TCS, Persistent CEOs Confirm Shift to Outcome-Based Pricing Amid AI Productivity Gains

India's top IT firms are overhauling their decades-old billing model as AI reshapes how services are priced and delivered. In August 2026, TCS CEO K Krithivasan told Reuters that roughly 80% of the company's finance, HR, and business-services contracts are now priced on outcomes rather than hours worked. Persistent Systems CEO Sandeep Kalra separately confirmed that clients are demanding the same work for 25–30% less, while expecting faster delivery. TCS attributed the shift partly to AI-driven productivity gains of 10–15%, which it passes to clients in phases to protect its own margins. Cognizant also signalled the same direction, stating that clients now expect measurable business results rather than billable effort.

In 2026, AI Agent Infrastructure Is Solved — But Context Remains the Hard Problem

By mid-2026, building a functional AI agent has become straightforward, with platforms like Cloudflare Agents SDK and Vercel AI SDK absorbing what once required months of engineering work. However, agents continue to fail in production not due to model limitations, but because they lack organizational context — the decisions, discussions, and institutional knowledge that exist outside code and tickets. A July 2026 arXiv paper (arXiv:2607.14275) confirmed that context quality metrics such as grounding sufficiency and instruction consistency reliably predict agent reliability before deployment. Tools like MCP can grant agents access to data, but raw connector output often floods the context window without providing genuine understanding. The recommended fix is a dedicated context layer that retrieves, reconciles, ranks, and permission-scopes relevant knowledge before the agent begins reasoning.

AI-Heavy Firms Cut Jobs but Also Grew Headcount 10%, Study Finds

Major tech companies including Block, Oracle, and Meta collectively cut tens of thousands of jobs in 2026 while simultaneously increasing AI spending, contributing to over 121,000 tech layoffs tracked so far this year. However, a working paper analysing data from more than 21,000 US businesses found that heavy AI spenders actually grew their overall headcount by roughly 10% over two years, with entry-level hiring also rising. OpenAI's GDPval benchmark, released in September 2025, revealed that frontier AI models now compete directly with experienced professionals across 1,320 specialised tasks in 44 occupations. Researchers and analysts suggest the layoffs are concentrated in roles focused on routine task execution, while demand grows for workers who bring judgment and decision-making ownership. The emerging pattern indicates that AI is reshaping labour markets rather than simply shrinking them, with job security increasingly tied to the level at which a worker's value sits above what AI can automate.

Helios AI Model Delivers Real-Time Video at 19.5 FPS with 100x Cost Reduction

Helios is a 14-billion-parameter video generation model developed by researchers from Peking University, ByteDance, and Canva. The model runs on a single H100 GPU at 19.5 frames per second, cutting inference costs by approximately 100 times compared to previous approaches. It achieves this efficiency through architectural innovations including adversarial hierarchical distillation, which reduces sampling steps from 50 to just 3. Helios supports text-to-video, image-to-video, and video-to-video tasks through a unified input representation. The cost and latency improvements make interactive video applications — such as virtual try-ons, accessibility tools, and real-time content creation pipelines — economically viable for the first time.

Shivakumar Claims Trump's $5,000 Proposal Mirrors Congress Welfare Schemes

Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar has claimed that Donald Trump's proposed $5,000 cash handout to American adults was inspired by Congress party's guarantee schemes in India. Shivakumar described his party's welfare programs as a major success with the public. Trump recently floated the proposal as part of a Republican electoral pitch, contingent on a party win. The plan is estimated to cost around $1.2 trillion, though no clear funding mechanism or congressional approval pathway has been outlined yet.

Gurgaon Woman Harassed After Hit-and-Run by Alleged Drunk Men, FIR Filed

A woman in Gurgaon was injured after her two-wheeler was struck by a car on Golf Course Road. Her family alleges the vehicle was occupied by four intoxicated individuals who then chased her and made offensive gestures. The victim's brother confirmed she has been left traumatized by the incident. Gurgaon Police took suo motu cognisance of the matter and registered an FIR. The family has also announced plans to file a formal complaint with the police.

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Centre summons Air India CEO over immigration lapse

House Ways and Means Committee releases crypto tax bill before upcoming hearing

The U.S. House Ways and Means Committee has published a new cryptocurrency tax bill in advance of a scheduled hearing this week. The legislation aims to address several key areas the crypto industry has long sought regulatory clarity on. Among the issues covered are de minimis transaction thresholds and the tax treatment of staking rewards. The bill represents a congressional effort to establish clearer tax policy frameworks for digital assets.

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China Introduces Stricter Travel Rules for Its Citizens

China has introduced new travel restrictions that will apply to its citizens. The measures are expected to significantly expand the government's control over people's movement. Observers and analysts have noted that the rules represent a further tightening of state oversight. The development has drawn attention from those monitoring civil liberties and governance in China.

Trump's handpicked prosecutor resigns from DOJ probe after clash with attorney general

Dal Lake’s weed problem finds an unlikely craft fix

TickDB MCP Lets Claude Access Live Market Data With Verified Timestamps

Developers can now connect Claude to real-time market data by configuring the TickDB Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, eliminating reliance on the AI's outdated training data. Without a live data connection, Claude reconstructs prices from memory with no timestamps, making it unreliable for financial research or trading workflows. MCP is an open standard that allows AI tools like Claude to call external APIs mid-conversation, similar to how they invoke a calculator or code interpreter. Once set up via Claude Desktop's config file using a TickDB API key, Claude can fetch live price snapshots, order book depth, historical candlestick data, and other market metrics with millisecond-precision timestamps. Users can independently verify the timestamps using a simple Python script, confirming exactly when the market data was recorded.

Bitcoin dips to $77,800 ahead of Senate Clarity Act vote amid rising oil prices

Bitcoin retreated to $77,800 after briefly touching $79,000, as market attention turns to an upcoming U.S. Senate vote on the Clarity Act. The legislation is expected to provide regulatory guidance for the cryptocurrency sector. Simultaneously, rising oil prices have added to broader market uncertainty. The combination of legislative developments and macroeconomic pressures appears to be weighing on Bitcoin's short-term price movement.

Node.js Guide Advocates Token-Scoped Event Trust for Healthtech IoT Dashboards

A technical guide published on DEV Community outlines a framework for building safer IoT control panels in healthtech environments using Node.js and real-time event discovery. The approach emphasizes that device presence should be treated as an observation rather than a permission, with each event type bound to a narrow token scope to prevent unauthorized actions. The author proposes classifying events into four families — presence, capability, intent, and outcome — to ensure dashboards do not conflate connectivity with authority. A Go-based event envelope structure is recommended, embedding authorization, sequencing, and trust fields directly alongside event names to make unsafe assumptions structurally difficult. The guide stresses that only server-signed observations should drive status displays, while browser-side callbacks must never be permitted to authorize device commands.

Rust MCP Tool Cuts Next.js Error Tokens by 99.7% While Blocking Credential Leaks

A developer has released an open-source Rust-based tool called Tokenectomy that compresses verbose Next.js and other framework error logs before they are sent to AI coding assistants. The tool reduces a typical 45,820-token error dump to just 118 tokens in under 0.2 milliseconds by stripping irrelevant node_modules stack frames and retaining only the actionable crash location. It also locally redacts secrets such as database passwords and API keys using a deterministic regex pipeline, preventing credentials from reaching cloud-based AI models. Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), it integrates with tools like Cursor and Claude Desktop via a pre-built binary distributed through npm, requiring no Rust installation. The tool runs entirely locally over stdio with a memory footprint of 3.45 MB and received a Grade A score from an independent audit by Glama.ai.

Matthew Rhys Becomes First Actor to Win Two Lead Emmy Awards in One Night

Welsh actor Matthew Rhys has made Emmy Awards history by winning two lead acting prizes in a single evening. This achievement marks the first time any performer has claimed two lead acting awards in one night at the prestigious television ceremony. Rhys is widely known for his work in acclaimed television productions. The historic double win has drawn significant attention to the actor and to the Emmy Awards ceremony itself.

Three SQL Window Function Techniques to Solve the Gaps and Islands Problem

The 'gaps and islands' problem in SQL involves identifying consecutive streaks in data, such as uninterrupted user login days, and the breaks between them. Since SQL lacks a native streak-detection function, developers rely on combinations of window functions like ROW_NUMBER(), LAG(), and running SUM() to build solutions. The classic approach subtracts a sequential row number from each date, producing a shared computed value for rows within the same streak that shifts whenever a gap appears. A second, more readable method uses LAG() to flag rows that begin a new streak, then applies a cumulative SUM() to assign each streak a unique group ID. Both techniques, along with a third variation, ultimately produce the same output — the start date, end date, and length of each consecutive streak per user.

Meta Scraps Employee Data Collection Program After Backlash and Breach

Meta launched an internal program to collect employee computer data intended for training its artificial intelligence models. The initiative quickly drew resistance from staff who raised concerns about privacy violations and the risk of AI-driven job losses. A significant data breach then occurred shortly after, exposing private communications and sensitive personal information. Meta suspended the program within hours of the breach, though the company has not clarified what will happen to the data already collected.