Senior Finance Manager

Volkswagen has equipped more than 330,000 employees with Microsoft Copilot, the AI assistant built into Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams, Microsoft said on October 21. The group says it is used in engineering, production, procurement, and sales. Two days earlier, Volkswagen's labour representatives said the company wants to hold salaries at 2026 levels for the rest of the decade. The company declined to comment on what it called "speculation." Trade union IG Metall is seeking a 5% raise over 12 months. At Microsoft's list price of $30 per user a month, 330,000 seats would cost at most $118.8 million a year. Neither company has disclosed what Volkswagen pays. Volkswagen is also targeting €6 billion in annual net savings by 2030 and plans job cuts in Germany.

Microsoft's AI diagnostic system correctly diagnosed complex medical cases in a simulation 83% of the time, against 36% for generalist physicians, according to a study published in Science. The system, MAI-DxO, coordinates several AI agents that question a patient, order tests, and debate a diagnosis. The cases came from the New England Journal of Medicine. Specialists and physician teams, who usually handle such cases, were not part of the comparison. Much of the gain came from stronger underlying models, especially OpenAI's GPT-5 and GPT-5.5. MAI-DxO helped most on complex cases and with weaker models, but little on emergency department cases. Microsoft AI chief executive officer Mustafa Suleyman called the result a step toward "medical superintelligence." Microsoft is working with Mayo Clinic on a healthcare foundation model, and will test MAI-DxO with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Aragon, a drought-stricken region of northeast Spain, has become a magnet for US tech companies building data centres. Amazon Web Services promises to spend almost $40 billion on several large complexes there, and Microsoft and Blackstone have also signed agreements. Regional authorities, which call Aragon the "Virginia of southern Europe," offered tax breaks and fast-tracked permits. They expect jobs and a place in the "new economy" that AI will bring. Amazon says it will create 6,200 permanent jobs. Residents and farmers fear water shortages, noise, and harm to wildlife, including birds killed by wind turbines that power the centres. Environmental groups have crowdfunded a legal challenge to Amazon's expansion and say the approvals were rushed.