Oskar Block has never been able to stay away from entrepreneurship for long.

He was just 18 when he launched his first startup, building machine learning models for sports betting. “I’ve always been drawn to solving difficult data problems,” he told TechCrunch. He went on to consulting, where he helped companies with their AI integration strategies and learned what it took to get large enterprises to embrace the technology. 

Block then took a role at an autonomous trucking company, where he saw firsthand how manual and slow the patent process was. The idea for his next company came one evening at dinner with a friend and colleague, Tobias Estreen, when Estreen’s father, a patent attorney, started recounting what his days looked like: “Reading the same kind of documents, the same way he had for thirty years,” Block recalled.

Block and Estreen saw an opening and teamed up with two others, Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson, to launch Stilta, an AI platform designed to automate the research and analytical work behind intellectual property cases — the kind of labor-intensive work that has historically made patent litigation slow and expensive. The startup announced a $10.5 million seed round on Tuesday, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors include Y Combinator and operators from companies like OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable. 

Block, the company’s CEO, said Stilta works like a team of lawyers. Users put a patent number into the software along with any relevant content, and from there, a network of AI agents gets to work, searching for other patents might conflict with the claim, flagging similar property that could apply, and pulling the filing and court history of the patent. 

“They reason in parallel and converge the way a room full of specialists would, but at a scale no human team can match,” Block said, adding that the lawyer or professional using the platform is still in the “driver’s seat” by guiding the analysis, not ceding it. “The output is litigation-grade: a report and claim charts with pinpoint citations to every piece of evidence.”

Other companies in this space include Solve Intelligence and DeepIP. Legal tech has become a hot sector amid the broader AI boom. Block said parts of the legal industry are already seeing AI-accelerated change, while other parts may not be ready for it for a long time. 

The analytical work, he said, is already being overtaken by AI. For now, it’s still humans deciding the outcomes of cases. He also noted that many companies are holding on to patents they’ve “never enforced, never licensed, never even analyzed properly because the cost of doing so was prohibitive.”

That cost barrier is what Stilta aims to lower. Making the patent litigation process more efficient and affordable could open up new doors for many companies that have long left their IP on the shelf and change how they think about the latent value sitting inside their patent portfolios.

“The question isn’t really whether the legal system is prepared for AI,” Block said. “It’s whether companies are prepared for what becomes possible when the analytical bottleneck disappears.” 

Expleo’s research explored how, in the age of AI, for many organisations, empathy is a fundamental skill.

Technology and consulting company Expleo has released the results of its AI Pulse sentiment tracker, Expleo AI Pulse for Ireland. The organisation collected data from 200 respondents across Ireland, Germany, France and the UK, to identify the levels of worry, excitement, trust and confidence in AI-led technology.

The research found that business leaders in Ireland, ahead of their contributing European counterparts, are far more likely to value empathy as a fundamental skill for managers in the age of AI, despite ongoing concerns around the impact AI will have on the global jobs market.

Data taken for the month of April found that Ireland’s business leaders believe human-centric, empathetic coaching and people leadership are among the most critical skills a manager can wield in the context of increased AI adoption. This was true for 28pc of participants based in Ireland, compared to 21pc in the UK, 18pc in Germany and 15pc in France. 

“The high proportion of business leaders valuing human-centred leadership actually shows a great level of AI maturity. Business leaders here understand that it is people who transform organisations, not AI,” said Phil Codd, managing director for Ireland, at Expleo. 

AI transformation 

In regions outside of Ireland, the most valued skill on average across the market was found to be the ability to integrate AI into workflows and drive change (25pc), however, Ireland by comparison was less convinced, with less than 20pc sharing this opinion.  

There is also significant concern among Ireland’s business leaders, 45pc of whom are worried about how AI is transforming their organisation, up from 43pc since March. This fear is not as strongly felt outside of Ireland, standing at 41pc in the UK and only 34pc in France and Germany. 

Codd said, “The organisations that will get the most from AI are not the ones racing to implement it fastest, but the ones investing in the human side. Ireland’s focus on empathy as a core management skill isn’t a reluctance to embrace AI, it’s an advanced understanding of what successful adoption actually requires.”

Late last week International Data Corporation (IDC), in partnership with Dell Technologies, published a new global study exploring how European governments and public sector organisations are approaching sovereign and agentic AI and what it will take to deploy the technology at scale.

The report found that leaders in Europe’s public sector are showing strong drive in accelerating modernisation through agentic AI, however, efforts are being hampered by a gap in the skills needed to effectively operate advanced technologies. Almost 70pc of European public sector IT leaders, who participated in the research, stated that the current workforce is unable to keep pace with evolving technologies. 

This was not dissimilar to a report published by Irish technology consulting company Accenture, which found that, for many employees, there is a growing disconnect between expectation around results from AI and the level of preparedness among employees.

Commenting on the findings of the Accenture report, Hilary O’Meara, the country managing director for Accenture in Ireland, said: “Ireland has all the ingredients to lead in the age of AI – a skilled workforce, a public and private sector proven to deliver, deep connections with the global technology industry, and genuine national ambition. Now the question is whether Irish business will play its part.

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Asus isn’t waiting for Apple’s lower-cost laptop story to settle. Its new Intel Wildcat Lake Vivobook 14SE and 16SE have launched in China, giving Windows laptop makers an early chance to crowd Apple on price and visible hardware.

The sharper threat is the Vivobook 16SE, which starts at CNY 4,599, about $675, with a higher-end display model at CNY 4,999, around $734. That pricier version adds a 16-inch 2560 x 1600 screen with a 144Hz refresh rate, variable refresh rate support, and a 400-nit brightness rating.

That gives Asus a clean comparison against the MacBook Neo before Apple’s affordable laptop gets more breathing room.

How much screen does Apple lose

The Vivobook 16SE gives Asus its clearest opening. The upgraded IPS panel has more resolution than the base screen option, plus the 144Hz refresh rate that can make scrolling and motion feel smoother.

For shoppers, the tradeoff is easy to understand. Apple still has ecosystem pull, but Asus can put a larger, faster display in front of buyers at a launch price that looks aggressive. If global pricing stays close to the China range, that advantage gets harder to shrug off.

Why does Wildcat Lake raise pressure

The Intel Core 5 320 inside both Vivobook models is another part of the squeeze. Asus is bringing Wildcat Lake to mainstream buyers early, giving the Vivobook 14SE and 16SE a newer chip story without pushing them into premium-laptop territory.

The rest of the spec sheet leans practical. Both models include 16GB of RAM, 512GB of PCIe 4.0 storage, two USB-C 3.2 ports with power delivery, two USB-A ports, HDMI 2.1, and a headphone jack. For many buyers, that means fewer dongles and a more familiar setup than Apple’s minimalist approach.

When does this become real competition

For now, Asus has only launched these Vivobooks in China. The company is expected to share global launch and availability details, but the price outside China is still missing.

That price will decide how serious the threat becomes. Apple can still lean on macOS, battery efficiency, and ecosystem loyalty, but Asus is making the entry-level comparison less comfortable. The next thing to watch is whether these same configurations come overseas without losing the value edge.

In the Dutch municipality of Waalre, 10 older adults are now living under the quiet watch of artificial intelligence. Ceiling-mounted sensors from Kepler Vision Technologies scan their homes continuously, feeding an AI trained to distinguish a fall from a sit-down and automatically push a notification to family members or emergency contacts when the algorithm flags an incident. Depending on how you feel about surveillance tech, that either sounds like a great way to protect independent older people who live alone or like a dystopian nightmare. The pitch, at least on paper and given the alternative, leans toward the former.

According to Statistics Netherlands, just over a quarter of the Dutch population will be over 65 by 2040, yet the country’s care infrastructure is not growing at nearly the same rate. This isn’t a problem unique to the Netherlands. In the US, we’ll reach similar numbers by 2050. Japan’s over 60 population is already around 30% today and the World Health Organization predicts that the global population over 60 is expected to nearly double by 2050. That means there’s more pressure for older adults to manage independently at home, for longer, with less institutional support every year. Falling — more specifically, lying undiscovered after a fall — is one of the more dangerous consequences of this unfortunate calculus, but the faster someone is found after a fall, the better their chances of recovery are.

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This Dutch pilot, run through a collaboration between connectivity provider WeConnect, care network Leefsamen, and Brainport region partners, is designed for people already at elevated fall risk who want to stay in their own homes. The hardware and software are similar to the AI fall-detection systems Kepler has been running in nursing facilities for some time. So, this first application in private residences is a logical extension, not necessarily a conceptual leap.

And yet, the idea of an all-seeing eye inside a home seems, well, weird.

A sensor that can reliably detect the movement pattern of a fall can, by definition, detect a great deal else about how someone moves through their home — when they get up at night, how often they visit the bathroom, whether their gait is changing. Even if the system is designed to suppress that data, the infrastructure for collecting it exists. If the pilot scales, what happens when the commercial incentives of the companies involved diverge from the privacy interests of a 78-year-old who signed a consent form she may not have fully understood? What happens in the event of a data breach?

These aren’t hypothetical concerns — heck, they aren’t even limited to this pilot program, since the tech is already monitoring more than “15,000 elderly people around the clock” in care facilities, according to Kepler’s release. The partner companies have made the familiar pledges to protect privacy with Kepler specifying compliance with international information security standards which is a little reassuring, but data breaches happen.

None of this makes the technology bad; it’s just complicated. For someone who’s living alone, the choice may not be between AI monitoring and unmonitored freedom; it may be a choice between AI monitoring and a fall that goes undiscovered for two days. Framed that way, the sensor in the hallway starts to look less like surveillance and more like a smoke detector with better software.

The company is also expected to lay off 8,000 workers this week.