AI Reshapes Business, Iran Shuts Internet, Water Crisis Looms

Agentic AI's progress in reshaping global business services has been slower than anticipated, while sophisticated AI models are making strides in fraud detection, processing transactions in milliseconds. Meanwhile, Iran experienced a near-total internet blackout, impacting its higher education system, and the importance of managing urban groundwater supplies under climate change has been highlighted.

According to VentureBeat, the promise of agentic AI, which can take goal-driven action, transforming global business services (GBS) and other enterprises, has not yet been fully realized. Contributing Editor Taryn Plumb reported in December 2025 that the fundamentals needed to scale this technology were missing.

In the realm of fraud protection, AI models are proving effective. Mastercard's Decision Intelligence Pro (DI Pro) platform, for example, can analyze individual transactions and identify suspicious ones in milliseconds, as reported by VentureBeat. This capability is crucial, given that Mastercard processes approximately 160 billion transactions annually, with peak periods seeing up to 70,000 transactions per second. Johan Gerber, from Mastercard, noted that DI Pro focuses on the risk associated with each transaction.

In other news, Iran experienced a near-total internet blackout on January 8th, impacting its higher education system, according to Nature News. This disruption is one of the most severe since the 1980 cultural revolution, which saw universities closed for three years. The restrictions echo a five-day internet blackout in 2019, which raised concerns about digital isolation.

Finally, Nature News also highlighted the critical and urgent need to preserve water supplies under megacities, especially in light of climate change. Two recent announcements underscored the scale of managing urban groundwater resources.