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IIM Udaipur Leads the Conversation on ‘Beyond AI’ at the Second Edition of D’Future: India Digital Conclave

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MUMBAI, India, Jan. 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — The Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur (IIMU), successfully hosted the second edition of the D’Future: India Digital Conclave at the Jio World Convention Centre, Mumbai on January 17, 2025. This landmark event brought together policymakers, researchers, practitioners, business leaders, entrepreneurs and changemakers to delve into the theme: ‘Beyond AI: The Next Frontier in Digital Transformation.’

The one-day conclave served as a dynamic platform to explore cutting-edge insights into innovation and technology, offering a glimpse into how digital transformation is reshaping industries such as Manufacturing, Logistics, Finance, Aviation, Healthcare, Media, Entertainment, Sports and beyond. With engaging panel discussions, thought-provoking keynote addresses, and impactful networking opportunities, IDC-2025 reinforced its commitment to driving meaningful conversations around the future of technology.

The conclave marks yet another significant milestone in IIM Udaipur’s dedication to fostering collaboration and thought leadership in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

The event commenced with an address by Prof. Ashok Banerjee, Director, IIM Udaipur. In his inaugural speech, Prof. Ashok Banerjee, Director of IIM Udaipur, emphasised the institute’s pioneering efforts in fostering sustainability, innovation, and digital transformation. He highlighted IIM Udaipur’s leadership in renewable energy, with 20% of its energy sourced from renewables, projected to reach 45% by year-end, and its goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2030. Prof. Banerjee also spoke about the institute’s Digital Enterprise Management (DEM) program, which integrates academic rigour with real-world industry interactions to prepare students for emerging trends. Concluding his address, Prof. Banerjee reiterated IIM Udaipur’s commitment to leading India’s digital and sustainable transformation journey by leveraging innovative education, impactful research, and strategic partnerships.

In his keynote address, P. Vasudevan, Executive Director at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), highlighted the multifaceted challenges and opportunities in integrating AI into everyday life. He emphasised the critical role of transparency in AI decision-making to ensure financial inclusion and cautioned against the risks of financial exclusion if AI models lack accountability. Mr. Vasudevan discussed concerns such as deepfakes, false simulations, and the gap between AI ideation and execution, using fraud detection and speech-to-text AI as examples. Concluding his address, Mr. Vasudevan spotlighted India’s potential in the global AI landscape, supported by initiatives like AIRAWAT, a sophisticated AI research and cloud platform, and the DPDP Act, which will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of digital governance. He urged stakeholders to focus on solving challenges in AI integration rather than discarding solutions that don’t initially work, reiterating the importance of collaboration through PPP models for self-reliance and sustainable progress.

For the session ‘Research at the Intersection of AI and Human Beings’, international researcher Prof. Mohan Kankanhalli, in his insightful session on “Harnessing AI for Societal Good,” explored how AI can address both grand and emerging challenges. He outlined guiding principles for mission-driven research, emphasising real-world impact, measurable improvements, and deployment pathways beyond academic papers. Prof. Kankanhalli also addressed smaller, critical challenges like detecting harmful social media content and creating safe large language models (LLMs). Sharing his research, he delved into advancing multimodal LLMs, ensuring fairness in AI, and exploring innovative concepts like machine unlearning and anti-sample creation to counter biases. The speaker concluded by highlighting AI’s immense potential for societal good, tempered by the need to mitigate its downsides in areas like facial forging and ensuring ethical development.

In his session on ‘Frontiers Between Language and Reasoning,’ Prof. Soumen Chakrabarti discussed the fascinating relationship between AI and the human brain. He emphasised that the human brain’s strength lies in the dynamic retrieval and linkage of information, which is essential for reasoning. Prof. Chakrabarti highlighted the importance of training AI to mirror these processes, particularly through graphical and logical understanding, enabling AI systems to form meaningful connections between queries, passages, and complex data representations like HTML tables. He also delved into the intricacies of training large language models (LLMs), showcasing detailed examples of how knowledge graphs and formal logic can enhance AI’s reasoning capabilities. According to Prof. Chakrabarti, AI needs to go beyond natural language for reasoning tasks, relying on graphs and tables to communicate complex reasoning steps effectively. His talk emphasised that integrating graph matching and sub-graph retrieval would be critical in advancing AI systems for tasks requiring sophisticated reasoning.

In the engaging panel discussion, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Human Instincts,’ moderated by Shiv Shivakumar, Chairman at MTPL, an Advent Company, panellists shared their perspectives on the evolving role of AI across industries. The esteemed panelists included Apurva Mankad, Founder of WebXpress, Jayanta Banerjee, Group and Global CIO at Tata Steel Limited, Khushboo Aggarwal, Founder of Zyla Health, and Neetan Chopra, Chief Digital & Information Officer at Indigo Airlines. The discussion began with a lighthearted exploration of how ChatGPT would introduce each panellist, leading to a lively debate about AI’s capabilities to provide personal touches. The panellists further discussed the practical aspects of introducing AI within organisations, focusing on starting small, building awareness, and establishing business cases for AI adoption. They also shared insights from their industries on AI’s impact on skills, job roles, and employee productivity, focusing on Manufacturing, Aviation, Logistics, and Healthcare, where AI helps reduce burnout among caregivers. The conversation also covered key topics such as cloud investments, data security, and AI compliance, emphasising building a sustainable and secure AI ecosystem.

In a compelling session on Corporate Success Stories, Amitav Sinha, Director General of the Central Board of Direct Taxes, shared insights into transformative projects that have revolutionised the income tax system in India. Reflecting on his journey with the core team of business process re-engineering, he highlighted how technology has come a long way to being leveraged to tackle underreporting and non-reporting of income. Initiatives such as mismatch detection systems, enabling taxpayers to update discrepancies with minimal charges voluntarily, have significantly enhanced compliance. Mr. Sinha detailed key milestones like establishing Centralized Processing Centers (CPCs), enabling seamless integration of filing and processing systems, and achieving a remarkable processing rate of 9,600+ ITRs per minute. He also discussed the role of AI/ML in reducing litigation by assisting officers with uniform decision-making, predicting advanced taxes, and ensuring faceless assessments. These innovations have not only streamlined operations but also set a roadmap for enhancing transparency and efficiency in tax administration.

In the second session on Corporate Success Stories, Kanchan Bhonde, Product Strategy Head at Makers Lab and Assistant Vice President at Tech Mahindra, showcased groundbreaking projects that bridge the divide between technology creators and users. She shared an inspiring story of overcoming language barriers to empower innovative solutions for malnutrition in India, emphasising the critical role of AI-driven tools in breaking barriers to progress. Ms. Bhonde discussed transformative initiatives like Antmanirbhar Krishi, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to empower farmers with self-reliance. Highlighting challenges unique to India, such as underrepresented dialects, her team developed a model with 1.2 billion parameters that supports 37 Hindi dialects. Despite limited data—40% of which was unusable—they achieved remarkable results with a sustainable, cost-effective model. Additionally, she introduced Project Indus, showcasing real-time applications of generative AI on edge, tested in multi-agent scenarios and open-sourced for broader impact.

As part of this transformative event, the Startup Show offered a dynamic platform for discussing AI’s potential to revolutionise industries. Moderated by Bikram Mahajan, Partner at Unicorn India Ventures, the session featured Abhay Pandey, Venture Capitalist at A91 Partners, alongside startup leaders Abhilash Chakraverty (Larkai), Amit Srivastava (Constems AI), Aniruddha Banerjee (SwitchOn), and Samyak Jain (Zeko AI). Together, they shared their perspectives on AI’s current and future role in reshaping industries like manufacturing, healthcare, and digital marketing.

Discussions highlighted AI’s ROI potential, acknowledging that while some sectors need more time to fully realise returns, industries like healthcare and legal services are on the cusp of breakthroughs. Computer vision was identified as a game-changer in manufacturing, enabling defect-free production and contextual analysis of supply chains. Panelists also discussed India’s strength in data warehousing and application development, emphasising the nation’s growing investment in AI infrastructure and its capability to train models cost-effectively.

Challenges like privacy regulations, clean data usage, and the rising infrastructure cost were addressed, along with strategies for balancing volume and value in scaling AI solutions globally. Panelists also explored digital twins in the U.S. market, showcasing zero-defect models as the starting point for AI innovation in manufacturing. This session underscored the significance of social responsibility, standardisation in large models, and leveraging AI as a co-pilot for progress, ensuring a sustainable and inclusive future in the AI era.

Opening the session on AI in Sports and Entertainment Mr. Prateek Garg, Managing Director at Marigold Park Capital, highlighted India’s diverse streaming ecosystem and the democratisation of the value chain, emphasising AI’s role in delivering hyper-personalized content (n=1 experiences) and its potential to position media as a major contributor to GDP. He encouraged professionals to embrace AI rather than fear it, noting the shift from video as a profit centre to fandom as the ultimate goal. The speaker highlighted that by focusing on audience preferences and leveraging AI to lower production costs, increase efficiency, and shorten turnaround times, the industry can unlock unprecedented opportunities to capture consumer attention and reduce risks. Mr. Garg spotlighted monetisation as a key area of disruption, with hyperlocal targeting and contextual ad placements offering significant potential. He explained that AI also enables predictive tools to detect subscriber churn and empowers faster experimentation with new concepts. The speaker emphasised the importance of cultivating new talent pools capable of embracing AI and structuring teams to foster innovation, adaptability, and risk-taking. This approach, he argued, is crucial to staying ahead in the evolving AI-driven entertainment landscape.

Mr. Ramakrishnan Subramanian (Ramky S), Founder of Sportsmechanics, delivered a compelling talk on how AI is revolutionising the world of sports and entertainment. Drawing from his dual passion for sports and technology, Mr. Subramanian illustrated how AI reshapes athlete development, fan engagement, and operational efficiency. He highlighted the challenge of bridging the gap between 20 million aspiring cricketers in India and only 3,000 traditional coaches. AI is unlocking untapped potential by offering virtual coaching tools where players can upload videos and receive personalised guidance to accelerate skill development.

On the entertainment side, the speaker showcased how AI-driven analytical tools are not only empowering teams but also enhancing fan engagement. He pointed out that with 1.2 billion cricket followers globally, 90% of them in India, the potential for hyper-personalized fan experiences is immense. Mr. Subramanian stressed the importance of building smart, self-owned community platforms that give fans control over their content preferences, boosting viewership and revenue opportunities.

About IIM Udaipur

IIM Udaipur is well on its way to becoming a globally recognised B-School. It has broken new ground by focusing on world-class research and transforming students into tomorrow’s managers and leaders. The Institute arrived on the global education stage by securing accreditation from the AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) in merely eight years of its establishment. With this accreditation, IIM Udaipur is counted in the same league of global institutes, such as Harvard Business School, Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT Sloan School. IIMU has been listed on the Financial Times (FT) Global MIM Ranking 2024 for the 6th consecutive year, making it the only IIM to have achieved this feat. In the QS Global MIM Ranking 2025, IIM Udaipur stands as the 6th highest-ranked IIM and continues to maintain its listing for the 6th year in a row, reinforcing its global standing. Notably, it is also the youngest B-School in the world to be featured in both rankings. Additionally, IIM Udaipur ranks 4th in India for research in management, according to the UT Dallas methodology, which tracks publications in leading global journals, showcasing its excellence in academic research.

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Northern Hemisphere Heat Drives Demand for Cooling and Sun-Protection Products on Yiwugo

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July 24, 2026

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YIWU, China, July 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Yiwugo.com, the official website of the Yiwu Commodity Market, is the largest commodity wholesale market in the world. The final whistle may have blown on the World Cup, but the intense heat gripping the Northern Hemisphere shows no sign of letting up. Europe has experienced unusually hot weather this year, sparking not only a surge in demand for air conditioners but also a boom in portable handheld fans. Merchants on Yiwugo say that in previous years, European customers would begin placing orders in March or April and take their time completing their annual procurement. This year, however, the purchasing season has stretched well into summer, with a flood of new buyers coming in, most of them looking for small handheld fans. With customers eager to capitalize on the peak summer season, delivery timelines have also become significantly tighter. Whereas orders in previous years could generally be fulfilled within a month, merchants are now frequently being asked to deliver within about a week, leaving manufacturers scrambling to keep pace with demand.

Lingpan Official Flagship Store has specialized in the production and sales of small fans, insulated cups, and related products for 15 years. This summer, demand from European customers for high-speed small fans has risen sharply, accompanied by urgent delivery requirements. Many customers began requesting shipment just one week after placing their orders, hoping the products would arrive in time for the World Cup and the ongoing heatwave across Europe. One long-standing European customer purchased only five models of small fans from Lingpan last year. Anticipating stronger demand ahead of this summer, the customer expanded the order to 10 models. The first shipment sold out soon after arriving at port, prompting several subsequent repeat orders. European buyers have shown particular interest in high-speed cooling fans and placed great requirements on product quality. So far this year, Lingpan’s fan sales have more than doubled compared with the same period last year, with total purchases reaching approximately RMB 1 million.

Beyond Europe, the owner of Lingpan, Ling Pan pointed out that the Indian market has also undergone significant changes over the past two years. Indian customers are showing great interest in panda-shaped fans, drinking cups, and related products. Procurement volumes among many Indian buyers have increased substantially, with average annual purchases now reaching several hundred thousand yuan.

Unlike European countries grappling with sudden heat waves, Asian markets such as Japan and South Korea, where summers are consistently hot and air conditioners and fans are already everyday essentials, have shown much stronger demand for sun-protection products. From April 1, 2026 to date, sales of sun-protection masks on Yiwugo have increased by 31.6% YoY, while sales of sun-protection face shields surged by 72.42% and sun hats rose by 8.1%.

Chen Jia, a Yiwugo merchant, has engaged in the production and sales of sun-protection masks and sun-protection face shields for eight years. Chen operates the Xiao Zhen and Xiao Mian Sun-Protection Products Workshop in District 4 of the Yiwu International Trade Market. In recent years, the company has customized cooling nylon fabrics for customers in Japan and South Korea. Sun-protection masks and sun-protection face shields made from this material not only offer UPF 50+ protection, but also maintain a more structured shape and are less susceptible to snagging or deformation. Their protective performance remains effective after routine washing, and the products can last for more than five years under normal use.

In 2024, a TV shopping operator from South Korea contacted Xiao Zheng and Xiao Mian through Yiwugo and began placing orders after inspecting the products in person. Over the following two years, the company continued to improve the fitness and design of its sun-protection products. It introduced sun-protection face shields with breathable mesh panels and incorporated soft supports around the nose area to prevent the masks from rubbing against lipstick. These product upgrades have steadily driven up customer ratings on the client’s store. Annual procurement, initially valued at around RMB 300,000, has risen year by year, and the company has since developed into a recognized brand in the local market.

Persistent heat across the Northern Hemisphere has been creating new forms of cross-border consumer demand while enabling Yiwugo merchants to keenly capture shifts in overseas markets. From the strong sales of small portable fans in Europe to the rising demand for functional sun-protection products in Japan and South Korea, the diversity of orders reflects both consumers’ need for relief from extreme heat and the ability of Yiwu manufacturers to strengthen their presence in global markets through product innovation and rapid fulfillment. Faced with a rapidly changing international market, many merchants are continuing to refine product designs, upgrade fabric techniques, and enhance supply efficiency. By leveraging Yiwugo to broaden their export channels, they are keeping pace with overseas consumption trends and capitalizing on the expanding market for cooling and sun-protection products, turning the summer heat into new momentum for cross-border trade.

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Snorkel AI Highlights First Wave of Open Benchmarks Grants Projects

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July 24, 2026

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SAN FRANCISCO, July 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Snorkel AI today highlighted the first group of projects supported through Open Benchmarks Grants, a $3 million commitment to support open-source datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation research.

Launched in February 2026, Open Benchmarks Grants has received hundreds of applications from researchers, labs, and engineers working to address a growing challenge: AI systems are advancing faster than the field’s ability to rigorously measure their performance on realistic, consequential work.

“From complex environments and huge autonomy horizons to rich, sophisticated outputs, these projects tackle some of the field’s hardest evaluation challenges,” said Fred Sala, a member of the Open Benchmarks Grants steering committee and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “I’m excited to see the broader research community use, validate, and build on them.”

Open Benchmarks Grants provides selected teams with funding, expert data development support, research and engineering collaboration, and platform resources. Supported projects include:

Frontier-Bench (formerly Terminal-Bench 3.0), developed with Laude Institute and the Harbor community, is a harder, more domain-diverse successor to Terminal-Bench 2.1 — built in the open, task by task, under continuous adversarial review.Agents’ Last Exam, developed with UC Berkeley RDI and the RDI Foundation, evaluates agents on long-horizon, economically valuable professional workflows. It spans 55 sub-industries and includes more than 1,500 tasks toward a 5,000-task target, sourced and validated by more than 300 industry experts.OSWorld 2.0, developed with XLANG Lab, evaluates computer-use agents on 108 long-horizon workflows across 31 self-hosted web environments and professional desktop applications.Continual Learning Bench, developed with UC Berkeley SkyLab and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, measures whether agents genuinely improve across sequential, stateful tasks.SlopCode Bench, developed with the University of Wisconsin–Madison, measures how code quality degrades as coding agents repeatedly modify and extend their own solutions.Terminal-Bench 2.1, developed with Stanford University, Laude Institute and the Harbor community, evaluates agents on challenging work in terminal environments. The release corrected 28 tasks and introduced continuous validation.

With support from Open Benchmarks Grants, Terminal-Bench Science is also now in development, extending the Terminal-Bench framework to computational research workflows across the life, physical, earth, and mathematical sciences.

Beyond the grants program, Snorkel led the development of Senior SWE-Bench with the research teams at Princeton University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The benchmark evaluates coding agents on senior-level engineering work, including implementing features from realistic instructions, investigating bugs that require runtime analysis, and producing code that follows existing codebase conventions.

Open Benchmarks Grants was established with support from Hugging Face, Prime Intellect, Together AI, Factory, Harbor, and PyTorch. Applications remain open and are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Learn more and apply for a grant at benchmarks.snorkel.ai.

About Snorkel AI
Snorkel AI is the frontier AI data lab, helping teams build the data and environments behind high-performing frontier and agentic AI. We combine technology with research-driven AI data development to create datasets, benchmarks, evals, and custom solutions for real-world AI systems. Founded out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019, Snorkel works with leading AI labs and enterprises to move from better data to better outcomes. 

media@snorkel.ai

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Payzli Vaults to No. 3 on Tampa Bay’s Fast 50, Up From No. 22 in One Year

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July 24, 2026

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Payments technology company, Payzli earns a second consecutive Fast 50 ranking, crediting the climb to accelerating partner and merchant growth on its proprietary technology stack.

TAMPA, Fla., July 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Payzli, the partner-first payments technology company, has been named the No. 3 fastest-growing company in the region on the Tampa Bay Business Journal’s 2026 Fast 50 – a 19-spot climb from its No. 22 debut last year, and the company’s second consecutive year on the list.

The ranking was announced July 23 at the Tampa Bay Business Journal’s Fast 50 event in Tampa, where Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer Naim Hamdar accepted the award alongside members of the Payzli team.

Payzli attributed its growth to a compounding effect: a national network of ISOs, agents and ISVs bringing merchants onto a technology platform Payzli built and operated in-house. 

That platform rests on three proprietary pillars:

Payzli Connect: the company’s payment CRM and merchant-and-partner dashboard, giving agents and ISOs daily residuals visibility and giving merchants a single place to run their account.Payzli POS: AI-powered point-of-sale and business software purpose-built for service businesses, including salons, med spas, wellness studios, and independent operators.Payzli Transact: an online payment gateway built on Visa Platform Connect through Payzli’s partnership with Visa Acceptance Solutions.

The Visa Acceptance Solutions partnership is central to how Payzli frames its credibility: rather than assembling a growth story on top of borrowed infrastructure, the company processes on rails backed by one of the most established networks in the industry alongside Fiserv and TSYS – a point that matters to the partners and merchants deciding where to place their volume.

“A second year on this list, and a jump to No. 3, isn’t about one good quarter. It’s about a network deciding to build with us and stay,” said Naim Hamdar, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Payzli. “Every rank on this list represents partners we’ve earned and merchants who trust us to run their payments. We built the technology in-house so we could keep the promises the industry usually breaks: nothing hidden, a real person in reach, and daily residual visibility our agents can actually count on. That’s what this ranking measures and it’s why we’re doing it all, for the joy of business.”

“They say nothing in Tampa moves fast except the afternoon thunderstorms, so making the Fast 50 two years running feels pretty good,” said Kapil Pershad, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Payzli. “In all seriousness, this is a credit to our team and the businesses that trust us to power their growth.”

The Fast 50, produced by the Tampa Bay Business Journal, recognizes the fastest-growing private companies in the Tampa Bay region. Payzli’s return to the list and its move into the top three reflects a merchant-first product suite and a rapidly expanding national partner network across the payments and embedded-finance landscape.

About Payzli

Payzli is an end-to-end payments technology partner that makes accepting payments simpler and affordable for businesses of all sizes and risk levels. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Tampa, Florida, Payzli brings together in-person processing, an advanced online gateway, AI-powered point of sale, and mobile and contactless payments – backed by its own technology, honest pricing, and dedicated human support. Built partner-first, Payzli equips ISOs, agents, developers, and independent software vendors to grow, with direct integrations to major processing platforms, in-house underwriting, a flexible credit policy, a Visa Acceptance Solutions foundation partnership, and sponsor-bank backing from Esquire Bank, a NASDAQ-listed strategic investor in Payzli. For more information, email partners@payzli.com or visit payzli.com.

Payzli is a registered trademark of United Payment Systems LLC. United Payment Systems LLC is a registered ISO of Esquire Bank (Jericho, NY), Commercial Bank of California (Irvine, CA), and KeyBank, National Association (Cleveland, OH).

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