Quote for the day:
"The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning; to create a product or service to make the world a better place." -- Guy Kawasaki
PIN It to Win It: India’s digital address revolution
DIGIPIN is a nationwide geo-coded addressing system developed by the Department
of Posts in collaboration with IIT Hyderabad. It divides India into
approximately 4m x 4m grids and assigns each grid a unique 10-character
alphanumeric code based on latitude and longitude coordinates. The ability of
DIGIPIN to function as a persistent, interoperable location identifier across
India’s dispersed public and private networks is what gives it its real power.
Unlike normal addresses, which depend on textual descriptions, a DIGIPIN
condenses the geo-coordinates, administrative metadata and unique spatial
identifiers into a 10-character alphanumeric string. Because of which, DIGIPIN
is readable by machines, compatible with maps and unaffected by changes in
naming conventions. When combined with systems like Aadhaar (identity), UPI
(payments), ULPIN (land) and UPIC (property), DIGIPIN can enable seamless KYC
validation, last-mile delivery automation, digital land titling and geographic
analytics. ... For DIGIPIN to become the default address format in India, it has
to succeed across three critical dimensions: A 10-character code might be
accurate, but is it memorable? For a busy delivery rider or a rural farmer,
remembering and sharing it must be easier than reciting a landmark-heavy
address. The code must be accepted across platforms – Aadhaar, land registries,
GST, KYC forms, food delivery apps and banks. Deepfakes leveled up in 2025 – here’s what’s coming next
Over the course of 2025, deepfakes improved dramatically. AI-generated faces,
voices and full-body performances that mimic real people increased in quality
far beyond what even many experts expected would be the case just a few years
ago. They were also increasingly used to deceive people. For many everyday
scenarios — especially low-resolution video calls and media shared on social
media platforms — their realism is now high enough to reliably fool nonexpert
viewers. In practical terms, synthetic media have become indistinguishable from
authentic recordings for ordinary people and, in some cases, even for
institutions. And this surge is not limited to quality. ... Looking forward, the
trajectory for next year is clear: Deepfakes are moving toward real-time
synthesis that can produce videos that closely resemble the nuances of a human’s
appearance, making it easier for them to evade detection systems. The frontier
is shifting from static visual realism to temporal and behavioral coherence:
models that generate live or near-live content rather than pre-rendered clips.
... As these capabilities mature, the perceptual gap between synthetic and
authentic human media will continue to narrow. The meaningful line of defense
will shift away from human judgment. Instead, it will depend on
infrastructure-level protections. These include secure provenance such as media
signed cryptographically, and AI content tools that use the Coalition for
Content Provenance and Authenticity specifications.Your Core Is Being Retired. Now What?
Eventually, all financial institutions will find themselves in the position of
voluntarily or involuntarily going through a core migration. The stock market
hammered one of the largest core processing companies in the world recently,
effectively admitting publicly what most of the industry has known for years:
They were more concerned about financial engineering of the share price than
they were about product engineering a better outcome for their clients.
Unfortunately, the market also learned recently that the largest core processing
provider will soon be making some big changes and consolidating many of its core
systems. It’s hard to imagine how a software company can effectively support and
maintain this many diverse core platforms – and the rationale behind this
decision seems obvious and needed. However, this is an incredibly risky
inflection point for banks and credit unions on platforms targeted for
retirement. The hope and bet is that most clients will be incentivized to
migrate to one of the remaining cores. ... The retirement of your core is
an opportunity to rethink the foundation of your institution’s future. While no
core conversion is easy, those who approach it strategically, armed with data,
foresight, and the right partners, can turn a forced migration into a
competitive advantage. The next generation of cores promises greater
flexibility, integration and scalability, but only for institutions that
negotiate wisely, plan deliberately, and take control of their own timelines
before someone else does.Whether AI is a bubble or revolution, how does software survive?
Bubble or not, AI has certainly made some waves, and everyone is looking to find
the right strategy. It’s already caused a great deal of disruption—good and
bad—among software companies large and small. The speed at which the technology
has moved from its coming out party, has been stunning; costs have dropped,
hardware and software have improved, and the mediocre version of many jobs can
be replicated in a chat window. It’s only going to continue. “AI is positioned
to continuously disrupt itself, said McConnell. “It's going to be a constant
disruption. If that's true, then all of the dollars going to companies today are
at risk because those companies may be disrupted by some new technology that's
just around the corner.” First up on the list of disruption targets: startups.
If you’re looking to get from zero to market fit, you don’t need to build the
same kind of team like you used to. “Think about the ratios between how many
engineers there are to salespeople,” said Tunguz. “We knew what those were for
10 or 15 years, and now none of those ratios actually hold anymore. If we are
really are in a position that a single person can have the productivity of 25,
management teams look very different. Hiring looks extremely different.” That’s
not to say there won’t be a need for real human coders. We’ve seen how badly the
vibe coding entrepreneurs get dunked on when they put their shoddy apps in front
of a merciless internet. Why Windows Just Became Disruptible in the Agentic OS Era
Identity is where the cracks show early. Traditional Windows environments assume
a human logging into a device, launching applications, and accessing resources
under their account. Entra ID and Active Directory groups, role-based access
control across Microsoft 365, and Conditional Access policies all grew out of
that pattern. An agentic environment forces a different set of questions. Who is
authenticated when an agent books a conference room, issues a purchase order
draft, or requests a sensitive dataset? How should policy cope with agents that
mix personal and organizational context, or that act for multiple managers
across overlapping projects? What happens when an internal agent needs to
negotiate with an external agent that belongs to a partner or supplier? ...
Agentic systems improve as they see more behavior. Early customers who allow
their interactions, decisions, and corrections to be observed become de facto
trainers for the platform. That creates a race to capture training data, not
just market share. The same is true for the user experience. How people “vibe
reengineer” processes isn’t optimized yet. The vendor that gets that experience
right will empower AI-savvy users in new ways, and deep knowledge about those
emerging processes will be hard to copy. It is likely, however, that more than
one approach will emerge, which will set up the next round of competition.SaaS attacks surge as boards turn to AI for defence
"SaaS security, together with concerns around the secure use of AI moved from
a niche security initiative to a boardroom imperative. The 2025 Verizon Data
Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) called out a doubling of breaches
involving third-party applications stemming from misconfigured SaaS platforms
and unauthorized integrations, particularly those exploited by threat actors
through scanning and credential stuffing," said Soby, Co-founder and Chief
Technology Officer, AppOmni. ... "Security technologies leveraging AI agents
have the potential to move the industry closer towards security operations
autonomy. In fact, we're seeing innovative advancements there, especially in
the development of SOC AI agents," said Ruzzi, Director of AI, AppOmni. She
highlighted the Model Context Protocol, an emerging technical standard, as a
mechanism that can act as a universal adapter between AI models and external
systems. ... She warned that AI agents still face challenges when they deal
with large and complex data sets. "But organizations need to look beyond the
AI hype of agents to implement the technology in a way that will be truly
useful for them. Handling large volumes of complex data still presents a
challenge here. Agents are most useful when assigned to perform a targeted
task that handles smaller volumes of simpler data," said Ruzzi.Why CIOs must lead AI experimentation, not just govern it
The role of IT leadership is undergoing a profound transformation. We were once
the gatekeepers of technology. Then came SaaS, which began to democratize
technology access, putting powerful tools directly into the hands of employees.
AI represents an even more significant shift. It can feel intimidating, and as
leaders, we have a crucial responsibility to demystify it and make it
accessible. Much like the dot.com boom, we're witnessing a transformative
moment, and IT leaders must harness this potential to drive innovation. ... The
key to successful AI adoption is fostering a culture of learning and
experimentation. Employees at all levels, whether developers or non-developers,
executives or individual contributors, must have the opportunity to get their
hands on AI tools and understand how they work. Some companies are having
employees train AI models and learn prompt engineering, which is a fantastic way
to remove the mystery and show people how AI truly functions. We’re encouraging
our own teams to write prompts and train chatbots, aiming for AI to become a
true copilot in their daily tasks. Think of it as akin to an athlete who trains
consistently, refining their skills to achieve better results. That’s the
feeling we want our employees to have with AI — a tool that makes their work
faster, better and, ultimately, more meaningful and joyful. My own mother’s
relationship with her voice assistant, which has become an integral part of her
life, is a simple reminder of how seamlessly technology can integrate when it’s
genuinely helpful.AI, fraud and market timing drive biometrics consolidation in 2025 … and maybe 2026
Fraud has overwhelmed organizations of all kinds, and Verley emphasizes the
degree to which this has pulled enterprise teams and market players in adjacent
areas together. AI has contributed to this wave of fraud in several important
ways. The barrier to entry has been lowered, and forgeries are now scalable in a
way cybercriminals could only have dreamed of just a few years ago. The
proliferation of generative AI tools has also changed the state of the art in
biometric liveness detection, with injection attack detection (IAD) now table
stakes for secure remote user onboarding the way presentation attack detection
(PAD) has been for the last several years. ... Reducing fraud is part of the
motivation behind the EU Digital Identity Wallet, which launches in the year
ahead. By tying digital IDs to government-issued biometric documents with
electronic chips. “That’s going to mean a huge uptick in onboarding people to
issue them these new credentials that are going to be big in identity
verification, and that’s going to be the best way to do that,” Goode says. At
the same time, businesses that had no choice but to pay for identity services
during pandemic now have more choice, Verley says. So providers are emphasizing
fraud protection to justify the value of their products. ... Uncertainty is a
central feature of the AI market landscape, and Goode notes the possibility that
if predictions of the AI market popping like a bubble in 2026 come true,
restricted credit availability “could put a damper on acquisitions.”Why Strategic Planning Without CIOs Fail
For large IT projects exceeding $15 million in initial budget, the research
found average cost overruns of 45%, value delivery 56% below predictions, and
17% of projects becoming black swan events with cost overruns exceeding 200%,
sometimes threatening organizational survival. These outcomes are not random.
BCG 2024 research surveying global C-suite executives across 25 industries found
that organizations including technology leaders from the start of strategic
initiatives achieve 154% higher success rates than those that do not. When CIOs
enter after critical decisions are made, organizations discover mid-execution
that constraints render promised features impossible, integration requirements
multiply beyond projections, and vendor capabilities fail to match sales
promises. Direct project costs pale beside the accumulated burden of technical
debt. ... Gartner’s 2025 CIO Survey (released October 2024), which surveyed over
3,100 CIOs and technology executives, revealed that only 48% of digital
initiatives meet or exceed their business outcome targets. However, Digital
Vanguard CIOs, who co-own digital delivery with business leaders, achieve a 71%
success rate. That 48% improvement represents the difference between coin-flip
odds and a reliable strategic advantage. Failed transformations do not merely
waste money. They consume organizational capacity that could deliver value
elsewhere.Top 3 Reasons Why Data Governance Strategies Fail
Clearly, data governance is policy, not a solution. It nests within any
organization that has deployed business analytics as part of its overall
strategy – in fact, one of the reasons for data governance failure is that it is
not being aligned with an enterprise’s business strategy. Governance is about
ensuring the proper implementation of business rules and controls around your
organization’s data. It involves the wholehearted participation of all company
departments, especially IT and business. Any attempt to run it in a vacuum or
silo means it’s imminently doomed. ... A well-thought-out data governance plan
must have a governing body and a defined set of procedures with a plan to
execute them. To begin with, one has to identify the custodians of an
enterprise’s data assets. Accountability is key here. The policy must determine
who in the system is responsible for various aspects of the data, including
quality, accessibility, and consistency. Then come to the processes. A set of
standards and procedures must be defined and developed for how data is stored,
backed up, and protected. To be left out, a good data governance plan must also
include an audit process to ensure compliance with government regulations. ...
If an Enterprise does not know where it’s headed with its data governance plan,
reflected in black and white, it’s bound to stutter. Things like targets
achieved, dollars saved, and risks mitigated need to be measured and
recorded.
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