Technology, the exhibition industry, and what I read when I am not working.
GISEC opened at Expo City on 16 September, not at the World Trade Centre, and GITEX moves into the same halls in December. DWTC is relocating both of its flagship shows, and the September one landed first. That made a cybersecurity conference the live rehearsal for the bigger move, and it is not a small rehearsal: 25,000 professionals, 750 exhibiting brands and a new Cyber First summit pulling in ministers and central bank governors. Whatever the new venue got wrong, it got wrong in front of the least forgiving audience available, three months before the show that actually matters.
Source: GISEC Global, official event site
Not a customer-service chatbot: this is the core banking system, at a 99% source code generation rate. Sony Bank and Fujitsu report a 30% shorter development period and 40% fewer man-hours from basic design through integration testing, running Claude on Amazon Bedrock. The figure nobody publishes is the governance one. I take every production change through Permit to Build, Permit to Release and a Change Advisory Board, and how you evidence a 99% generation rate to a CAB is the question that decides whether the rest of it travels.
Source: Fujitsu and Sony Bank, joint press release
The world's largest tech show moves to Expo City for its 2026 edition, 7 to 11 December, after 45 years at the Dubai World Trade Centre. Having run the technology behind shows at this scale, the hard part is never the floor plan. It is registration, access control and network behaviour under peak load, in a venue with no operational history to calibrate against.
Source: GITEX Global
RBC has passed 200 AI models and its token consumption is up more than 500% in a year, while the Financial Sector Enterprise Cloud Index puts runaway token cost, shadow IT and data sovereignty at the top of the risk list. I once took a cloud estate down by over 80%. The discipline that makes that possible is exactly the one most AI programmes are currently skipping.
Source: Nutanix Financial Sector Enterprise Cloud Index
UFI puts AI adoption across exhibitions at 87%, in a sector worth 88.6 billion dollars this year. Adoption is not the interesting figure. After the show closes, most organisers still cannot answer the only question their board asks: did it work, and for whom.
Source: UFI
Technology spend passed 1.2 billion dollars in 2025, close to triple the 2017 level, with copilots now in customer service, coding and risk management. The rollout is not the achievement. What had to change in governance before 15,000 people were allowed to use it, is.
Source: AI News
Erica now returns contextual guidance in under three seconds and has taken nearly a minute off average call handling. At that headcount, a minute per call stops being a product feature and becomes a capacity decision.
Source: CIO Dive
The Life is Strange studio has warned that without restructuring or external financing it runs out of money in January 2027. Creative studios rarely die of bad games. They die of runway, and the warning usually lands about two quarters after the decision that caused it.
Source: Variety
Marvel's Wolverine on 15 September, Onimusha back after twenty years, Valheim finally leaving early access, EA Sports FC 27 and Silent Hill: Townfall, with BlizzCon and Tokyo Game Show inside the same fortnight.
Source: PC Gamer
The twelfth album arrived in April: thirty-six minutes, no padding, and the first with Ilan Rubin behind the kit after Nine Inch Nails. Pitchfork called it the leanest and meanest record they have made in thirty years. The brevity is the whole argument.
Source: NME
Asked what 2026 holds, Maynard James Keenan answered “Writing, I guess”, then explained why he will not announce: say it out loud and it runs further away, like Groundhog Day. Nothing since Fear Inoculum in 2019. Anyone who has owned a delivery roadmap will recognise the discipline, and probably envy it.
Source: NME
If you want where the Tool and Soundgarden lineage actually went, rather than the nostalgia, this is it. Their seventh record, out in May, trades stoner riffing for long-form seventies progressive structure and scores 84 with the critics. Heavy music that manages to be soothing.
Source: The Prog Report