McKinsey & Company now counts 20,000 AI agents among its 60,000 workers, global managing partner Bob Sternfels said in January. Its human headcount has fallen from roughly 45,000 to 40,000 since 2023. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) threatens the junior staff at the base of the professional services pyramid, whose research and first drafts firms bill at a markup. Pricing decides who suffers: firms paid for hours lose revenue as machines speed up, while those paid for access or outcomes can gain. The article scores listed firms on four tests. RELX and Intapp scored four of four, Thomson Reuters three, Accenture and ExlService one, and Gartner and Robert Half zero. Harvey, a private legal AI company, says its recurring revenue tops $400 million.

From Innovation to Deployment: The Future of Cement & Construction,. Decarbonization is reshaping the economics of cement. As emissions targets drive up costs, they are also sparking a wave of innovation - pushing companies to deploy capital in a sector historically hesitant to do so, and fueling a new global trade in low-carbon materials. Success will require firms to fundamentally rethink how they compete, invest, and source. From Innovation to Deployment: The Future of Cement & Construction, presented on October 29 at the CarbonZero Global Conference and Exhibition (October 27-29, Tangla Hotel, Brussels, Belgium)by Jacob Moos, Asociate Partner at McKinsey & Company explores what that shift means, and how companies can position themselves to lead it. Based in Stockholm, Jacob drives innovation in the materials sectors (cement, mining and metals etc.), and is particularly focused on how how technology and industry can lower cost and carbon by deploying new technology, from R&D to in field. This is your last chance to vote for the Leadership Award and the Decarbonization Project of the Year Award, voting ends October 21, at 23:59 GMT. Set yourself up for dynamic panels: Conference Day 1, October 28 Scaling Alternative Fuels in Cement Kilns - Nikos Nikolakakos, Environment & Resources Manager, Cement Europe - presenter and moderator "Use of Alternative Fuels in the EU Cement Industry" - Adriana Fernandez, Industrial Decarbonization Analyst, UNIDO - Herve Camerlynck, Managing Director, FEBELCEM, Managing Director, European Concrete Paving Association Circular Economy, Waste Valorization & Critical Mineral Recovery - Isabela Stefoni, Environmental Manager, and Diana Cornea, Lead Buyer Cement, Steel, and Precast, PORR Construct Romania - Martina Bassan, Corporate Affairs Director, European Metals Standards, Policy & Market Readiness - Kerry Sutton, Executive Director, NEU: An ACI Center of Excellence for Carbon Neutral Concrete "The State of Low-Carbon Concrete in the Built Environment - NEU's Perspective" - Maria del Mar Rojas, Engagement Manager Europe, Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) "Operationalizing the Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0 for Cement: A Call to Action for the Sector" - Leon de Graaf, President, Business Advisors for CBAM Coalition "Positioning Low-Carbon Cement for commercialization under CBAM and the ETS1 Revision" Rebecca Gualandi, European Climate and Energy Correspondent, Carbon Pulse - moderator Conference Day 2, October 29 Cementitious Materials Innovation & Raw Material Strategy - Cobi Busst, Principal, Building Materials & Industrial manufacturing, Beaumont Bailey presenter and moderator "Building SCM Teams at Scale: Why Cement Needs a New Leadership Model" - Quentin Philippe, CEO, Alithic - Loren Burnett, President & CEO, Prometheus Materials Inc. - Jean-Philippe Benard, Chief Executive Cementitious Business & Energy, TITAN Group Carbon Capture, Utilization & Storage (CCUS) - Vincent Michel CEO at Iscal Sugar | Former GO4ZERO Programme Director "Lessons learned in developing and executing large-scale CCS project in the cement and sugar industry" - Irene Dominguez Perez, Policy Manager, Embodied Carbon & Lead Markets, Bellona Europa "Concrete Carbonation: Climate Solution or Accounting Illusion? - Elena Rubio Portillo, Project Management Advisor CCUS EMEA, CEMEX "From Ambition to Execution: Leading Carbon Capture Projects in the Cement Industry" - Georg Locher, Schwenk Cement "Strategic approaches to CCS versus CCU prioritization, considering infrastructure readiness and renewable energy constraints - Duncan McLachlan, VP Growth & Enterprise, io Consulting Salman Muhammad, Technology and Policy Analyst, Carbon Management Europe - moderator Financing & Commercialization of Low-Carbon Cement: - Dr. Josilene Ferrer "Carbon Markets and the Decarbonisation of the Cement Industry: From Compliance to Strategic Transformation - Insights from China and Challenges for Brazil" - Marta Diez, Country Manager Spain, CFP Energy - Luyue Tan, Carbon Analyst, London Stock Exchange Group "Carbon as the New Currency" Victoria Hatherick, Editor - Emmissions, Argus Media - moderator CEO & Executive Roundtable - Leading the Transition to a Competitive, Climate-Resilient Cement Industry: - Claudia Albertini, CEO, Holcim Belgium - Mahendra Singhi, Member of Board of Directors & Strategic Advisor, Dalmia Cement (Bharat) Limited, Board of Governors, National Council for Cement and Building Materials (NCCBM); Member, Governing Council, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI); - Jean-Philippe Benard, Executive Board Member, TITAN Group Beatrice Ene, MD, Industry Link - moderator Join the 100-only, hand-picked delegates from all over the world that are advancing solutions for technology, policy, and production that move the needle towards industry decarbonisation! VIP passes that included the Holcim plant visit are sold out, make sure you register before the standard tickets also run out, only 8 seats available. Cannot make it? Register to its newsletter for staying in touch with upcoming editions and other powerful events Industry Link SRL organize and get an extra 20% off as well as extended early bird deadlines, here: www.industrylink.eu/#signupnow.

Oxford photonics startup Salience Labs raises $125M to link thousands of GPUs with light. October 15, 2026 * Bullhound leads the $125M Series B; AMD Ventures and Intel Capital join. * Salience showed a 64-port all-optical switch at ECOC 2026; 128- and 256-port systems are next. * Cignal AI sees the optical circuit switching market passing $8B by 2030. Salience Labs, a photonic chip startup based in Milton, Oxfordshire, has closed an oversubscribed $125 million Series B led by Bullhound Capital. AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank also took part. Existing shareholders Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures followed on. The money will go toward volume manufacturing, the 128- and 256-port versions of its switch, and a second West Coast office in Silicon Valley. Salience was founded in 2021 and builds on more than a decade of research at the University of Oxford and the University of Münster in Germany. Switching light without turning it into electricity. Kewada holds undergraduate and master's degrees in physics from Imperial College London and previously worked at McKinsey & Company before becoming an entrepreneur-in-residence at Oxford Science Enterprises, where she helped bring together research from Oxford and the University of Münster to commercialise photonic technology. Feldmann, a physicist specialising in photonics, helped develop and test the company's early prototype. Their combined commercial and research expertise underpins Salience Labs' ambition to use light-based switching to deliver faster, lower-latency connectivity for AI data centres. A conventional network switch converts an optical signal into an electrical one to route it, then converts it back. Optical circuit switching (OCS) skips that step and sets up a path for the light itself. Salience says its all-optical, fully integrated architecture is built to connect thousands of GPUs across multiple racks in scale-up AI networks. The company showed a 64-port version live at ECOC 2026, which it calls an industry first for silicon photonics OCS. TA 32-port version, validated by Keysight, came before it. Salience says it will keep working with Keysight Technologies and Tower Semiconductor to scale manufacturing. "OCS will play a critical role in AI data centre networking. As customers roll out optical links in their data centers, they need high-performance optical switches to deliver the token economics workloads demand. Salience Labs has demonstrated a market-leading technology: a fully integrated on-chip solution that scales well to high-volume manufacturing," said Vaysh Kewada, CEO and co-founder of Salience Labs. Scaling optical switching for AI. The demand case rests on how AI clusters are being built. Dell'Oro Group forecasts that cumulative spending on datacenter switches in AI back-end networks will approach $1 trillion between 2026 and 2030, with scale-up taking more than half of it by 2030. Cignal AI expects the OCS market to exceed $8 billion by 2030. Scale-up networks link accelerators inside a rack or pod, so they behave like one machine. That is where AMD says its focus is moving. "AI infrastructure is increasingly being designed at rack scale, where networking has a direct impact on system performance, efficiency and economics. Salience Labs is developing a differentiated, integrated optical switching architecture aimed at addressing these challenges, and AMD Ventures is pleased to support the team as it scales its technology and manufacturing capabilities," said Patrick Rundell, director at AMD Ventures. Intel Capital pointed to the chip design itself. "Photonics is quickly becoming essential to scaling AI infrastructure, and optical circuit switching can unlock significant gains in performance and efficiency," added Srini Ananth, managing director at Intel Capital. Strategic money is spreading across the optical stack. Salience is the latest of several photonics startups to land large rounds from chipmakers, and investors aren't picking a single winner. AMD also backs Ayar Labs, which raised $500 million in a Series E at a $3.8 billion valuation, according to SDxCentral. Lightmatter raised $400 million at a $4.4 billion valuation. CScale, which emerged from stealth with $145 million, counts Intel and Nvidia among its backers. Each targets a different layer: optical I/O, photonic interconnects or switching. The shared thesis is that moving data, not computing it, limits AI clusters. In the UK, Oriole Networks has raised about $35 million in total and is deploying OCS in a government lab alongside AMD chips. The UK angle matters too. The British Business Bank's presence, alongside Oxford Science Enterprises and Cambridge Innovation Capital, shows state-linked and university capital staying with a UK deep-tech company into its growth stage, a pattern also seen at Universal Quantum. TFN has tracked Nvidia's investment activity in AI infrastructure in its coverage of its European backing.