It’s humbling to admit you don’t know something—maybe doubly so for an AI trained to be an all-knowing answer machine. Put on the spot, these systems just seem to prefer fudging facts.

Needless to say, that’s not a trait that small businesses want in a bookkeeper. But Intuit CTO Alex Balazs tells us it’s hammered that habit out of QuickBooks’s AI products.

“We spend a lot of time and energy making sure that the agents err on the side of saying, ‘I don’t know,’” Balazs said at a recent Manhattan event.

The financial software giant behind services like TurboTax, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp has a new cast of AI helpers on offer to its small and medium-sized business clients.

One is a payments agent that will manage and predict the lateness of invoice collection and draw up reminder emails in a chosen tone. An accounting agent categorizes expenses, and a customer agent prioritizes leads, drafts introductory chats, and schedules meetings. Other tools cover payroll, finance, and project management.

Balazs said the goal is to make the businesses feel as if they can delegate these tasks in the same way they would to a human worker.

“We instructed [the agents] to say, ‘Here’s where you’re starting; this is what the outcome is; here are the things you have access to; go complete the task for the customer. And oh, by the way, keep track of everything you’re doing and show them all your work at the end so they have complete control,’” Balazs said.

Keep reading here.—PK

Now’s the time to buy.

That’s the message Ford is pitching amid a bevy of EV deals industrywide ahead of the Sept. 30 expiration of tax credits on EV purchases and leases.

The automaker recently extended through the end of September its Ford Power Promise, which aims to promote at-home charging by providing EV buyers with complimentary home chargers and installation.

“With everything that’s happening in the marketplace, not only the incentives that we have…and the fact that tax credits are still out there for some of these makes and models, now is the time to really double down and get as much as you can as a consumer,” Stacey Ferreira, Ford’s director of US sales strategy, told Tech Brew.

What’s changing: President Donald Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” into law on July 4, nixing EV tax credits from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

Those include a $7,500 tax credit for qualified new EV purchases, a $4,000 credit for qualified used EVs, and a “leasing loophole” that allows automakers to pass on incentives for some models that don’t qualify for the other credits.

Keep reading here.—JG

With AI wearing ever-more hats in all kinds of workplaces, researchers are scrambling to devise tests that grade how well the technology actually performs in its myriad roles. In healthcare alone, several new benchmarks aim to gauge AI’s prowess in medical settings.

But none of the current tests look at how well AI can summarize real-world medical studies, a new report from startup Atropos Health claimed. The authors proposed a new framework to evaluate this skill on nine major models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

This kind of summarization is important because large linked databases of electronic health records and automation tools have made real-world evidence more abundant and accessible, the authors wrote. As a company that uses AI to generate real-world evidence reports, Atropos has a vested interest here as well.

Report card: Google’s Gemini models were the clear winners among the nine models that researchers tested. But different models had various pros and cons.

Keep reading here.—PK