GenAI/AI News Jul 17 25: Microsoft Research Models Dialog, AWS announces
My dear friend, Bill Isaacs wrote a fantastic book called Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together. Bill is a skilled and brilliant practitioner who helps leaders understand the power and structure — implicit and explicit of dialog; how it works and how leaders can harness it to unlock performance in their organizations. In today's news, a Microsoft research team begins to come up with a more sophisticated model of the human in the context of the dialogue with large language models. It yields better results and I believe it's just the beginning of understanding how to truly go from a questioning or query form of interaction to a robust dialogue. This exploration of the structure of dialog is why we marked it essential. In addition AWS is in New York announcing a fantastic suite of new product services and much more.
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Today there were 1 Essential, 3 Important, and 2 Optional articles.
CollabLLM: Teaching LLMs to collaborate with users
Rating: Essential
Rationale: Microsoft Research introduces CollabLLM, a method for teaching large language models to engage in cooperative dialogue with users through reinforcement learning. Our analysts highlighted this as a critical evolution in human-AI interaction, signaling a shift from passive compliance to active collaboration, essential for future AI productivity and augmentation use cases.
AWS announces new innovations for building AI agents at AWS Summit New York 2025
Rating: Important
Rationale: AWS revealed a suite of tools—including Agent Core with Interpreter, and observability features—designed to simplify the creation and deployment of AI agents. Though the updates were seen as iterative rather than groundbreaking, our analysts agreed this continues AWS’s momentum in agentic AI development and warrants attention from AI leaders.
Google rolls out AI-powered business calling feature, brings Gemini 2.5 Pro to AI Mode
Rating: Important
Rationale: Rationale: Google introduced a business-calling AI that can autonomously contact local businesses to gather information on pricing and availability, aiming to remove the friction of live calls for consumers and small businesses. In parallel, Google enhanced its AI Mode in Search by upgrading it to Gemini 2.5 Pro for premium users. Our analyst highlighted this as an important step toward more powerful, multi-part AI-driven queries that signal evolving monetization strategies and the growing role of conversational interfaces in search and commerce.
How PayU built a secure enterprise AI assistant using Amazon Bedrock
Rating: Important
Rationale: PayU's case study describes how it leveraged Amazon Bedrock to deploy a secure AI assistant using private cloud connections and rigorous access control. Our analysts praised the technical clarity and architectural transparency, especially around AI security, though noted that measured business outcomes were still early and lightly quantified.
Lloyds Bank Rolls Out Generative AI Tool Athena
Rating: Optional
Rationale: Lloyds Bank launched Athena, a generative AI assistant that enables employees to quickly retrieve customer-facing content from over 13,000 internal documents. While adoption figures were strong, our analysts found the article lacking in implementation details and concrete impact, framing it as a typical but under-documented enterprise use case of AI in finance.
Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety
Rating: Optional
Rationale: This position paper argues for greater transparency in large language models via chain-of-thought outputs to enhance AI safety and monitorability. Despite being authored by major AI labs, our analysts felt it was a research-centric discussion with limited immediate applicability for enterprise AI leaders and lacked actionable takeaways.
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