By Adam Mills and Gabriel Snyder
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Editor's note: This is AI Impact, Newsweek's weekly newsletter where each week, we will explore how business leaders are unlocking real value through artificial intelligence.
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Inference Layer
By Gabriel Snyder
Read More on Newsweek.AI
I was recently speaking with Mohamad Ali, senior vice president of IBM Consulting, who walked me through some of the AI tools IBM has built for clients. A pattern quickly emerged: Solutions that had started with automation quickly evolved into something bigger. The initial use cases were familiar: cybersecurity threat assessments, contract bidding, etc. But as workflows became faster and cheaper, something interesting happened: They didn’t just save money—they unlocked new capabilities.
One CEO, for example, began by automating the process of bidding on contracts, a time-consuming but routine task the company had handled for years. The efficiency gains of automation were obvious—reducing the time required from weeks to hours. But then came the CEO’s insight: In the process, the firm had built real-time awareness of the prices it and its competitors were charging, it could apply that new capability to inventory management and pricing and strategically boost revenues. What started as cost reduction became a growth engine.
And this isn’t an isolated story—companies across industries are seeing the same shift. Take SAP: The company began by automating routine sales tasks—data entry, lead qualification, proposal generation. That efficiency gain unlocked something transformative: the ability to map customer journeys and shorten sales cycles dramatically. SAP cut its sales cycle from 12–18 months to just 3–6 months, opening up the SME market that had previously been uneconomical for in-person sales. The result? 22,000 new customer opportunities in 2024—a clear case of automation evolving into a strategic advantage.
Retail offers another vivid example. Walmart started by automating demand forecasting and inventory management. Those faster workflows became the foundation for its Trend-to-Product system, which scans social media and search data, generates mood boards and feeds concepts directly into prototyping and sourcing. What once took months now happens in weeks, enabling Walmart to launch trend-driven products ahead of competitors and capture emerging demand before rivals even notice. Automation didn’t just make Walmart more efficient—it gave it a new capability: real-time product innovation.
The real creativity in AI isn’t just figuring out how to do more with less. It’s asking: What can we do now that we couldn’t before? When automation becomes capability, the game changes—from efficiency to innovation, from cost savings to competitive advantage.
So, what’s your AI superpower? Is it freeing up talent for higher-value work? Reinventing customer engagement? Or bending the curve on innovation? The companies that thrive in this era will be the ones that see AI not as a tool to cut costs, but as a catalyst for doing more—much more. Please share your stories with us! We’d love to feature them in a future edition.
Upcoming Webinars
The Myths and Realities of AI for SaaS
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Dr. Ranjit Tinaikar’s new op-ed on Newsweek, "AI and the New SaaS Buyer: Myths and Realities of the Impact of AI," argues that the true transformation of AI in the SaaS world is happening where few are looking. The biggest productivity gains, he writes, are coming from the engineering side, where AI is accelerating code generation, refactoring and modernization rather than in customer-facing tools or new revenue streams. Despite the hype, the path from AI implementation to measurable business impact remains uneven, and most of the value still sits behind the scenes.
Tinaikar warns that while AI is becoming table stakes for SaaS providers, buyers aren’t paying more for it. Instead, he sees the near-term opportunity in legacy modernization and automation, where ROI is tangible and adoption less risky.
He’ll discuss these findings with Gabriel Snyder, editorial director of Newsweek Nexus and co-host of the AI Impact Interview series, in a live webinar, The Myths and Realities of AI for SaaS, on December 4 at 11 a.m. ET. Register here.
Core Intelligence
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Artificial intelligence is eroding one of the most basic assumptions in business: that you can trust what you see and hear.
Resemble AI’s Q3 2025 Deepfake Report noted more than 2,000 verified incidents last quarter, nearly half targeting companies, marking what CEO Zohaib Ahmed calls an “inflection point” in synthetic deception. “The barrier to entry has completely collapsed,” he said. Anyone with basic access to generative tools can now create highly convincing audio or video in minutes, and the attackers are organized, fast and increasingly focused on the enterprise.
The corporate threat is no longer theoretical. Deepfake fraud in the report accounts for nearly 40 percent of all incidents, with 385 cases leading to direct financial loss. Executives are being impersonated on video calls, cloned voices are authorizing wire transfers and fabricated investor announcements are designed to move markets. Companies are attractive targets, Ahmed noted, because “there are more assets, more authority and more trust to exploit.” Recent cases in Singapore and Australia, including a fully AI-generated Zoom room and synthetic voices used to obtain Qantas credentials, show how quickly the risk is scaling.
The report reframes deepfakes as a corporate integrity issue, not a niche cybersecurity concern. “When stakeholders start to question if a CEO’s message or a board announcement is real, you’ve lost credibility,” Ahmed said. Detection, he argues, has to “evolve into infrastructure,” embedded into how organizations authenticate identity, media and transactions. But technology alone is not enough. “Tools matter, but culture matters more,” he added, urging leaders to normalize slowing down, verifying and “build doubt into their decision-making” as a safety feature, not a weakness.
Analysts expect the problem to worsen before it stabilizes: Deloitte projects continued acceleration of AI-driven fraud across financial services, and Resemble forecasts deepfake-enabled fraud could reach $40 billion globally by 2027. The fundamentals of trust remain the same—staying watchful and understanding how a company is represented—but the stakes, and the speed, are rising.
You can read the full article here: AI deepfakes are forcing companies to rebuild trust.
AI Impact Awards & Summit
The Newsweek AI Impact Awards seek to identify and recognize uniquely innovative AI solutions that solve critical business problems in different industry segments, or significantly advance capabilities. Recognition comes not from ideas, but from measurable IMPACT on business operations.
Register now – Early bird deadline ends 12/19.
Prompt Injection
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“All organizations, particularly small and midsized companies, are eager to see how they can best leverage AI to enable smart decisions, inspire human ingenuity, and drive business outcomes. As AI becomes increasingly embedded in business management systems, the focus shifts from standard process automation to human empowerment. The companies that thrive in this era will be those that combine trusted data, practical innovation, and human insight to produce concrete results, increase operational efficiencies, and spur business growth.”
Have your own lesson to share? Email us at ai-impact@newsweek.com
Run Log
By Adam Mills
For MaineHealth, fighting insurance denials isn’t just paperwork, it’s survival. As the largest health system in northern New England, its hospitals face mounting financial pressure from coverage disputes that can take months to resolve and threaten essential community services.
“Our ultimate goal,” said Dr. Ed Kimlin, MaineHealth’s medical director of payer operations, “is to ensure that Mainers will continue to receive world-class care close to home.”
To meet that goal, Kimlin’s team began using an AI-powered review system that analyzes payer criteria and patient medical records to generate appeal drafts for denied claims. The model was trained to compare hospital documentation against hundreds of coverage guidelines and surface the criteria that justify reimbursement, work that previously required hours of manual review.
One case, the fictional “Mr. Baggins,” showed how it works. The patient’s claim for rehabilitation care had been denied. The AI system parsed dozens of insurer requirements, linked them to corresponding physician notes and automatically built a draft letter citing the exact passages that met each criterion. “The specialist can actually see which criteria the [AI] system integrated into the letter,” Kimlin explained. “We can edit and strengthen that argument. But the system did the heavy lift—it turned the dense policy language into something usable.”
For clinicians, that means less time fighting denials and more time focused on patients. Each appeal becomes faster, clearer and more defensible proof that even in the battle over paperwork, intelligent systems can help preserve access to care.
Context Window
■ As agents and automation reshape the workplace, one major tech firm is retraining thousands of its own employees instead of simply reducing headcount, signaling that “AI job loss” is becoming more about skill-pivot than elimination. [Newsweek]
■ The AI-data-center boom is now reshaping the U.S. economy: tech giants are investing hundreds of billions in massive facilities, pushing out jobs, straining power grids and raising questions about sustainability. [Wired]
■ While most enterprise AI pilots are still failing to scale, a new angle reveals the root of the problem: many companies are simply pointing AI at the wrong targets as real value shows up when it tackles customer-facing tasks and drives measurable outcomes. [CIO]
■ Schools are now scrambling to keep up: K-12 educators are being asked to deploy and govern AI tools while students are already using them. The takeaway: early-stage, real-world AI policy in education looks more like improvisation than strategy. [MIT News]
■ The Artificial Intelligence Act may be softened by the European Commission after mounting pressure from U.S. tech firms and the Donald Trump administration, putting Europe’s status as a global AI-regulation pioneer in question. [The Guardian]
■ Druid AI is pushing agentic computing forward with a platform that lets enterprises build their own task-specific agents that fit into existing systems, focusing on accuracy and compliance to drive real production use. [Newsweek]
Transfer Protocol
Shane Luke, formerly vice president and general manager of AI and machine learning at Workday Inc., has been appointed senior vice president of AI at Roper Technologies.
Edward Raffaele, formerly vice president of AI at Workday, is now vice president of AI engineering at Roper.
Ben John, previously vice president of engineering for Microsoft’s AI team, has joined Mobavenue as a strategic advisor as the company expands its AI initiatives.
Jaffrey Ali, previously vice president of innovation and product strategy at FranConnect, has been named chief AI officer at the company, leading its franchise-software platform into an era of intelligent automation and AI-driven operations.
Josh Fecteau, formerly head of internal data and AI enablement at Teradata since 2019, has been promoted to chief data and AI officer, overseeing the company’s enterprise-wide AI strategy.
Dirk Karl, formerly chief procurement officer at MTN Group, has joined AI firm HUMAIN as chief procurement officer and senior vice president, where he will embed AI-driven supply-chain intelligence into global sourcing and transformation.
Know someone on the move in AI? Send job change info to ai-impact@newsweek.com
Magic Moment
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"I have a four-year-old, and we do bedtime stories. There's a massive library of books, but every so often he's bored with the ones that are there. So, he keeps asking for customized books that feature him in the story. So, I started collecting all the ideas… a story about dragons or dinosaurs or steam engines or whatever, and then I prompt Gemini for writing a children's storybook. It has a storybook feature where it will lay out an illustrated storybook with like images and things like that."
Experience some AI magic? Tell us about it at ai-impact@newsweek.com
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