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Duck Creek Kicks Off Formation ’26 as Strong Fiscal Momentum Signals Accelerating Demand for its Intelligent Core Insurance Platform

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Company highlights double-digit SaaS growth, global expansion, and launch of its new agentic AI platform as industry leaders gather in Orlando

BOSTON, April 27, 2026 /CNW/ — Duck Creek Technologies, the intelligent core of insurance, today kicks off Formation ’26: Agents of Innovation, its flagship user conference, as the company builds strong momentum in the first half of fiscal 2026, marked by double-digit year-over-year SaaS ARR growth fueled by new logos and expansion across its global customer base.

Duck Creek’s strong start to fiscal 2026 reflects this demand, with double-digit new customer wins and existing customer expansions across its core, specialty, and AI-powered solutions. Adoption of Duck Creek’s intelligent cloud continues to scale globally. Insurers are selecting Duck Creek for its enterprise depth including policy, billing, claims, rating, loss control, reinsurance, distribution management, and payments solutions to operate faster, more accurately, and maintain regulatory compliance.

“We are expanding our leadership in insurance technology with more than 370 customers globally. Including 33 of the top 50 North American insurers,” said Hardeep Gulati, Chief Executive Officer of Duck Creek. “Insurers modernizing their core systems are looking for more from their technology. They need a trusted partner like Duck Creek with proven enterprise scale and speed-to-value to help them drive profitable impact and growth. At Formation, we are excited to announce our new agentic platform that will help further improve the combined ratios for insurers with more than $150B in premium flowing through Duck Creek annually.”

Formation ’26 will bring together more than 800 insurance professionals, ecosystem partners, and industry leaders to explore how technology is transforming the insurance lifecycle. The event underscores growing market demand for intelligent, cloud-native platforms that enable insurers to accelerate cloud migration, product development, and automate core insurance workflows to accelerate decision-making and improve operational agility. A highlight of the event will be Duck Creek unveiling its agentic AI platform and showcasing live demonstrations of agentic applications and agents.

Formation ’26 will feature a distinguished lineup of guest speakers joining Gulati during his keynote, including Stephen Lord, Global CIO of AXIS Capital, and Monti Saroya, Senior Managing Director and Co-Head of the Flagship Fund at Vista Equity Partners. Together, they will share perspectives on large-scale transformation, AI adoption, and the future of agentic insurance.

The conference will also include a customer panel moderated by Chief Operating Officer Chris McCloskey, featuring leaders from Core Specialty, Europ Assistance, and Arbella Insurance, who will discuss their transformation journeys and business outcomes achieved through modern core systems. An analyst panel moderated by SVP of Sales William Magowan will bring together experts from AM Best, Celent, and Datos Insights to provide an external view on market trends and innovation benchmarks.

Customer Momentum

Millers Mutual Insurance advanced its modernization strategy with Duck Creek OnDemand, implementing Policy, Billing, and Reinsurance Clarity to modernize its core systems and support continued growth in the multifamily housing insurance market.Anchor Group Management Inc. partnered with Duck Creek to modernize its insurance payments infrastructure, enabling more streamlined billing processes and improved digital payment experiences for policyholders.Frankenmuth Insurance adopted Duck Creek OnDemand Distribution Management to transform how it manages agencies and producers, increasing visibility, improving operational efficiency, and strengthening collaboration across its distribution network.Indigo Insurance turned to Duck Creek OnDemand to accelerate its modernization strategy and support rapid growth, gaining a scalable cloud-based core platform designed to bring new products to market faster.Encova Insurance went live on an upgraded Duck Creek OnDemand Distribution Management system, unifying agency operations across lines of business, streamlining onboarding, and improving the overall agent experience.New Zealand’s Medical Assurance Society (MAS) selected Duck Creek’s full suite of core solutions delivered via OnDemand to modernize its general insurance business, enhance member experiences, and support a broader digital and data-driven transformation.Country-Wide Insurance selected Duck Creek Clarity to strengthen its data and analytics capabilities, enabling real-time insights and preparing for its upcoming OnDemand go-live with Active Delivery.Fortegra selected Duck Creek Reinsurance and Duck Creek Clarity to modernize financial operations, improve portfolio transparency, and support continued growth across products, geographies, and distribution models.Duck Creek secured more than a dozen additional new customer engagements across commercial specialty and personal lines.

Industry Recognition

Named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SaaS P&C Insurance Core Platforms North America, marking the seventh consecutive year the company has been recognized as a Leader.Named a Leader in the Everest Group 2025 Underwriting Orchestration Products PEAK Matrix Assessment, recognizing Duck Creek’s strength in delivering AI-driven underwriting, integrated core workflows, and measurable value across global P&C carriers.Featured in Everest Group’s 2026 Voice of the Customer Report for Insurance CXOPs, outperforming both core system peers and the market average, with customers citing strengths in seamless implementation, deep core system integration, and enterprise scalability and more.Received the 2025 IDC FinTech Real Results Award for Insurance Transformation for measurable customer outcomes.

About Duck Creek

Duck Creek is the intelligent core that leading insurers choose to build on. Purpose-built for property and casualty (P&C) and general insurance, Duck Creek unifies the full insurance lifecycle on a single platform with one data foundation. As an agentic platform, it connects intelligence across underwriting, policy, billing, claims, and payments workflows where decisions are made and compliance is non-negotiable. Duck Creek enables carriers to launch products faster, adapt quickly to change, and grow with precision and confidence. Solutions are available individually or as a full suite via Duck Creek OnDemand. Visit www.duckcreek.com and follow Duck Creek on LinkedIn and X.

Media Contacts:  
Marianne Dempsey / Tara Stred  
duckcreek@threeringsinc.com

 

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SOURCE Duck Creek Technologies, Inc.

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Chef Robotics Physical AI Models Can Now Automate Baked Goods Packing

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Chef Robotics, a leader in physical AI for the food industry, today announced that Chef robots can now automate tray assembly for baked goods packing. The application places baked products, such as burger buns, chocolate chip cookies, biscotti, butter cookies, biscuits, fortune cookies, granola bars, rusks, and shortbreads into trays and packaging containers before sealing.

Watch Chef robots in action.

Baked goods packing has historically been difficult to automate for high-mix production. Each item behaves differently on the production line—a granola bar compresses under the wrong grip, while a biscotti or rusk can crack if placed at the wrong angle. Surface textures range from glazed and smooth to crumbly and irregular, and strict presentation requirements leave little room for error. This variability has made it challenging for automation systems to reliably handle baked goods at production speeds, leaving food manufacturers dependent on manual labor and traditional bakery equipment.

To address this, Chef built its baked goods packing application on its existing piece-picking capability, which uses Chef’s AI-powered computer vision and physical AI models trained across diverse real-world production environments. This allows Chef robots to assess each item’s position, shape, and orientation in real time and determine how to pick the items from the pan and place them quickly and precisely without damaging them.

The baked goods packing application supports four distinct placement capabilities.

First, Chef’s vision system detects the angle at which each item sits in the pan and reorients it after picking, placing it on the tray at the exact angle required, regardless of its original position, enabling retail-ready presentation for SKUs that require precise angular placement.

Second, Chef robots can place multiple baked goods into the same packaging container in a single automated pass, completing full tray assembly without manual intervention.

Third, for packaging containers with multiple small compartments, Chef robots can precisely place items into each designated section, including multiple items in the same compartment, using Chef’s AI vision model to detect compartment positions and orientations in real time.

Fourth, Chef’s vision system identifies the exact center of each tray and places every item at a predefined offset from that center, ensuring a uniform, consistent arrangement across every pack regardless of how trays arrive on the conveyor.

For food manufacturers evaluating bakery systems and baked goods packaging automation, the application offers higher throughput, reduced labor dependency, and consistent presentation across shifts. The capability runs on Chef’s existing robotic hardware and software, allowing manufacturers to deploy it without requiring any changes to their production lines.

Chef’s baked goods packing application is available in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the UK and is included as part of Chef’s robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) pricing model.

About Chef Robotics
Chef is the first company to have commercialized a scalable AI-driven food robotics solution. With over 104 million servings made in production, Chef leverages ChefOS, an AI platform for food manipulation, to offer a Robotics-as-a-Service solution that helps industry-leading food companies increase production volume and meet demand. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Chef aims to empower humans to do what humans do best by accelerating the advent of intelligent machines. Visit https://chefrobotics.ai to learn more.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chef-robotics-physical-ai-models-can-now-automate-baked-goods-packing-302756923.html

SOURCE Chef Robotics

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Chef Robotics Physical AI Models Can Now Automate Baked Goods Packing

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Chef Robotics, a leader in physical AI for the food industry, today announced that Chef robots can now automate tray assembly for baked goods packing. The application places baked products, such as burger buns, chocolate chip cookies, biscotti, butter cookies, biscuits, fortune cookies, granola bars, rusks, and shortbreads into trays and packaging containers before sealing.

Watch Chef robots in action.

Baked goods packing has historically been difficult to automate for high-mix production. Each item behaves differently on the production line—a granola bar compresses under the wrong grip, while a biscotti or rusk can crack if placed at the wrong angle. Surface textures range from glazed and smooth to crumbly and irregular, and strict presentation requirements leave little room for error. This variability has made it challenging for automation systems to reliably handle baked goods at production speeds, leaving food manufacturers dependent on manual labor and traditional bakery equipment.

To address this, Chef built its baked goods packing application on its existing piece-picking capability, which uses Chef’s AI-powered computer vision and physical AI models trained across diverse real-world production environments. This allows Chef robots to assess each item’s position, shape, and orientation in real time and determine how to pick the items from the pan and place them quickly and precisely without damaging them.

The baked goods packing application supports four distinct placement capabilities.

First, Chef’s vision system detects the angle at which each item sits in the pan and reorients it after picking, placing it on the tray at the exact angle required, regardless of its original position, enabling retail-ready presentation for SKUs that require precise angular placement.

Second, Chef robots can place multiple baked goods into the same packaging container in a single automated pass, completing full tray assembly without manual intervention.

Third, for packaging containers with multiple small compartments, Chef robots can precisely place items into each designated section, including multiple items in the same compartment, using Chef’s AI vision model to detect compartment positions and orientations in real time.

Fourth, Chef’s vision system identifies the exact center of each tray and places every item at a predefined offset from that center, ensuring a uniform, consistent arrangement across every pack regardless of how trays arrive on the conveyor.

For food manufacturers evaluating bakery systems and baked goods packaging automation, the application offers higher throughput, reduced labor dependency, and consistent presentation across shifts. The capability runs on Chef’s existing robotic hardware and software, allowing manufacturers to deploy it without requiring any changes to their production lines.

Chef’s baked goods packing application is available in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the UK and is included as part of Chef’s robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) pricing model.

About Chef Robotics
Chef is the first company to have commercialized a scalable AI-driven food robotics solution. With over 104 million servings made in production, Chef leverages ChefOS, an AI platform for food manipulation, to offer a Robotics-as-a-Service solution that helps industry-leading food companies increase production volume and meet demand. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Chef aims to empower humans to do what humans do best by accelerating the advent of intelligent machines. Visit https://chefrobotics.ai to learn more.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chef-robotics-physical-ai-models-can-now-automate-baked-goods-packing-302756923.html

SOURCE Chef Robotics

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Air Products to Expand Industrial Gas Supply for Samsung Electronics’ Next-Generation Semiconductor Fab in South Korea

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New investment underscores the company’s long-term commitment to Korea and its leading role in the global semiconductor industry 

LEHIGH VALLEY, Pa., April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Air Products (NYSE:APD), a world-leading industrial gases company and serving Samsung globally, today announced it has been selected by Samsung to supply industrial gases for its new advanced semiconductor fab in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea.

Under the agreement, Air Products will build, own and operate multiple state-of-the-art production facilities and a bulk specialty gas supply system to supply nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and hydrogen for Samsung’s new semiconductor fab. The new facilities are expected to come onstream in multiple phases from 2028 through 2030.

Air Products has a long track record of executing multiple phase expansions in Pyeongtaek to support Samsung’s growing manufacturing needs. This latest project represents Air Products’ largest investment to date in the semiconductor industry and will establish Pyeongtaek as the company’s single largest operations site globally supporting the electronics industry. 

“Air Products is honored to be selected once again by Samsung and to have their continued confidence as a trusted partner supporting their strategic growth plans,” said SR Kim, President, Air Products Korea. “This significant investment reinforces Air Products’ role as a leading global supplier to the semiconductor industry and underscores our long-standing commitment to supporting our strategic customers with safety, reliability, efficiency and excellent service.”

Air Products has served the global electronics industry for more than 40 years, supplying industrial gases safely and reliably to many of the world’s leading technology companies. The company has operated in Korea for more than 50 years and has established a strong position in electronics and manufacturing sectors.

About Air Products

Air Products (NYSE: APD) is a world-leading industrial gases company in operation for over 85 years focused on serving energy, environmental, and emerging markets and generating a cleaner future. The Company supplies essential industrial gases, related equipment and applications expertise to customers in dozens of industries, including refining, chemicals, metals, electronics, manufacturing, medical and food. As the leading global supplier of hydrogen, Air Products also develops, engineers, builds, owns and operates some of the world’s largest clean hydrogen projects, supporting the transition to low- and zero-carbon energy in the industrial and heavy-duty transportation sectors. Through its sale of equipment businesses, the Company also provides turbomachinery, membrane systems and cryogenic containers globally.

Air Products had fiscal 2025 sales of $12 billion from operations in approximately 50 countries. For more information, visit airproducts.com or follow us on LinkedInXFacebook or Instagram.

This release contains “forward-looking statements” within the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on management’s expectations and assumptions as of the date of this release and are not guarantees of future performance. While forward-looking statements are made in good faith and based on assumptions, expectations and projections that management believes are reasonable based on currently available information, actual performance and financial results may differ materially from projections and estimates expressed in the forward-looking statements because of many factors, including the risk factors described in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2025 and other factors disclosed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, we disclaim any obligation or undertaking to update or revise any forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect any change in the assumptions, beliefs or expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances upon which any such forward-looking statements are based.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/air-products-to-expand-industrial-gas-supply-for-samsung-electronics-next-generation-semiconductor-fab-in-south-korea-302757497.html

SOURCE Air Products

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