It’s so hard for big businesses to get AI tools working reliably that whole new organizations of forward-deployed engineers or FDEs— specialists who drop into a company to get its AI systems up and running — are springing up to help them.

“AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services,” says Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive whose new company, June, emerged from stealth Monday morning. “The industry’s answer to AI implementation is, ‘let’s hire more and more and more people.”

Rapoport and her three cofounders — Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat — have a different idea about how to bring AI into broader use. To pursue it, the company raised $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, with additional backing from tech luminaries like Michael Dell, Aaron Levie and George Kurtz. The company declined to share its valuation.

The four founders previously started Bonobo AI, a pre-transformer language model company that launched a voice-to-text service in 2017. Bonobo AI was snapped up two years later by Salesforce, and the team worked for several years on the tech giant’s AI initiatives before setting out on their own again after watching customers struggle to bring AI into their existing platforms.

Their potential was clear enough to their investors, Rapoport says, that “we didn’t even have a deck for this raise.”

While the so-called SaaSpocalypse has software firms fearing that AI might replace them, thus far no one is vibe-coding a CRM for a Fortune 500 company. Any AI model brought into a corporate setting still has to work with Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks, Workday, or any of a dozen other data-management platforms.

“Before AI can create value, someone has to deal with legacy systems,” Rapoport says. “You have fragmented data across these platforms. You have complex workflows. You have years of technical debt.”

Building an agent template is the easy part, she says. The hard part is getting it to work with the mess underneath. “How does an agent know how to operate when you have 10 duplicate [database] fields that say the same thing, and different teams are using them?”

June’s platform scans a company’s existing systems to understand its business processes, find bottlenecks, and then build more optimized, agent-powered processes to replace them, automatically notifying teams through the company’s comms channels.

“We give you the full roadmap automatically of what needs to happen step by step for you to actually implement this agent successfully in an enterprise environment, which is often very complex,” Rapoport said. “We give you a step by step guide. ‘Remove these duplicates. Connect to this data source.’ And then you click on ‘build’ on each task, and June starts building it for you in the organization.”

Paul Akinmade, chief strategy officer at CMG, a major U.S. mortgage lender, moved his company’s software engineering over to Claude Code quickly, but hit roadblocks trying to integrate it with Salesforce. That was a problem since he’d promised at Salesforce’s annual conference the year before that he’d return with 100 agents running, and it wasn’t looking like he’d hit that target.

Akinmade says his team spent weeks hitting a wall — meeting with architects, talking to forward-deployed engineers, consulting everybody they could — without making progress. June changed that, he says, giving his team a clear view of where to deploy agents and letting them do so safely, even before the official kickoff call between the two companies

Rapoport sees June as a tool that complements FDEs and consultants, but her customers may be drawn to it for the opposite reason: it lets them avoid FDEs altogether.

When Akinmade was first considering piloting the tool at CMG, he says he told her: “If your product requires FDEs, I don’t want your product. I’ve already I’ve already done that and I’m getting annoyed by it. I don’t want a black box. I don’t want something only certain people can figure out. I want an easy-to-use tool.”

Evidently, June cleared the bar.

Apple is also prioritizing the 14-inch MacBook Pro over the MacBook Air.

Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed below belong solely to the author. Data sourced from Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower.

As we know, the median salary for fresh graduates in Singapore is currently S$4,500, while the figure for the entire workforce is S$5,775. However, there are some jobs that pay their young workers much better—if not straight out of school, then at least before they hit 30.

According to the data from the Ministry of Manpower, there are 30 occupations where median salaries for workers between 25 and 29 years of age are already above the national average.

S$100,000 by age 30

The list is, unsurprisingly, dominated by jobs in the tech sector (10 occupations) and finance (nine occupations), with the rest divided among medicine, management, law, and design.

The boom in AI catapulted young engineers to the top, with IT companies already paying them over S$100,000 per year, outranking the usual high-earners with legal degrees.

But these earnings may see an even bigger rise in 2026, as international tech giants from the US and China are competing for local AI-graduates, with the Straits Times reporting packages worth as much as S$350,000, targeting the most qualified PhD holders.

This follows OpenAI’s S$300 million investment to establish a local AI lab, Google DeepMind’s announcement of its AI research lab last year, and Anthropic’s growing presence—both GIC and Temasek are investors in the latter.

This boom may be a boon for young talent, provided that it doesn’t lose steam and the generous offers do not turn into mass layoffs that the tech industry experienced over the past few years.

If that happens, though, there is hope in finding a job in one of the other occupations, which offer very good earnings to 20-somethings, putting them on track to six figure annual salaries in their 30s.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s job landscape here.

Featured Image Credit: Rawpixel/ depositphotos

In this week’s Sunday Reboot, despite Apple making more money than in any previous Q3, it’s never enough to escape a beating from investors or analysts.

Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get the next week underway with a good first step.

The Maddest Money

I have been covering Apple and the tech industry in general for over ten years. I have a decent understanding of how things work in many areas, but I do have some blind spots.

I have trouble understanding the logic of analysts and investors around the time of Apple’s quarterly results.

Every three months, the AppleInsider editorial team has to spend a few hours analyzing a PDF spreadsheet and a press release from Apple, detailing just how much money the company made this time. In painstaking detail.

Of course, that’s followed by listening to a conference call with people asking questions of Tim Cook and Kevan Parekh. Most of the time, the responses are predictably an inability to comment on future plans or reiterating something the pair mentioned 15 minutes prior.

This quarter’s periodic money talk was a bit different, as Cook gave a farewell speech ahead of the CEO transition to John Ternus.

For nine quarters in a row, Apple has declared total revenue that’s a year-over-year improvement over the previous one. Q1 to Q3 2026 inclusive have year-over-year increases of around 16%.

Apple makes billions, but it’s never enough for analysts.

Despite repeatedly making more money than almost anyone would see in multiple lifetimes in a mere three-month period, the same pattern emerges.

Right after the results release and everyone sees Apple make deity-level bank, the share price goes down. Over the space of an hour, the price went down on July 30 from 338.45 at 4:30 P.M. Eastern to $308.03 at 5:30 P.M.

That could be explained as investors thinking they have done enough to earn that sweet $0.27 dividend and decided to shift their money right afterward. That, at least, I can get my head around.

Gordon Gekko meets Mean Girls

The real brain burner is the swathe of analysts who then decide that Apple didn’t do enough. Despite each of its units earning billions, as if they are major companies in their own right.

Goldman Sachs, after raising the price target to $370 just days before the results, cut the target by $10 after the call. Chiefly because of Apple’s guidance that it won’t meet demand for the next quarter.

You know, during a time period when people have to get a mortgage to afford more RAM.

To Cook’s credit, he said it was not a partner or supplier issue, and was simply one of “incredibly strong demand.” Apple has the nice problem to have of being too wanted by consumers.

Rosenblatt raised its price target by $24, which sounds good except it’s still underwater at $300. Cue complaints about the “volatile financial environment” and supply constraints.

Also for some reason, the iPhone 18 will be having a hard time because the iPhone 17 was such a huge success. Apparently, the high sales for the current generation mean there’s no one around to buy the next one.

More realistically, the problem here is that the iPhone 17 did really well compared to the iPhone 16, which means it’ll be harder for the iPhone 18 to show further improvement over the iPhone 17.

Growth is all-important to investors, even if they are blinkered to Apple having other products or revenue sources available.

Morgan Stanley did a similar trim of its price target as Goldman Sachs, from $364 to $360, citing higher memory costs and slowing Services growth.

Because Services only climbed a mere 12.7% instead of MorgStan’s expectation of 14.6% growth, that apparently means growth will slow to 9.5% next year.

The annual growth percentage of Apple’s Services arm. Still aggressively positive.

By that, Morgan Stanley believes Services will earn only $2.9 billion more revenue this time next year, when it really wants to see more than $4 billion.

In effect, people are somehow complaining that a company that made billions more dollars than the same time last year didn’t quite do enough. Also that it is so popular that it cannot keep up with demand, and that’s apparently equally horrific.

Then there’s JP Morgan, which also cut its price target from $345 to $340, again hammering on about the supply constraints. However, at least the analysts are realistic, pointing out that limited product availability will push revenue into later quarters, and that Services will continue to be a benefit.

It’s not as bleak as other analysts’ denouncements of Apple’s success. But it’s still a downer.

The investors and analysts probably have justifiable reasons for pointing out Apple’s deficiencies. But from here, it seems a little bit picky and weird.

It’s almost like they’re trying to pick any perceived fault or shortcoming to justify their salaries to investors, eager to understand Apple’s workings and to know if their investment is safe.

You may have a romanticized image of high-power investors similar to shows like “Billions” and “Succession.” Each quarter, the image that gets reinforced to me is more like “The Office” or an Aldi version of Statler and Waldorf.

I just hope that I don’t get jaded enough to downgrade that view further to “Sanford and Son.”

Last week’s Sunday Reboot talked about Apple TV moving into dating, the existence of “Matchbox The Movie,” and the hope for even more “Ted Lasso”.

The 2026 astronomical calendar features only four eclipses. But August is a bounty of riches, with two set to occur.

They include a full solar eclipse on August 12 and a partial lunar eclipse on August 27 and 28. Catch one—or both—of these eclipses if you can: They’ll be the last ones of 2026, as the other two have already taken place.

We’ve got all the details on what to expect, the path of each August eclipse, and how to watch the celestial happenings.

Solar Eclipse on August 12

The first eclipse of the month will be a total solar eclipse. This occurs when the moon passes between Earth and the sun. The August solar eclipse will be visible in the northern hemisphere.

Path: The moon’s shadow will travel from west to east, beginning in the Arctic. Parts of Alaska will be treated to a partial view of the eclipse, as well as other northerly locations including Canada, Iceland, and parts of the North Atlantic. Some locations in Europe and the eastern US will also get a glimpse of the eclipse.

Only a few areas on land will get to see totality, though. Sparsely populated stretches of eastern Greenland will see the sun completely obscured, as will the far western edge of Iceland. Spain is the most populated region in the path of totality. It’s the first time the Iberian Peninsula will be treated to a full solar eclipse in more than a century.

How to view it: For one, not with your naked eye! For areas in the path of totality, the eclipse will reach its peak in the late afternoon. That’s an idea and dramatic time for viewing, when the sun is low on the horizon. Again, just not with your naked eye!

Animation: courtesy of NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

Times vary slightly by city, but in almost all of Spain the eclipse will occur at sunset, with totality around 8:30 pm Central European Time. From start to finish, the eclipse will last about an hour; totality is expected to last about two minutes.

Lunar Eclipse on August 27–28

The second eclipse of the month will be a partial lunar eclipse, which occurs when the Earth comes between the sun and the moon. A portion of the lunar surface will remain lit while the rest of the disk darkens or takes on a reddish hue.

Path: Unlike a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse does not follow a narrow path across the Earth. The partial lunar eclipse will be visible simultaneously across a vast region of the planet. However, the eclipse will be best viewed across the Americas, primarily in eastern and central Canada, the US, and Mexico, as well as throughout Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.

While the eclipse is partial, up to 96 percent of the lunar disk will be in the Earth’s shadow, making for a dramatic view.