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Welcome to our weekly edition of AI & Finance™!
Hello, friends, we're wrapping up a huge week in artificial intelligence news that saw the launch of major new models, impactful commentary and criticism from government regulators and a few huge venture capital announcements, and we've got it all here for you. For starters, our AI & Finance headlines column has the latest from PNC, Square, FactSet and more, after reviewing some recent research from Edward Jones. AI Education looks at the "zero trust" paradigm and why its relevant for financial services, and we have three $1 billion-plus funding rounds in our top 5 VC's column. News from four major AI providers leads the latest edition of AI Intelligence. Also, in this week's We Asked, advisors tell us about their favorite technologies, while we look back to exhaustively review the ongoing debate about AI's role in the financial services industry today, and try to imagine what it will be moving forward into the future... CHECK IT ALL OUT BELOW!
Maybe we need to keep our big mouth shut, before we cause real trouble. Welcome to a surprisingly full AI & Finance-we only say that because, for a period covering a major U.S. holiday, we do have a lot of headlines. First, however, let's humorously blur the line between happy coincidence and causation. In last week's newsletter introduction, we had the displeasure of relaying reports that the finance and technology sectors were losing a combined 28,000 jobs a month-this came right on the heels of our first "Look Back" report discussing AI-induced job disruption in the financial services sector. Last week... CONTINUE HERE
"Trust no one, tell your secrets to fewer, and you will never be betrayed." - Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli would have made a hell of an IT guy in the era of cloud computing and AI. Welcome to AI Education, where this week, we're going to discuss why the prevailing paradigm in computing has become the rough equivalent of an X-Files poster. We're introducing you to the concept of zero trust. But before we define zero trust (it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like), we need to give you a bit of how we got here. Since the pandemic of 2020, we've stayed the... CONTINUE HERE
This week our overall AI venture capital activity maintained its momentum from prior weeks, with all five of our listed announcements coming in over $800 million and eight announcements total coming in over $100 million. The biggest announcement, per FinSMEs, came from Houston-based energy developer Joulent, which raised a $1.75 billion round led by National Grid to "advance its high-voltage project pipeline, fund modular generation infrastructure, scale its technical capabilities, and expand its engineering workforce to meet AI data center electricity demand," according to its announcement. Normally we wouldn't feature an energy company in our Top 5 announcements, but Joulent's raise was explicitly... CONTINUE HERE
We write a lot about the drawbacks and risks of technologies, but what about the benefits? Shouldn't good technology be delightful to us? We definitely think so! What kind of technology delights wealth managers? Of course, we get research from some of the wealthtech usual suspects, like T3 and Kitces.com, which offer pretty good insight into what advisors are using and some general information about advisor satisfaction... but those polls aren't as open ended as we want to be. What technology is really making advisors happy, to the point where they want to sing its praises... or at least tell a technology writer... CONTINUE HERE
The artificial intelligence industry entered the second half of 2026 with a renewed emphasis on infrastructure, commercialization and enterprise deployment rather than simply larger foundation models. Major technology companies accelerated investments in custom AI chips, cloud infrastructure and enterprise software, while frontier model developers continued to introduce new capabilities amid growing government scrutiny and competitive pressure. Meta, Microsoft, xAI, OpenAI, Nvidia and other industry leaders all made significant moves that could reshape the competitive landscape for AI developers, cloud providers and financial services firms adopting generative AI. Meta Platforms dominated AI headlines by unveiling multiple initiatives designed to transform years of AI investment... CONTINUE HERE
We've sure gotten a lot of cool technology over the past decade. Do we really know what we want it to do? For now, AI's most successful financial applications are still relatively modest. The technology searches documents, summarizes meetings, writes first drafts, prepares research, reviews transactions, assists programmers and brings relevant information to the attention of employees. It functions as an efficiency aide-a highly capable assistant sitting between a financial professional and the extraordinary trove of data maintained by banks, insurers, asset managers, accounting departments and advisory firms. The efficiencies can be substantial. But an assistant that merely organizes information is different... CONTINUE HERE
Source: thefinancials.com | Updated every 30 minutes, M-F during market hours
The DWN AI Index™ is a benchmark stock index of the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. The index is comprised of a diversified group of stocks deriving a significant percentage of their revenue from AI applications. REVIEW HISTORICALS HERE
STOCKS COMPRISING DWN AI INDEX:
Amazon (AMZN) * Arista Networks (ANET) * AI (C3.ai) * CrowdStrike Holdings (CRWD) * Duolingo (DUOL) * iRhythm Technologies (IRTC) * Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) * NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) * Palantir Technologies (PLTR) & * Taiwan Semiconductor * Manufacturing (TSM)
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