Field Notes

TLDR

Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, the Digital Omnibus on AI, entered into force 27 July 2026 and deferred most Annex III high-risk obligations to 2 December 2027 while Article 50 transparency duties applied from 2 August 2026. Providers of legacy generative systems gain until 2 December 2026 for Article 50(2) machine-readable marking only. Operators report standing up transparency war rooms separate from delayed conformity-assessment programs. Named enterprise fine counts are UNKNOWN.

TLDR

McKinsey Global Institute estimates currently demonstrated technologies could in theory automate activities accounting for about 57 percent of US work hours — roughly 44 percent via agents and 13 percent via robots — while stressing this is technical potential, not a job-loss forecast. More than 70 percent of in-demand skills appear in both automatable and non-automatable work. The McKinsey Podcast episode published 30 April 2026 discusses human–agent hybrid teams. Named customer reorg outcomes are UNKNOWN.

TLDR

Google Cloud documents a Gen AI evaluation service on Vertex AI: generate answers for a prompt set, score them with named rubrics, and log runs in Vertex AI Experiments. For RAG, operators use EvalTask datasets with prompt and response columns, then batch jobs for large golden sets. Groundedness and answer-quality metrics replace anecdotal pilots. Named customer before/after scores are UNKNOWN.

TLDR

Microsoft documents two Copilot agent paths — declarative agents using Copilot's orchestrator and models, and custom engine agents with external hosting — plus a Copilot Control System with security, management, and measurement pillars. Operators report choosing declarative for Graph-scoped Q&A and routing complex workflows to custom engines only after governance review. Named customer agent counts are UNKNOWN.