Photo credit: RW Genting
The First World Hotel, located in the Genting Highlands, some 50 kilometers north of Kuala Lumpur, stands out against the backdrop of the greenery. Its two main buildings and annex include a remarkable 7,351 rooms, which kept the Guinness World Record for world’s largest hotel under lock and key since 2015. People come via cable car or by making their way up the mountain roads, and then find themselves in a realm of continual motion, as you can’t help but keep going forward to the next surprise.

Construction began in the early 2000s, and the first major section opened in 2006, with over 6,000 rooms. Then, for a brief period in 2008, a Las Vegas property knocked it off the top rank, but the Malaysian crew returned in 2015 and added 1,233 additional rooms to restore the record permanently. Today, the hotel sprawls across three connected buildings, with dramatic horizontal streaks of color that stand out against the verdant hills. The design is deceptively basic but effective, transforming the entire structure into a landmark visible from miles away.

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Room sizes vary to accommodate every type of visitor, with standard and deluxe options measuring 180 square feet. While compact, they are spotless and have everything you need for a short stay. Triple rooms include three beds, making family visits or group excursions possible without wasting space. The superior deluxes and World Club rooms offer a decent 320 or 430 square feet, ideal for couples or business travelers who desire a separate living area and a little extra comfort. Every one of them looks out onto vistas of the forest or the resort below, and the mountain air keeps the temperature a little cooler than in the city.

The truth is that tourists rarely stay in their rooms for extended periods of time. A skybridge and walkways go directly into First World Plaza, which is essentially a mini-city for shopping and entertainment. Inside, the Skytropolis Funland has indoor rides, bumper cars, and arcade games that will keep the kids entertained for hours. Snow World then provides a wonderful contrast with its artificial snow and ice slides, which are ideal for escaping the hot heat outside. The plaza also has a bowling alley, a video game park, and a variety of dining options, from casual food courts to quick ice cream kiosks.

Next door to all of this, the resort continues to expand. Families who still have energy to burn can visit Genting SkyWorlds, a large outdoor theme park with roller coasters, cinema and adventure zones. A quick cable car trip brings everything together, allowing you to enjoy the huge thrill attractions in the morning, shop in the afternoon, and return to your room without ever leaving the site. The only legal casino in the country is also right on your doorstep, and it always draws large groups that fill the hotel nightly.
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The report shows that many organisations are facing significant challenges as they work to implement generative and agentic AI.

Writer, a provider of AI agents for enterprise, has partnered with research firm Workplace Intelligence to release the second annual AI survey, AI Adoption in the Enterprise. 

To gather the data Writer and Workplace Intelligence collected information from 2,400 employees and C-suite leaders from the US, UK, Ireland, Benelux, France and Germany. What was discovered is that organisations are still facing significant obstacles when it comes to implementing agentic and GenAI. 

The report found that almost 80pc of contributing executives are struggling with problems related to lagging, ROI, strategy gaps and internal power struggles, with 38pc of CEOs reporting a high or crippling amount of stress around their AI strategy. In fact 64pc of CEOs worry that they could lose their jobs if they fail to navigate their organisation through the AI transition. 

As a result 92pc of c-suite participants said that they are actively cultivating  a “new class of AI elite employees” as a means of getting ahead in the AI race. Nearly 90pc of contributing leaders are of the opinion that “AI super-users” are at least five times more productive than employees who have yet to embrace AI. 

“The stakes are high for those who lag behind”, claims the report, which said “77pc of executives warn that employees who refuse to become AI-proficient won’t be considered for promotions or leadership roles and 60pc plan to lay off employees who can’t or won’t use AI.”

“This is a defining moment in AI adoption and the gap between super-users and laggards is widening fast,” said Dan Schawbel, a managing partner at Workplace Intelligence. 

“We’re already seeing this play out, the super-users we surveyed were around 3 times more likely to have received both a promotion and pay raise in the past year, compared to employees who have been slow to adopt these tools. Top AI users are also saving nearly nine hours per week using AI, 4.5 times more than the two hours a week reported by AI laggards.”

For May Habib, the CEO and co-founder of Writer, “layoffs are not a viable AI strategy”.

Habib said: “The leaders who are putting in the work to radically redesign operations with human-agent collaboration at the centre are the ones compounding their advantage in ways competitors can’t replicate.

“AI transformation is ultimately about people and the future belongs to the companies putting agent-building power directly into the hands of people closest to the work.”

C-suite challenges

A gap in strategy was among the challenges being navigated in the workplace, by c-suite personnel. 39pc admitted that they don’t have a formal strategy in place to drive revenue from AI tools and even in scenarios where strategies do exist, it was found that quality is lacking. Three-quarters of participants noted that their company’s AI strategy is more for show than for actual internal guidance.

Security and governance was also found to be of concern to executives. 67pc of executives said that they believe their company has suffered a data leak or security breach because an employee used an unapproved AI tool. More than one-third concede they aren’t very confident they could “pull the plug” on a rogue AI agent if it started causing financial or reputational damage to their company.

There may also be an element of employee sabotage as the data suggested that rather than embracing AI, 29pc of employees, including 44pc of GenZ participants admitted to entering company information into public tools, using unapproved tools or refusing to use AI altogether. Moreover, three-quarters said that employee sabotage poses a serious threat to their company’s future.

For others, lagging ROI and confusion around the benefits of the tech are impacting adoption. Nearly all of the contributing executives (97pc) have said that AI has been beneficial, with three-quarters of the opinion that AI agents will be a part of their organisation’s c-suite within the next five years. However, nearly half said that AI adoption at their organisation has been a “massive disappointment”. 

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Defense startup Hermeus has raised $350 million to keep developing what it calls the “fastest unmanned aircraft,” in a funding round that has pushed its valuation to $1 billion.

The Los Angeles-based startup said Tuesday that it has raised $200 million in equity financing, led by Khosla Ventures. Existing investors Canaan Partners, Founders Fund, In-Q-Tel, and RTX Ventures also participated. New outside money is coming from the venture fund of media conglomerate Cox Enterprises, the publicly-traded closed-end management investment company Destiny Tech100, and others.

The remaining $150 million comes in the form of debt, which Hermeus co-founder and CEO AJ Piplica told TechCrunch will help the startup and its growing cap table maintain some control.

“We build a lot of hardware, we’re expanding our manufacturing capabilities, and if we can finance a large portion of our spend non-dilutively, it’s absolutely the way to do it,” he said in an interview.

Hermeus’s raise comes at a time when venture and corporate investors are flooding money into defense startups. VC investment in defense tech crossed $9 billion over 265 rounds globally last year, according to PitchBook, with corporate investors contributing $2 billion across 28 rounds.

But for Hermeus, it’s not just about good timing.

Piplica attributes at least some of the fundraising success to a change Hermeus made on the technical side a few years ago. The startup had spent time and money developing its own engine, partially out of necessity, he said. After Hermeus courted RTX Ventures — the venture arm of RTX Corporation, the defense contractor formerly known as Raytheon — a new opportunity arose.

Piplica and his team decided instead to work with RTX subsidiary Pratt & Whitney to modify the aerospace company’s F100 engine in order to power Hermeus’ hypersonic aircraft.

This put Hermeus on a faster track with a proven and functional engine, making it easier to test and iterate while lining up new contracts with the U.S. government along the way. Instead of aiming at one big goal of building a Mach 5 aircraft, Hermeus was now able to diversify, according to president Zach Shore.

“This accelerates us to Mach 5, and also reinforces the economics of the business while satisfying near term demand from the from the Department of Defense,” he said. “I think in that way, you have a number of concentric circles overlapping simultaneously that reinforce the business, that reinforce the customer, and that, you know, reinforce the technology maturation.”

Last month, Hermeus flew a demonstrator version of its technology that was the size of an F-16 fighter aircraft. The startup has said it’s aiming to make the next iteration of that aircraft go supersonic. A third aircraft is in the works as well, Piplica said.

This rapid prototyping approach is hard to come by in aviation, Piplica said. He points to SpaceX as the industry standard for being willing to build, test, fail, learn, and repeat until it gets a vehicle right. That’s why the hardest challenge Hermeus faces is cultivating or developing talent, Piplica said.

“There’s nowhere in the world where companies are building new full-scale aircraft on an annual basis, clean sheet or otherwise,” he said. “People used to do that, but they’re all dead, which means you have to go make those people in one way or another.”

The new funding round will also help Hermeus continue to build out its staff, which is already approaching 300 employees.

Hermeus has now had two successful test flights (it flew a demonstrator last year that was three times smaller). But Piplica stressed the need for Hermeus to be ready for some kind of failure — which, again, he sees as part of the rapid prototyping proccess.

“The challenge is, how do you pick the right kind of chunks of risk to take on and apply your capital to over time,” he said. “Like, yeah, we could crash an airplane, and I expect it’ll happen at some point in our development program. We’re set up to do that very safely. But this is also why, like, building more aircraft is super important. If you don’t build a lot, it takes you a lot longer, because you’re gonna go baby things. You know, we wonder why it takes us 20, 25, years to develop a new aircraft?”

• USPS just lost around 20% of its Amazon parcels
• Amazon is USPS’s biggest customer, worth around $6 billion annually
• Amazon has continued to expand its own delivery network, opening it up to others

Amazon has struck a deal with the US Postal Service (USPS) which will see the latter lose a chunk of its business – but still come off better than previously anticipated.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal WSJ, the deal will mean USPS could still end up delivering around one billion Amazon packages a year – marking a roughly 20% decrease compared with the previously floated two-thirds reduction.