AI alone won’t transform your business. It has the potential to speed up workflows, improve CX and sales, perform useful research in seconds, and ease employees’ workloads—but only if it’s thoughtfully designed and implemented.

Many workplaces use enterprise tools—AI and otherwise—provided by Google Cloud in some capacity: They're largely accessible and ubiquitous, and the company designs and refines them to perform the functions users need. I spoke with Karthik Narain, Google Cloud’s chief product and business officer, about how he works with customers, data and technology to design the enterprise software they need. I also got some advice on figuring out ways to work with data, AI and software within the enterprise, creating pathways for employees to get the most out of technology. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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Artificial Intelligence

Two new AI models from China have been announced or launched in the last week, promising users inexpensive and accurate performance of tasks. DeepSeek’s V4 Flash became available last Friday, writes Forbes senior contributor Rachel Wells, highlighting its low cost and intelligence. V4 Flash has an intelligence score of 50—equivalent to Google Gemini 3.6 Flash—and a cost of 3 cents per benchmark task—105 times cheaper than Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, which is $3.15 for a similar task. However, Wells writes, this doesn’t mean the new DeepSeek is the solution for budget-conscious IT departments. It has a 37% accuracy rate and an 84% hallucination rate.

Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max AI model, which will be available next week, sounds more promising on paper. It will be one of the world’s largest open AI models at 2.4 trillion parameters, and Alibaba says it will be able to perform long, complex tasks. Alibaba highlighted Qwen3.8-Max’s coding ability, saying it can spend hours on code without needing human input, and that it spent 16 days writing and improving a coding tool. Forbes contributor Jon Markman writes this model’s price undercuts competitors, at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output—about 40% of the input price for Anthropic’s Claude and a quarter of its output price.

The big question: Can Qwen3.8 Max deliver for its lower price? Accuracy studies have not yet been published—though Alibaba has said it is comparable to Anthropic Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT5.6-Sol. However, unlike Anthropic and OpenAI, Alibaba’s models are open—meaning developers can download, run and modify them.

Meanwhile, other leading AI........

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