📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: Pentagon demands robotic cargo ships capable of 2,000-mile

The Pentagon is searching for a new way to move supplies through dangerous coastal waters.

In a fresh solicitation, the Defense Innovation Unit is asking industry to build small, autonomous cargo vessels that can slip into contested areas without putting US sailors at risk.

The deadline for proposals is March 16.

The notice makes clear why the effort matters. The Department of Defense “faces a littoral contested logistics challenge,” warned the DIU solicitation, which is due March 16.

“Increasingly distributed operations in austere, contested littoral environments are met with all-domain threats targeting logistics capabilities, locations, and activities.”

“These threats limit the ability of warfighters to persist in contested environments and remain combat effective.”

Small, expendable cargo ships

To reduce that risk, the Pentagon wants low-cost, expendable robotic freighters. Companies must deliver the systems within 180 days of contract award.

DIU does not spell out the ship’s full dimensions. It sets a minimum cargo capacity of 9 tons. That points to a vessel far smaller than traditional commercial container ships or oil tankers.

The military also wants a stealthy profile. Vessels must have “a low-profile form factor to reduce chances of detection and interdiction,” while also being compact enough to ride on a commercial tractor-trailer.

Each craft would haul standard military loads. That includes warehouse pallets, Pallet Containers, or PALCONs, and Joint Modular Intermodal Containers, known as JMICs.

The vessel must carry six 3,000-pound JMICs or two 5,100-ton containers.

Speed is modest by design. The ships need to reach at least 12 knots when fully loaded. Many commercial vessels can go faster, but the Pentagon prioritizes survivability and range.

The freighters must travel between 1,000 and 2,000 miles while fully loaded. They also need to operate in sea state 5, with waves up to 13 feet.

Operating in contested waters

The Pentagon expects these vessels to work across the logistics chain. They would conduct pier-to-pier, ship-to-ship, and ship-to-shore transfers.

That includes supporting Military Sealift Command vessels and other littoral connectors.

Autonomous navigation remains a key hurdle. The ships must maneuver through crowded ports and busy waterways.

They must also function amid GPS jamming and degraded communications.

DIU calls for GPS and active sensors, along with “passive sensing during emissions control (EMCON) conditions or when communications are lost,” the solicitation notes.

Companies must show their systems can maintain navigation in disrupted environments.

“Prior to completion of prototyping, companies will be expected to demonstrate assured Position, Navigation and Timing in DDIL [denied, degraded, intermittent, and limited communications] and GPS-degraded and denied environments,” according to the solicitation.

Operators must also retain control. Crews need the ability to reprogram routes at sea. Human controllers must take remote command when required.

Security is another priority. The Pentagon does not want hostile forces hijacking these robotic freighters.

Ships must be “resistant to tampering while underway with the ability to remotely scuttle the vessel,” the solicitation specifies.

Taken together, the request signals a shift in how the US military plans to sustain forces near hostile shores.

Instead of relying only on large, crewed ships, the Pentagon is exploring smaller robotic craft that can move supplies, absorb risk, and, if necessary, sink themselves before capture.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it bat

Salesforce on Tuesday launched an entirely rebuilt version of Slackbot, the company's workplace assistant, transforming it from a simple notification tool into what executives describe as a fully powered AI agent capable of searching enterprise data, drafting documents, and taking action on behalf of employees.

The new Slackbot, now generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, is Salesforce's most aggressive move yet to position Slack at the center of the emerging "agentic AI" movement — where software agents work alongside humans to complete complex tasks. The launch comes as Salesforce attempts to convince investors that artificial intelligence will bolster its products rather than render them obsolete.

"Slackbot isn't just another copilot or AI assistant," said Parker Harris, Salesforce co-founder and Slack's chief technology officer, in an exclusive interview with Salesforce. "It's the front door to the agentic enterprise, powered by Salesforce."

From tricycle to Porsche: Salesforce rebuilt Slackbot from the ground up

Harris was blunt about what distinguishes the new Slackbot from its predecessor: "The old Slackbot was, you know, a little tricycle, and the new Slackbot is like, you know, a Porsche."

The original Slackbot, which has existed since Slack's early days, performed basic algorithmic tasks — reminding users to add colleagues to documents, suggesting channel archives, and delivering simple notifications. The new version runs on an entirely different architecture built around a large language model and sophisticated search capabilities that can access Salesforce records, Google Drive files, calendar data, and years of Slack conversations.

"It's two different things," Harris explained. "The old Slackbot was algorithmic and fairly simple. The new Slackbot is brand new — it's based around an LLM and a very robust search engine, and connections to third-party search engines, third-party enterprise data."

Salesforce chose to retain the Slackbot brand despite the fundamental technical overhaul. "People know what Slackbot is, and so we wanted to carry that forward," Harris said.

Why Anthropic's Claude powers the new Slackbot — and which AI models could come next

The new Slackbot runs on Claude, Anthropic's large language model, a choice driven partly by compliance requirements. Slack's commercial service operates under FedRAMP Moderate certification to serve U.S. federal government customers, and Harris said Anthropic was "the only provider that could give us a compliant LLM" when Slack began building the new system.

But that exclusivity won't last. "We are, this year, going to support additional providers," Harris said. "We have a great relationship with Google. Gemini is incredible — performance is great, cost is great. So we're going to use Gemini for some things." He added that OpenAI remains a possibility as well.

Harris echoed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's view that large language models are becoming commoditized: "You've heard Marc talk about LLMs are commodities, that they're democratized. I call them CPUs."

On the sensitive question of training data, Harris was unequivocal: Salesforce does not train any models on customer data. "Models don't have any sort of security," he explained. "If we trained it on some confidential conversation that you and I have, I don't want Carolyn to know — if I train it into the LLM, there is no way for me to say you get to see the answer, but Carolyn doesn't."

Inside Salesforce's internal experiment: 80,000 employees tested Slackbot with striking results

Salesforce has been testing the new Slackbot internally for months, rolling it out to all 80,000 employees. According to Ryan Gavin, Slack's chief marketing officer, the results have been striking: "It's the fastest adopted product in Salesforce history."

Internal data shows that two-thirds of Salesforce employees have tried the new Slackbot, with 80% of those users continuing to use it regularly. Internal satisfaction rates reached 96% — the highest for any AI feature Slack has shipped. Employees report saving between two and 20 hours per week.

The adoption happened largely organically. "I think it was about five days, and a Canvas was developed by our employees called 'The Most Stealable Slackbot Prompts,'" Gavin said. "People just started adding to it organically. I think it's up to 250-plus prompts that are in this Canvas right now."

Kate Crotty, a principal UX researcher at Salesforce, found that 73% of internal adoption was driven by social sharing rather than top-down mandates. "Everybody is there to help each other learn and communicate hacks," she said.

How Slackbot transforms scattered enterprise data into executive-ready insights

During a product demonstration, Amy Bauer, Slack's product experience designer, showed how Slackbot can synthesize information across multiple sources. In one example, she asked Slackbot to analyze customer feedback from a pilot program, upload an image of a usage dashboard, and have Slackbot correlate the qualitative and quantitative data.

"This is where Slackbot really earns its keep for me," Bauer explained. "What it's doing is not just simply reading the image — it's actually looking at the image and comparing it to the insight it just generated for me."

Slackbot can then query Salesforce to find enterprise accounts with open deals that might be good candidates for early access, creating what Bauer called "a really great justification and plan to move forward." Finally, it can synthesize all that information into a Canvas — Slack's collaborative document format — and find calendar availability among stakeholders to schedule a review meeting.

"Up until this point, we have been working in a one-to-one capacity with Slackbot," Bauer said. "But one of the benefits that I can do now is take this insight and have it generate this into a Canvas, a shared workspace where I can iterate on it, refine it with Slackbot, or share it out with my team."

Rob Seaman, Slack's chief product officer, said the Canvas creation demonstrates where the product is heading: "This is making a tool call internally to Slack Canvas to actually write, effectively, a shared document. But it signals where we're going with Slackbot — we're eventually going to be adding in additional third-party tool calls."

MrBeast's company became a Slackbot guinea pig—and employees say they're saving 90 minutes a day

Among Salesforce's pilot customers is Beast Industries, the parent company of YouTube star MrBeast. Luis Madrigal, the company's chief information officer, joined the launch announcement to describe his experience.

"As somebody who has rolled out enterprise technologies for over two decades now, this was practically one of the easiest," Madrigal …

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com