Businesses scramble to get noticed by AI search

The owner of a small pub chain in the south east of England has said his costs will rise by £62,000 per year after changes announced in the Budget. Phil Thorley, who runs the Thorley Taverns pub group, said business rates – a tax on commercial properties – will rise for 17 of his 18…

On Friday morning, groups representing roughly 700,000 tech workers within Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, all companies that have their own contracts with the Defence Department, signed an open letter urging the companies they worked for to also “refuse to comply” with the Pentagon’s demands.

It does not focus on quantitative polling, which is already largely automated through mass surveys. Instead, it emphasises depth. “We don’t ask people to tick boxes – they have a conversation with an AI,” Fontaine explains. “That means we can explore not just what people think, but how they think – how they build their…