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Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
The peak before the fall: Jazz, glamour, Gatsby and a short-lived Golden Age
One of the most consequential figures of the Jazz Age, arguably, was a now-forgotten man named Wayne Bidwell Wheeler. He was the driving force behind the National Prohibition Act of 1919. When the consumption of alcohol was made illegal, prohibitionists argued this would help cure a host of ills ranging from domestic violence and political corruption to alcoholism itself. What the Act famously did was help shape crime in the United States, and create a new and profitable field of business: the covert distillation, transport and distribution of alcohol. The most famous of these bootlegger-millionaires was Al Capone, who controlled much of the illegal activity conducted in Chicago between the years of 1925 and '31. He ran breweries and brothels, but was also hailed as a modern-day Robin Hood for his charitable contributions. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, Capone organised one of the city's biggest soup kitchens, feeding about 2,200 people three times a day. Capone was unique among the mobsters of his era for a couple of other reasons too: he readily employed black people; and he was a fan of jazz. There is a story about how he once asked Johnny Dodds to play a song. When the clarinetist said he didn't know it, Capone reportedly tore a $100 bill in two, gave one half to Dodds, and said he would get the other half when he learnt to play it. Another time, a group of Capone's henchmen more-or-less kidnapped the jazz pianist and singer Fats Waller as a birthday present for their boss. Waller stayed with Capone for three days. He was given all the food he could eat, plied with endless glasses of champagne, and was reportedly paid $100 a song. Waller left Capone's company unharmed, and thousands of dollars richer. The eccentricities and the sense of excess and debauchery in F Scott Fitzgerald's classic, The Great Gatsby (1925), draws directly from this world. Fitzgerald was about 22, a young soldier on leave for the weekend, when he visited the Seelbach hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, in the late-1910s. There he met a man named George Remus, who had started out as a criminal lawyer (in both senses of the phrase), and was now a millionaire bootlegger. Remus bought bonded liquor from before Prohibition and distributed it under the guise of medicinal use. His men then staged hijackings of their own delivery trucks, so they could resell the same alcohol at a much higher price. Remus also ran his own distilleries in Cincinnati, moving this booze around through tunnels. And he threw lavish parties, featuring scantily clad dancers and gifts of diamond stick pins and new cars for guests. In that other classic, Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film The Godfather, one sees more of how Prohibition changed the face of organised crime in the US. Salvatore Maranzano organised the Italian-American mob into five families: the Maranzano, Profaci, Mangano, Luciano and Gagliano. He then declared himself 'the boss of all bosses'. He was promptly murdered in a hit ordered by Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, who then set up The Commission, a governing body made up of members of the five families of New York, and representatives from other parts of the country. Meanwhile, crime was merging with a new wave of music in New York City. The original bootlegger of the era wasn't Capone. It was likely a man named Arnold Rothstein. When Prohibition hit, he invested in speakeasies, and smuggled Scotch whisky into the country in his own fleet of freighters. The character Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby was based on Rothstein. The speakeasy was where one went to have a drink. Some of these establishments were seedy, others were fashionable. Some managed to be both. New York's 21 Club saw visitors such as Humphrey Bogart and Joan Crawford. It remained fashionable even after Prohibition ended, in 1933. Similarly, Harlem's Cotton Club started off as an outfit where the gangster Owney Madden could sell liquor to the people of Harlem and ended up being one of the most fashionable places in New York — and the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. New Yorkers, regardless of race, crowded there to see the likes of Duke Ellington (1899-1974) and Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) perform. These fashionable clubs attracted a new kind of woman: the Flapper. She challenged ideas of what a woman should be — in her clothing, behaviour, attitudes to sex and liquor. She had her own slang in which a divorced woman was a fire alarm, and engagement rings were handcuffs. The Jazz Age may have come to an abrupt halt in 1929, with the great Wall Street crash and the onset of the Great Depression (which would drag on for 10 years, and be followed by World War 2). But by this time, culture had become a thing of the masses. Gender roles had been altered forever. So had art. Music. Movies. The world had changed. And would change again. (K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)
Fast Company
15-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Turning AI ambition into business action with real-time data and proactive agents
Imagine a retail merchandiser sitting at breakfast when her phone buzzes with a proactive alert. Overnight, social media chatter around a celebrity's post has sent demand for neon sneakers soaring. Instead of scrambling through manual reports, her AI agent has already flagged the trend, forecasted inventory gaps, and drafted a recommended restocking order. She taps to approve it and alerts her team to staff up—all before finishing her coffee. It's a powerful vision—but one most businesses haven't reached yet. 'The big lofty promises of AI haven't turned into corporate results on the P&L,' says Mike Capone, CEO of Qlik, a company that provides AI, data integration, and analytics solutions to large organizations. 'What we're seeing now is a little bit of disillusionment. And the reason for that is there's a bunch of foundational work that needs to get done in order to achieve those results.' Capone emphasizes that companies can't simply plug in a large language model and reap the benefits of AI. It must first establish systems that effectively collect, process, analyze, and store structured and unstructured data from multiple sources. 'The real foundation for AI is in multiple dimensions,' says Capone. 'Most importantly, data needs to be harnessed in real time. Old data is not useful in today's world. The veracity of that data is also crucial. If the data is not of sufficient quality and ready to feed into AI models, you're going to get bad outcomes.' Recent research reflects the disconnect between business leaders' expectations around AI and the actual results they have seen to date. A 2025 IDC survey sponsored by Qlik found that while '89% of organizations have revamped data strategies to embrace Generative AI, only 26% have deployed solutions at scale,' and '80% of organizations are investing in Agentic AI workflows, yet only 12% feel confident their infrastructure can support autonomous decision-making.' In a 2025 American Express survey of small business leaders, 87% currently using AI said 'they are still learning how to use it effectively,' and 68% reported that 'they thought AI would have made a bigger impact on their business than it actually has.' MAKING INFORMED DECISIONS IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD Today's leaders are managing significant challenges in a business landscape shaped by uncertainty, constant change, and rising costs. Qlik works with organizations to build a foundation of real-time, accurate data that can supply valuable AI analytics and have a positive impact on their bottom line. 'We have had more black swan events in the last 10 years than any time since World War II,' says Capone. 'Between COVID, the closure of the Suez Canal, natural disasters, the war in Ukraine, and the rising costs and tariff shock of the macroeconomic environment, things are changing every day. Minutes matter. The ability to ingest data in real time, make sense of it, and make decisions based on it is critical. And that's what we help our customers do.' This week, Capone and his team announced the launch of two new products at Qlik Connect, an annual data, analytics, and AI event that gathers nearly 2,000 attendees from approximately 60 countries. Qlik Open Lakehouse is a tool that offers real-time, vendor-neutral data integration for faster query performance and lower infrastructure costs. A new agentic experience provides a conversational interface and specialized AI agents that surface insights, recommend actions, and help users make faster, more informed decisions. Capone stresses that the company doesn't develop new products in a vacuum. He aims to spend between 30% and 40% of his time in any given week listening to customers on sales calls or direct interactions to understand their pain points, needs, and expectations. Customer feedback has a direct impact on the organization's product road map. Qlik also established an AI council composed of experts from public sector and higher education backgrounds. 'AI is complicated, and there is an ethical component to it that we are intentional about taking into account,' says Capone. 'We feel very strongly that technological advancement always outstrips society's ability to regulate it. Governments eventually try to catch up, but the reality is that the private sector owns some of this process. We're in a unique position to shape the ethical use of AI. The AI Council gives us another way to help us think about our technological decisions and how they play out—not just for our customers but for society in general. And more transparency is almost always the answer.' STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS RESULTS Capone urges business leaders to implement the following best practices to get the most out of their data and AI. • Start with a business problem. 'All of our most successful customers start by identifying a real business problem they want to solve. They ask: What are key things I can do to improve my business, top line, and bottom line? How can AI apply to these situations? How can I build a strong foundation and a repeatable process around AI? Everyone talks about their vision for AI. We're talking about operationalizing AI and putting it into the workflow of your entire business.' • Find an agile AI solution that can scale with your business needs. 'Sometimes in an effort to go super fast, people get myopic and think AI is a one-size-fits-all solution—but that's not the reality. We work with some of the largest, most innovative companies in the world that have saved millions of dollars with AI. But a lot of AI is becoming very local. You have to look at every dimension in your business and understand what flavor of AI makes sense for you.' • Focus on action, not ambition. 'Everybody has AI ambition, but we're past that stage now. Ask yourself: How can AI really truly impact my business? What ROI am I looking to get? How can we achieve more certainty through data? Let's get real about how we can build durability and sustainability into these platforms.'
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Business Standard
15-05-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Qlik unveils agentic experience to simplify data workflows, aid decisions
Qlik, a leading player in data integration, data quality, analytics, and artificial intelligence, on Wednesday introduced its new agentic experience to drive faster decisions and boost productivity by bringing new simplicity to complex data-driven workflows. Besides, the company launched Open Lakehouse, a fully managed Apache Iceberg solution built into Qlik Talend Cloud. These two products were unveiled at Qlik Connect 2025 here for its customers. The agentic experience will provide a single, conversational interface allowing users across the enterprise to interact naturally with data, using specialised AI agents to quickly uncover insights, drive faster decisions, and boost productivity, bringing new simplicity to complex data-driven workflows. At the heart of this continuous innovation is the Qlik engine, a unique technology that indexes relationships across data, enabling the discovery of unexpected connections. This new agentic experience is about removing the distance between data, decisions, and outcomes, Qlik CEO Mike Capone said here. "People want a seamless, conversational way to engage with their data, one that fits naturally into their work and delivers clear, trusted answers in context. We've built this experience to reflect how decisions actually get made in a business," he said. As enterprises face unpredictable market conditions and increasing pressure to make critical decisions rapidly, investments in AI have grown, he said, adding that, with its agentic experience, Qlik is focused on helping customers turn data into timely, high-quality decisions and results. Qlik's agentic experience to be rolled out this summer is specifically designed to empower teams to accelerate both decisions and productivity in rapidly changing environments, he added. Designed for enterprises under pressure to scale faster and spend less, Capone said, Qlik Open Lakehouse delivers real-time ingestion, automated optimisation, and multi-engine interoperability, without vendor lock-in or operational overhead. As organisations accelerate AI adoption, he said, the cost and rigidity of traditional data warehouses have become unsustainable. Qlik Open Lakehouse offers a new path -- a fully managed lakehouse architecture powered by Apache Iceberg that delivers 2.5 times, 5 times faster query performance and up to 50 per cent lower infrastructure costs, while maintaining full compatibility with the most widely used analytics and machine learning engines, he said. "With Qlik Open Lakehouse, enterprises gain real-time scale, full control over their data, and the freedom to choose the tools that work best for them. We built this to meet the demands of AI and analytics at enterprise scale, without compromise," he said. Qlik Open Lakehouse is built from the ground up to meet the scale, flexibility, and performance demands of modern enterprises, without the tradeoffs, he added. During the Qlik Connect 2025, it was also highlighted that despite record AI investment, most enterprises remain stuck in the lab. According to recent IDC research, while 80 per cent plan to deploy agentic AI workflows, only 12 per cent feel ready to support autonomous decision-making at scale. Trust in outputs is eroding amid growing concerns around hallucinations, bias, and regulatory scrutiny, the report said. And as models become commoditised, competitive advantage is shifting, not to those with the most advanced models, but to those who can operationalise AI with speed, integrity, and confidence, it added. The Qlik AI Council emphasised that trust must be designed in, not added later. Execution is the new differentiator, and it only works when the data, infrastructure, and outputs are verifiable, explainable, and actionable. In today's environment, the companies that pull ahead won't be the ones that test the most, they'll be the ones that deliver, the Council said. Observing that the market is short on execution, Capone said, companies aren't losing ground because they lack access to powerful models. "They're losing because they haven't embedded trusted AI into the fabric of their operations. That's why at Qlik, we've built a platform focused on decisive, scalable action. If your data isn't trusted, your AI isn't either. And if your AI can't be trusted, it won't be used," he added. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Indian Express
14-05-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
‘AI strategy without execution is pointless': CEO Mike Capone at Qlik Connect 2025
'Tons and tons of money is being poured into AI, but we're not seeing the results. Strategy is great, spending money is great, but without execution, it's completely pointless,' said Mike Capone, CEO of Qlik, during his keynote speech at the Qlik Connect 2025. The annual summit held by the software company has industry leaders gathered to throw light on the current state of AI implementation across enterprises, underscoring a concerning reality that amid massive investments most organisations are grappling to move from strategy to execution. In his keynote address, Capone spoke about the state of AI deployment. 'While 86 per cent added AI strategy, only 26 per cent actually deployed at scale. It's a massive gap. It's tragic,' Capone noted. This gap in implementation is seen as a critical challenge for companies that are rushing to embrace the AI wave, especially the recent phenomenon of Agentic AI that focuses on autonomous, goal-directed systems built to take independent actions. '80% of companies are saying they're investing in agentic AI,' Capone explained. 'But again, here's another gap. Only 12% of companies say or feel that their data is actually ready for agentic AI. So here we go again. Let's everybody jump in the water on agentic, but forget that you got to do the work.' Moments into the keynote, Capone welcomed Ritu Jyoti, group vice president and general manager of AI at IDC. On being asked what are the reasons that are impeding AI adoption, 'the first factor is that they (companies) have fragmented data. They have disjointed data and disparate systems leading to ineffective use for AI.' The IDC executive added that the other barriers include AI strategies operating in isolation from corporate strategy, a lack of AI-ready workforce, and overall a cultural resistance due to job security concerns. Jyoti emphasised the transformative potential of agentic AI while separating it from generative AI: 'Gen AI was all about augmenting a human and improving productivity and operational efficiency… If you think about agentic AI, the focus is on agility, adaptability, and timing,' she explained. Jyoti later illustrated her POV with an example. 'If you have a fully autonomous software engineer, you simply provide a high-level goal, like 'build an app to manage company-wide logistics and inventory', and the system delivers it. With generative AI, progress happened at a human scale, improving individual productivity. But with agentic AI, it's humans plus digital labour, allowing work at a speed, scale, and precision no human-only team can match.' Tom Mazzaferro, chief data AI and Analytics officer at Truist also made a brief appearance at the keynote. Masafaro shared insights on how the US bank is navigating the current challenges. 'Every big bank still operates in a hybrid ecosystem, both on ground, in the cloud. For us, it's all about how you bring it together to deliver our business strategy and service our customers and our clients as we go forward,' he explained. Mazzaferro stressed on the importance of partnerships in successful AI implementation. 'For us, we can't do it alone. We need to rely on partners, on key SMEs, on key solutions to deliver success for both our clients, but also for our teammates, for our employees.' When asked what advice he would give to others embarking on similar journeys, Mazzaferro recommended,'figure out what you're going to start. What do you want to achieve? How are you helping your business achieve their goals, their success, their outcomes? How is the technology that you're building and enabling helping your clients be successful?' Regardless of the challenges, organisations are thriving. 'The early adopters, they are kind of being mindful of the risks. They are being careful about their autonomy… but they're jumping ahead and failing fast, learning their lessons, setting up their structure,' Jyoti explained. She cited Johnson & Johnson as an example, which according to The Wall Street Journal is 'using AI for chemical synthesis during drug discovery, to accelerate drug discovery. Capone highlighted that the sole way to succeed was by focussing on the foundation that is trusted data, rather than pursuing specific AI models. 'It is not about models at all. It's about harnessing your data. It's about trusting your data, and it is about embedding AI where it drives outcomes that are tangible, measurable, real.' Both Capone and Jyoti addressed concerns about AI replacing jobs. When asked if everyone will lose their jobs to AI, Capone responded, 'I don't think so. I think people will lose their jobs because somebody got better at AI than you, not because AI took your job.' On the other hand, Jyoti shared a personal anecdote added.'I always joke with my son when I did my engineering, I didn't get a chance to use a calculator. But when he did his engineering, he used a calculator. That doesn't make him less intelligent than me.' Capone wrapped up his keynote with a call to action focused on execution. 'The race isn't coming. It's already on. The winners are not leaning. They're executing now… You've never been more important to your organisations than you are today. So the question is, are you moving fast enough not just to keep up, but to win?' The author is attending Qlik Connect 2025 in Orlando, US, at the company's invitation. Bijin Jose, an Assistant Editor at Indian Express Online in New Delhi, is a technology journalist with a portfolio spanning various prestigious publications. Starting as a citizen journalist with The Times of India in 2013, he transitioned through roles at India Today Digital and The Economic Times, before finding his niche at The Indian Express. With a BA in English from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, and an MA in English Literature, Bijin's expertise extends from crime reporting to cultural features. With a keen interest in closely covering developments in artificial intelligence, Bijin provides nuanced perspectives on its implications for society and beyond. ... Read More
Sky News AU
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sky News AU
‘Not going to get better': Sad health update for Tom Hardy after years of punishing body transformations
British actor Tom Hardy has offered a glimpse into his growing health challenges after years of physical strain from his demanding action roles. Hardy has repeatedly transformed his body for film roles over the years, including gaining and losing significant amounts of weight for blockbusters like Venom, The Revenant and Capone. The Dunkirk star has also been open about his addiction to cocaine, his time in rehab at age 25 and ultimately finding sobriety. Last week, Hardy discussed his health challenges from the punishing transformations in an interview with the British edition of Esquire magazine. 'I got dizzy today,' he told the outlet during a junket to promote the crime series MobLand, which sees Hardy play a fictional mob 'fixer' opposite the likes of Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren. 'I took a Sudafed and it's starting to work, so I feel better, but in the interviews I was sitting there, and you know when you feel not right, but you can't tell someone you don't feel right?' The actor then listed a list of injuries and health problems related to his action hero roles. 'I've had two knee surgeries now, my disc's herniated in my back, I've got sciatica as well,' he said. 'And I have that… is it plantar fasciitis? Where did that come from? And why? Why?! And I pulled my tendon in my hip as well." In 2012, he famously gained over 15 kilos of muscle for his role in The Dark Knight Rises before dramatically slimming down the following year for Mad Max: Fury Road. Hardy's commitment to transforming his body to match his characters began much earlier when he gained over 20 kilos to portray prisoner Charles Bronson. 'It's like, it's all falling to bits now, and it's not going to get better," he said.
