still, agentic AI can help a representative evaluate a customer's complete history more easily, assess risk factors, determine appropriate responses based on business rules, and automatically trigger the necessary workflows to resolve issues end-to-end. "There's a big difference between AI that talks and AI that gets things done," explains Barry Cooper, President of NiCE's CX Division. "While others are building agents that mimic conversations, we're building agents that fulfill customer needs—end to end." This distinction becomes crucial when examining NiCE's CXone Mpower Agents. Traditional AI chatbots had limited access to data, offered scripted responses, and were confined to specific areas of the business, such as front-office or back-office operations. NiCE's AI agent platform aim to break through these constraints by operating across the entire enterprise ecosystem—from initial customer contact through mid-office approvals to back-end fulfillment systems. Admittedly, Agentic AI is the AI buzzword of 2025, but early, well-scoped use cases show promise. Technology companies are increasingly working to streamline AI deployment as traditional approaches require extensive technical resources, custom development, and lengthy implementation cycles. NiCE's model simplifies AI agent creation while maintaining enterprise-grade sophistication through what they call vibe coding, allowing business users to tailor each agent's personality and communication style without requiring technical expertise. While the concept of vibe coding remains ill-defined, and its merits are hotly debated within the enterprise software community, there is a broad consensus around the underlying goal of making AI agents easier to code and deploy. The specific term matters less than the fundamental shift toward empowering business users to create and customize AI functionality without requiring deep technical expertise. In a rapidly evolving tech landscape, no single vendor can deliver everything an enterprise needs to succeed with AI, cloud, data, and digital transformation. Today, companies are no longer looking for isolated solutions—they need interconnected ecosystems. That's why strategic partnerships are essential. By working together, enterprise technology vendors can bridge data and function silos, improving workflows and accelerating innovation. Just as importantly, these alliances help enterprises extract greater value from existing technology investments by ensuring that new capabilities work in concert with the tools already in place. Over the past several months, NiCE has expanded its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and added ServiceNow and Snowflake to the mix. At Interactions 2025, NiCE announced an expanded collaboration with AWS, bringing together NiCE's domain expertise and rich interaction data with AWS's cloud infrastructure and generative AI services, including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, and the Amazon Nova family of large language models. The partnership addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing enterprise AI deployments: fragmented workflows, disconnected data, and inconsistent global performance. The partnership focuses on three core pillars. First, content-aware automation ensures that AI-generated responses are highly relevant and context-specific. Using the Amazon Q Index, Mpower Agents are equipped with up-to-date business content—from product documentation to policy details and case histories—enabling them to respond accurately and confidently in real time. Second, the integration delivers enterprise-wide orchestration by bridging front, middle, and back-office operations. NiCE's CXone Mpower Orchestrator automates workflows across functional teams, while Amazon Q Business extends this reach into a broader set of enterprise applications—eliminating silos and streamlining complex processes. Additionally, global scalability is made possible through AWS's robust cloud infrastructure. With low-latency performance and high availability across regions, multinational organizations can deploy and scale AI-driven customer service experiences quickly and consistently around the world. NiCE's partnership strategy also extends beyond AWS to include other critical enterprise platforms, such as ServiceNow and Snowflake. NiCE's latest partnership with ServiceNow aims to eliminate long-standing service gaps by tightly integrating real-time customer engagement with enterprise workflow automation. Announced at ServiceNow's Knowledge 2025 event, the collaboration integrates NiCE's customer service platform with ServiceNow's AI and Customer Service Management (CSM) tools to streamline operations across the entire organization, from the front office to the back. The goal: fully automated customer service fulfillment. The combined solution routes inquiries based on sentiment, intent, and service-level agreements (SLAs)—bridging siloed departments to accelerate resolution times and enhance both customer and employee experiences. Role-based AI copilots assist agents and back-office teams with real-time insights and next-best actions, while continuous optimization tools flag issues and launch workflows automatically. These relationships provide access to complementary technologies and customer bases, allowing NiCE to integrate with the broader enterprise software ecosystem that companies rely on for operations, data management, and workflow automation. NiCE's strategic collaboration with Snowflake aims to unlock the full value of customer interaction data by making it accessible, secure, and actionable across the enterprise. By integrating Snowflake's AI Data Cloud with CXone Mpower, NICE can improve data sharing, breaking down silos that have traditionally limited the impact of customer insights. Snowflake serves as the backbone of the CXone Mpower data lake, centralizing interaction data and enriching it with information from other enterprise systems. This unified data foundation allows organizations to automate key processes—from billing to claims handling—while powering AI-driven analytics, dashboards, and decision-making. The result: faster fulfillment, greater accuracy, and a deeper, organization-wide understanding of the customer experience. Apparently, 2025 is the year of the brand refresh. The technology industry has witnessed updates from Five9, Google's G, Hitachi HPE, and Qualcomm's introduction of Dragonwing, alongside NiCE's own transformation. Every brand refresh has its own story to tell, but NiCE's new logo and marketing campaign represent more than a desire for fresh typography and color schemes. The rebrand indicates the company's strategic desire to expand its AI vision beyond the contact center to encompass its broader portfolio of finance and security solutions. The company describes the rebrand as positioning "NICE to empower brands to deliver AI-powered experiences that are proactive, human-centered and intuitive—whether connecting with customers, protecting communities or combatting financial crime." NiCE's solution involves partnering with actress Kristen Bell, who serves as the face of the company's "NiCE World" brand campaign. The initiative positions Bell as the "NiCEst Person in the World," NiCE said the campaign "builds on NiCE's reimagined brand, championing a future where AI isn't just intelligent – it's connected, intuitive and working behind the scenes to make life better. The enterprise AI market remains in flux, with new entrants and existing players continually repositioning themselves. NiCE's focus on domain expertise, integration depth, strategic partnerships, and automation suggests a company that understands both the technical and implementation requirements necessary for large-scale AI adoption. As enterprises increasingly demand AI that delivers results, NiCE's bet on fulfillment-focused automation may prove prescient. Of course, there's still the matter of cost and return on investment. Most companies struggle to understand and plan for the true product and operational costs of AI. Organizations need to work with their technology vendors to deploy well-scoped use case that deliver measurable return on investment, fast. The question isn't whether AI will transform customer experience—it's which companies will build AI that completes the transformation rather than just talking about it.
Associated Press
16 minutes ago
- Associated Press
US unemployment ticked down, hovering at historically low levels
WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits dipped to 245,000 last week, hovering at historically low levels, the Labor Department said Wednesday. U.S. jobless claims ticked down from 250,000 the week before. Economists had expected last week's claims to match that at 250,000. The four-week average of claims, which smooths out week-to-week volatility, rose to 245,500, the highest since August 2023. The number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits the week of June 7 slid to 1.95 million. Weekly unemployment claim are a proxy for layoffs and mostly have stayed within a healthy band of 200,000 to 250,000 since the economy recovered from a brief but painful COVID-19 recession in 2020, which temporarily wiped out millions of jobs. In recent weeks, however, claims have stayed at the high end of range, adding to evidence that U.S. job market is decelerating after years of strong hiring. So far this year, employers are adding a decent but far from spectacular 124,000 jobs a month, down from an average 168,000 last year and an average of nearly 400,000 from 2021 through 2023. The hiring slowdown is partly the drawn-out result of 11 interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve in 2022 and 2023. But Trump's aggressive and often-erratic trade policies — including 10% taxes on imports from almost every country on earth — are also weighing on the economy, paralyzing businesses and worrying consumers who fear they'll mean higher prices. Carl Weinberg of High Frequency Economics is worried that claims remain elevated compared with recent years, when employment has remained very low by historical standards. 'We believe firms have been 'hoarding' workers to ensure that they don't lay off skilled and trained workers by mistake, especially with the labor market still very close to full employment,' Weinberg wrote. 'With uncertainty still high ... companies have remained hesitant about layoffs. That may be changing.'' The Fed, satisfied that an inflation was coming down, cut rates three times last year. But the central bank has turned cautious in 2025, worried that Trump's tariffs will rekindle inflationary pressures. The Fed is expected to leave rates unchanged as it wraps up a two-day meeting Wednesday.
