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The one thing that seems about as certain as death and taxes is that, over time, your Windows 10 PC will slow down. There are a variety of reasons this can happen, from accumulated apps and background processes that run amok to registry problems and outdated drivers.

How to speed up your computer

Want your Windows 10 PC to run faster? We’re here to help. By tweaking some of the operating settings, your machine will be zippier and less prone to performance and system issues.

And if you’re already running Windows 11, we’ve got you covered. Check out our top ways to keep Windows 11 devices chugging along smoothly.

Here’s our list of tips for Windows 10.

Top ways to speed up Windows 10

1. Change your power settings
2. Disable programs that run on startup
3. Go to a previous restore point
4. Use ReadyBoost to speed up disk caching
5. Shut off Windows tips and tricks
6. Stop OneDrive from syncing
7. Use OneDrive files on-Demand
8. Turn off search indexing
9. Clean out your hard disk
10. Clean out your Registry
11. Disable shadows, animations and visual effects
12. Disable transparency
13. Update your device drivers
14. Turn on automated Windows maintenance
15. Kill bloatware
16. Defrag your hard disk
17. Disable Game Mode
18. Run Windows troubleshooters
19. Shut down and restart Windows

You may notice that that last tip is the most tried-and-true way of (hopefully) smoothing out any problems in Windows 10. There’s a reason it’s effectively an internet meme.

1. Change your power settings

If you’re using Windows 10’s “Power saver” plan, you’re slowing down your PC. That plan reduces your PC’s performance in order to save energy. (Even desktop PCs typically have a “Power saver” plan.) Changing your power plan from “Power saver” to “High performance” or “Balanced” will give you an instant performance boost.

To do it, launch the Control Panel app, then select Hardware and Sound > Power Options. You’ll typically see two options: Balanced (recommended) and Power saver. (Depending on your make and model, you might see other plans here as well, including some branded by the manufacturer.) To see the High performance setting, click the down arrow by Show additional plans.

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Change your power settings in Control Panel to give your PC a performance boost.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

To change your power setting, simply choose the one you want, then exit Control Panel. “High performance” gives you the most oomph but uses the most power; “Balanced” finds a happy medium between power use and better performance; and “Power saver” does everything it can to give you as much battery life as possible. Desktop users have no reason to choose “Power saver,” and even laptop users should consider the “Balanced” option when unplugged — and “High performance” when connected to a power source.

If you use a laptop, there’s an even better and easier way to fine-tune performance versus power saving. Click the power icon on the right side of the taskbar, and a screen appears with a slider between “Best battery life” on the left and “Best performance” on the right. Move the slider to a spot between them to tell the laptop to balance the two.

On a laptop, Windows 10 lets you choose the precise balance between battery life and performance.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

2. Disable programs that run on startup

One reason your Windows 10 PC may feel sluggish is that you’ve got too many programs running in the background — programs that you rarely or never use. Stop them from running, and your PC will run more smoothly.

Start by launching the Task Manager: Press Ctrl-Shift-Esc, right-click the lower-right corner of your screen and select Task Manager, or type task manager into the Windows 10 search box and press Enter. If the Task Manager launches as a compact app with no tabs, click More details at the bottom of your screen. The Task Manager will then appear in its full-tabbed glory. There’s plenty you can do with it, but we’re going to focus only on killing unnecessary programs that run at startup.

Click the Startup tab. You’ll see a list of the programs and services that launch when you start Windows. Included on the list is each program’s name as well as its publisher, whether it’s enabled to run on startup, and its “Startup impact,” which is how much it slows down Windows 10 when the system starts up.

To stop a program or service from launching at startup, right-click it and select Disable. This doesn’t disable the program entirely; it only prevents it from launching at startup — you can always run the application after launch. Also, if you later decide you want it to launch at startup, you can just return to this area of the Task Manager, right-click the application and select Enable.

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You can use the Task Manager to help get information about programs that launch at startup and disable any you don’t need. 

Preston Gralla / Foundry

Many of the programs and services that run on startup may be familiar to you, like OneDrive or Evernote Clipper. But you may not recognize many of them. (Anyone who immediately knows what “bzbui.exe” is, please raise your hand. No fair Googling it first.)

The Task Manager helps you get information about unfamiliar programs. Right-click an item and select Properties for more information about it, including its location on your hard disk, whether it has a digital signature, and other information such as the version number, the file size and the last time it was modified.

You can also right-click the item and select Open file location. That opens File Explorer and takes it to the folder where the file is located, which may give you another clue about the program’s purpose.

Finally, and most helpfully, you can select Search online after you right-click. Bing will then launch with links to sites with information about the program or service.

If you’re really nervous about one of the listed applications, you can go to a site run by Reason Software called Should I Block It? and search for the file name. You’ll usually find very solid information about the program or service.

Now that you’ve selected all the programs that you want to disable at startup, the next time you restart your computer, the system will be a lot less concerned with unnecessary programs.

3. Go to a previous restore point

As you use Windows 10, it automatically creates restore points that are essentially snapshots of your system at specific moments in time, including installed software, drivers, and updates. Restore points are a kind of safety net so if something goes wrong, you can always restore your PC to a previous state.

They can also be used to speed up your PC if you notice — for no reason you can fathom — it’s started to slow down. Recently installed problematic drivers, software, or updates could be to blame, so going back to a previous restore point could speed things up again because the system will be returned to the state it was in before the problems started. Keep in mind, though, that you’ll only be able to restore your system to the state it was in during the last seven to 10 days.

To go to a previous restore point:

1. Save any open files and close all your programs.
2. In the search box, type advanced system and then click View advanced system settings. You’ll be sent to the Advanced tab of System Properties in the Control Panel.
3. Click the System Protection tab, and in the System Restore area, click System Restore.
4. On the screen that pops up, the Recommended restore option will be chosen for you. Click Next if you want to go that restore point. To see others, click Choose a different restore point. Highlight the one you want to use and click Next.
5. Click Finish from the screen that appears. Your system will restore to the restore point you chose and shut down.
6. Restart your PC. Note that when you do this, your documents, pictures or personal data won’t be deleted.

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Going to a restore point can help speed up your PC if you’ve recently installed drivers, software, or updates that have slowed down your system.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

It’s possible that System Restore hasn’t been turned on. If that’s the case, you can’t revert to a previous restore point. To turn it on, go to the System Protection screen as outlined above, and click Configure. Select Turn on system protection and click OK. From then on, your PC will regularly create restore points. If you want to create one right away, back on the System Protection screen, click Create.

4. Use ReadyBoost to speed up disk caching

Windows 10 regularly stores cached data on your hard disk, and then when it needs the data, fetches it from there. The time it takes to fetch cached data depends on the speed of your hard disk. If you have a traditional hard disk instead of an SSD, there’s a trick that can help speed up your cache: use Windows’ ReadyBoost feature. It tells Windows to cache data to a USB flash drive, which is faster than a hard disk. Fetching data from that speedier cache should speed up Windows.

First, plug a USB flash drive into one of your PC’s USB ports. The flash drive needs to support at least USB 2.0, and preferably USB 3 or faster. The faster your flash drive, the more of a speed boost you should see. Also, look for a flash drive that is at least double the size of your PC’s RAM for maximum performance.

After you plug in in the drive, open File Explorer and click This PC. Look for the flash drive. It may have an odd name, like UDISK 28X, or something even less obvious. Right-click it, choose Properties, and click the ReadyBoost tab.

Turn on ReadyBoost from this screen to speed up your PC.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

You’ll come to a screen that asks whether you want to use the flash drive as a cache and recommends a cache size. Leave the cache size as is or change it if you like. Then select Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost and click Apply and then OK.

(Note that if you see the message “This device cannot be used for ReadyBoost” when you click the ReadyBoost tab, it means your flash drive doesn’t meet ReadyBoost’s minimum performance standards, so you’ll have to insert a new one.)

As you use your computer, ReadyBoost will start filling the cache with files, so you may notice an increase in disk activity. Depending on how much you use your PC, it can take a few days for your cache to fill and offer maximum improved performance. If you don’t see an increase in performance, try a flash disk with more capacity.

Note: If you have an SSD, you won’t get any extra speed from ReadyBoost, and it might even hurt performance. So don’t use this on a system with an SSD.

5. Shut off Windows tips and tricks

As you use your Windows 10 PC, Windows keeps an eye on what you’re doing and offers tips about things you might want to do with the operating system. In my experience, I’ve rarely if ever found these “tips” helpful. I also don’t like the privacy implications of Windows constantly taking a virtual look over my shoulder.

Windows watching what you’re doing and offering advice can also make your PC run more sluggishly. So if you want to speed things up, tell Windows to stop giving you advice. To do so, click the Start button, select the Settings icon and then go to System > Notifications & actions. Scroll down to the Notifications section and uncheck the box marked “Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows.”

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Turning off Windows’ suggestions for you should help things run more smoothly (and give you back a measure of privacy).

Preston Gralla / Foundry

That’ll do the trick.

6. Stop OneDrive from syncing

Microsoft’s cloud-based OneDrive file storage, built into Windows 10, keeps files synced and up to date on all of your PCs. It’s also a useful backup tool so that if your PC or its hard disk dies, you still have all your files intact, waiting for you to restore them.

It does this by constantly syncing files between your PC and cloud storage — something that can also slow down your PC. That’s why one way to speed up your PC is to stop the syncing. Before you turn it off permanently, though, you’ll want to check whether it is actually slowing down your PC.

To do so, right-click the OneDrive icon (it looks like a cloud) in the notification area on the right side of the taskbar. (In order to see the OneDrive icon, you may need to click an upward facing arrow.) From the pop-up screen that appears, click Pause syncing, and select either 2 hours, 8 hours, or 24 hours, depending upon how long you want it paused. During that time, gauge whether you’re seeing a noticeable speed boost.

Here’s how to turn off OneDrive syncing temporarily, to see if that boosts system performance.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

If so, and you decide you do indeed want to turn off syncing, right-click the OneDrive icon, and from the pop-up, select Settings > Account. Click Unlink this PC, and then from the screen that appears, click Unlink this PC. When you do that, you’ll still be able to save your files to your local OneDrive folder, but it won’t sync with the cloud.

If you find that OneDrive slows down your PC but prefer to keep using it, you can try to troubleshoot OneDrive problems. For info on how to do that, check out Microsoft’s “Fix OneDrive sync problems” page.

7. Use OneDrive Files On-Demand

Some users may not want to stop OneDrive from syncing; doing so defeats its purpose of making sure you have the latest files on whatever device you use. And it would also mean you won’t be able to use OneDrive as a way to safely back up files.

But there’s a way to get the best of both worlds: You can keep syncing to an absolute minimum and only do it when absolutely necessary. You’ll speed up performance and still get the best of what OneDrive has to offer.

To do this, you use Windows’ OneDrive Files On-Demand feature. With it, you can choose to keep only certain files on your PC, but still have access to all your other OneDrive files in the cloud. When you want to use one of those online files, you open it directly from the cloud. With fewer files on your PC syncing, you should see a performance boost.

Right-click the OneDrive icon on the right side of the taskbar and select Settings > Account > Choose folders. From the screen that appears, uncheck the folders that you want stored online rather than on your PC, to save space, then click OK.

Use this dialog box to choose which folders will be saved on your PC.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

When you do that, all the files in the folders you unchecked will be set to online-only, which means they’re only available from OneDrive in the cloud, not on your PC. From now on, when want to open one of those files, you’ll have to be online.

Go back to this screen if you want to change which files are kept locally on your PC, and which in the cloud only.

8. Turn off search indexing

Windows 10 indexes your hard disk in the background, allowing you — in theory — to search your PC more quickly than if no indexing were being done. But slower PCs that use indexing can see a performance hit, and you can give them a speed boost by turning off indexing. Even if you have an SSD disk, turning off indexing can improve your speed, because the constant writing to disk that indexing does can eventually slow down SSDs.

To get the maximum benefit in Windows 10, you need to turn indexing off completely. To do so, type services.msc in the Windows search box and press Enter. The Services app appears. Scroll down to either Indexing Service or Windows Search in the list of services. Double-click it, and from the screen that appears, click Stop. Then reboot your machine. Your searches may be slightly slower, although you may not notice the difference. But you should get an overall performance boost.

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Here’s how to turn off Windows 10 indexing.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

If you’d like, you can turn off indexing only for files in certain locations. To do this, type index in the Windows search box and click the Indexing Options result that appears. The Indexing Options page of the Control Panel appears.

Click the Modify button, and you’ll see a list of locations that are being indexed, including Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer History, and your hard drive or drives. Uncheck the box next to any location, and it will no longer be indexed. If you’d like to customize what gets indexed and what doesn’t on individual drives, click the down arrow next to any drive and check the box next to what you want indexed and uncheck the box of what you don’t.

9. Clean out your hard disk

If you’ve got a bloated hard disk filled with files you don’t need, you could be slowing down your PC. Cleaning it out can give you a speed boost. Windows 10 has a surprisingly useful built-in tool for doing this called Storage Sense. Go to Settings > System > Storage and at the top of the screen, move the toggle from Off to On. When you do this, Windows constantly monitors your PC and deletes old junk files you no longer need — temporary files, files in the Downloads folder that haven’t been changed in a month, and old Recycle Bin files.

You can customize how Storage Sense works and also use it to free up even more space than it normally would. Underneath Storage Sense, click Configure Storage Sense or run it now. From the screen that appears, you can change how often Storage Sense deletes files (every day, every week, every month or when your storage space gets low).

You can also tell Storage Sense to delete files in your Downloads folder, depending on how long they’ve been there, and set how long to wait to delete files in the Recycle Bin automatically. You can also have Storage Sense move files from your PC to OneDrive cloud storage if they’re not opened for a certain amount of time (every day, or every 14 days, 30 days, or 60 days).

Here’s how to customize the way Storage Sense works.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

For more disk-cleaning tips, see “7 steps to a lean, clean Windows machine.”

10. Clean out your Registry

Under the hood, the Windows Registry tracks and controls nearly everything about the way Windows works and looks. That includes information about where your programs are stored, which DLLs they use and share, what file types should be opened by which program, and just about everything else.

But the Registry is a very messy thing. When you uninstall a program, for example, that program’s settings don’t always get cleaned up in the Registry. So over time, it can get filled with countless outdated settings of all types. And that can lead to system slowdowns.

Don’t even think of trying to clean any of this out yourself. It’s impossible. To do it, you need a Registry Cleaner. There are plenty available, some free and some paid. But there’s really no need to outright buy one, because the free Auslogics Registry Cleaner does a solid job.

Before using Auslogics or any other Registry cleaner, you should back up your Registry so you can restore it if anything goes wrong. (Auslogics Registry Cleaner does this for you as well, but it can’t hurt to have it backed up twice.) To do your own Registry backup:

1. Type regedit.exe in the search box, then press Enter. That runs the Registry editor.
2. From the File menu, select Export.
3. From the screen that appears, make sure to choose the All option in the “Export range” section at the bottom of the screen. Then choose a file location and file name and click Save.
4. To restore the Registry, open the Registry editor, select Import from the File menu, then open the file you saved.

Now download, install, and run Auslogics Registry Cleaner. On the left-hand side of the screen you can select the kinds of Registry issues you want to clean up — for example, File Associations, Internet, or Fonts. I generally select them all.

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Auslogics Registry Cleaner scans for and fixes problems in your Windows Registry.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

Next, tell it to scan the Registry for problems. To do that, click Scan Now, and from the drop-down menu that appears, select Scan. That lets you first examine the Registry problems it finds. (If you instead choose Scan and Resolve, it makes the fixes without you checking them.)

It now scans your Registry for errors, then shows you what it found. Uncheck the boxes next to any you don’t want it to fix.  Click Resolve when you’ve made your decision, and make sure that Back Up Changes is checked, so you can restore the Registry easily if something goes wrong. If you want to see details about what it’s done, click View detailed report at the bottom of the screen.

11. Disable shadows, animations, and visual effects

Windows 10 has some nice eye candy — shadows, animations, and visual effects. On fast, newer PCs, these don’t usually affect system performance. But on slower and older PCs, they can exact a performance hit.

It’s easy to turn them off. In the Windows 10 search box, type sysdm.cpl and press Enter. That launches the System Properties dialog box. Click the Advanced tab and click Settings in the Performance section. That brings you to the Performance Options dialog box. You’ll see a varied list of animations and special effects.

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The Performance Options dialog box lets you turn off effects that might be slowing down Windows 10.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

If you have time on your hands and love to tweak, you can turn individual options on and off. These are the animations and special effects you’ll probably want to turn off, because they have the greatest effect on system performance:

• Animate controls and elements inside windows
• Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing
• Animations in the taskbar
• Fade or slide menus into view
• Fade or slide ToolTips into view
• Fade out menu items after clicking
• Show shadows under windows

However, it’s probably a lot easier to just select Adjust for best performance at the top of the screen and then click OK. Windows 10 will then turn off the effects that slow down your system.

12. Disable transparency

In addition to turning off shadows, animations, and visual effects, you should also disable the transparency effects that Windows 10 uses for the Start menu, the taskbar, and the Action Center. It takes a surprising amount of work for Windows to create these transparency effects, and turning them off can make a difference in system performance.

To do it, from Settings, choose Personalization > Colors, scroll down to “Transparency effects” and move the slider to Off.

Turning off Windows 10’s transparency effects can help speed up performance.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

13. Update your device drivers

Windows 10 can take a big performance hit if it’s using outdated drivers. Installing the latest ones can go a long way towards speeding it up. Particularly problematic are graphics drivers, so those are the ones you should make sure to update. To do it:

1. Type devmgmt.msc into the Search box and click the Device Manager icon that appears in the right pane.
2. Scroll to the Display Adapters entry and click the side-facing arrow to expand it.
3. Right-click the driver that appears.
4. From the context menu that appears, select Update driver.

You’ll be asked whether to have Windows search for an updated driver or if you want to find one and install it manually. Your best bet is to let Windows do the work. Follow the on-screen instructions to install the driver.

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Updating your device driver with the Device Manager can give Windows 10 a speed boost.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

For help clearing out old drivers after you’ve installed the new ones, see “How to reduce Windows driver bloat.”

14. Turn on automated Windows maintenance

Every day, behind the scenes, Windows 10 performs maintenance on your PC. It does things like security scanning and performing system diagnostics to make sure everything is up to snuff — and automatically fixes problems if it finds them. That makes sure your PC runs at peak performance. By default, this automatic maintenance runs every day at 2:00 a.m., as long as your device is plugged into a power source and is asleep.

There’s a chance, though, that the feature has been accidentally turned off or you haven’t had your PC plugged in for a while, so the maintenance hasn’t been done. You can make sure it’s turned on and runs every day, and run it manually if you’d like.

Run the Control Panel app and select System and Security > Security and Maintenance. Click the down arrow in the Maintenance section, and under Automatic Maintenance, click Start maintenance if you want it to run now. To make sure that it runs every day, click Change maintenance settings, and from the screen that appears, select the time you’d like maintenance to run and check the box next to Allow scheduled maintenance to wake up my computer at the scheduled time. Then click OK.

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You can designate a time each day for Windows to run its maintenance tasks.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

15. Kill bloatware

Sometimes the biggest factor slowing down your PC isn’t Windows 10 itself, but bloatware or adware that takes up CPU and system resources. Adware and bloatware are particularly insidious because they may have been installed by your computer’s manufacturer. You’d be amazed at how much more quickly your Windows 10 PC can run if you get rid of it.

First, run a system scan to find adware and malware. If you’ve already installed a security suite such as Norton Security or McAfee LiveSafe, you can use that. You can also use Windows 10’s built in anti-malware app — just type windows security in the search box, press Enter, and then select Virus & threat protection > Quick Scan. Windows Defender will look for malware and remove any it finds.

It’s a good idea to get a second opinion, though, so consider a free tool like Malwarebytes. The free version scans for malware and removes what it finds; the paid version offers always-on protection to stop infections in the first place.

Malwarebytes is a useful application that will scan for and remove malware.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

Now you can check for bloatware and get rid of it. A good program to do that is PC Decrapifier. And Should I Remove It? is a website that offers advice on what files may be malware or bloatware.

For more details about removing bloatware, check out “Bloatware: What it is and how to get rid of it.”

16. Defrag your hard disk

The more you use your hard disk, the more it can become fragmented, which can slow down your PC. When a disk gets fragmented, it stores files willy-nilly across it, and it takes a while for Windows to put them together before running them.

Windows 10, though, has a built-in defragmenter you can use to defragment your hard disk. You can even tell it to run automatically so it stays constantly defragmented.

To do it, type defrag into the search box and press Enter. From the screen that appears, select the drive you want you want to defragment. Click the Optimize button to defragment it. Select multiple disks by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking each one you want to defragment.

If you want to have your disk or disks defragmented automatically, click the Change settings button, then check the box next to Run on a schedule. Now select the frequency at which you want the disk(s) defragmented by clicking the drop-down next to Frequency and selecting Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. (Weekly will be your best bet.) From this screen you can also choose multiple drives to defragment.

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You can set Windows 10’s built-in disk defragmenter to run automatically on a schedule.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

Note: If you have an SSD, defragging won’t offer any noticeable performance boost, and it could cause wear on the disk. So it’s not worth your while to defrag SSDs.

17. Disable Game Mode

If you’re a serious gamer, you probably know all about Game Mode, which optimizes your PC for playing games. That’s great for when you’re doing just that, but it can slow down your system when you’re not playing because it keeps some system resources in reserve in case you start playing a game and has occasionally been linked to stability issues. So turning off Game Mode can give your PC a quick boost. (You can always turn it back on again when you want to play a game.)

Game Mode is turned on by default, so even if you’ve never played a game on your PC, it’s probably enabled. To turn it off, go to Settings > Gaming > Game Mode and move the Game Mode slider to Off.

Turning off Game Mode can give your PC an instant boost.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

18. Run Windows troubleshooters

Windows 10 has a useful built-in troubleshooting tool that make sure your PC runs as quickly as possible without you having to do a thing. To turn it on, type troubleshoot into the search box and click Troubleshoot settings. The Troubleshoot screen appears.

In the “Recommended troubleshooting” section, click the down arrow and choose whether to have Windows ask you before running a troubleshooter, run a troubleshooter and then notify you, or run a troubleshooter without notifying you. At the bottom of the section, see if there are any recommended troubleshooters to run, and if so, run them.

You can also go to this page if you’re running into a problem on your PC — for example, a flaky internet connection or a problem with Bluetooth. On the page, click Additional troubleshooters and from the page that appears, run the troubleshooter designed to fix your problem.

Windows 10’s built-in troubleshooters can speed up your PC or fix computer issues.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

19. Shut down and restart Windows

Here’s one of IT’s not-quite-secret weapons for troubleshooting and speeding up a PC: Shut it down and restart it. Doing that clears out any excess use of RAM that otherwise can’t be cleared. It also kills processes that you might have set in motion and are no longer needed, but that continue running and slow your system. If your Windows 10 PC has turned sluggish over time for no apparent reason, you may be surprised at how much more quickly it will run when you do this.

Try just some of these tricks, and you’ll find that you’ve got a faster Windows 10 PC — and one that is less likely to have any reliability problems.

This article was originally published in February 2016 and most recently updated in May 2025.

More help getting the most out of Windows

• Top 10 Windows productivity tips
• Windows PowerToys: Your handy productivity toolbox
• 10 bad Windows habits you need to break (and what to do instead)
• 10 Windows features you aren’t using, but should
• 6 steps to recover missing data in Windows
• What to do when Windows won’t boot

Enterprise IT leaders are becoming uncomfortably aware that generative AI (genAI) technology is still a work in progress and buying into it is like spending several billion dollars to participate in an alpha test— not even a beta test, but an early alpha, where coders can barely keep up with bug reports. 

For people who remember the first three seasons of Saturday Night Live, genAI is the ultimate Not-Ready-for-Primetime algorithm. 

One of the latest pieces of evidence for this comes from OpenAI, which had to sheepishly pull back a recent version of ChatGPT (GPT-4o) when it — among other things — delivered wildly inaccurate translations. 

Lost in translation

Why? In the words of a CTO who discovered the issue, “ChatGPT didn’t actually translate the document. It guessed what I wanted to hear, blending it with past conversations to make it feel legitimate. It didn’t just predict words. It predicted my expectations. That’s absolutely terrifying, as I truly believed it.”

OpenAI said ChatGPT was just being too nice.

“We have rolled back last week’s GPT‑4o update in ChatGPT so people are now using an earlier version with more balanced behavior. The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable — often described as sycophantic,” OpenAI explained, adding that in that “GPT‑4o update, we made adjustments aimed at improving the model’s default personality to make it feel more intuitive and effective across a variety of tasks. We focused too much on short-term feedback and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT‑4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.

“…Each of these desirable qualities, like attempting to be useful or supportive, can have unintended side effects. And with 500 million people using ChatGPT each week, across every culture and context, a single default can’t capture every preference.”

OpenAI was being deliberately obtuse. The problem was not that the app was being too polite and well-mannered. This wasn’t an issue of it emulating Miss Manners.

I am not being nice if you ask me to translate a document and I tell you what I think you want to hear. This is akin to Excel taking your financial figures and making the net income much larger because it thinks that will make you happy.

In the same way that IT decision-makers expect Excel to calculate numbers accurately regardless of how it may impact our mood, it expects that the translation of a Chinese document doesn’t make stuff up.

OpenAI can’t paper over this mess by saying that “desirable qualities like attempting to be useful or supportive can have unintended side effects.” Let’s be clear: giving people wrong answers will have the precisely expected effect — bad decisions

Yale: LLMs need data labeled as wrong

Alas, OpenAI’s happiness efforts weren’t the only bizarre genAI news of late. Researchers at Yale University explored a fascinating theory: If an LLM is only trained on information that is labeled as being correct — whether or not the data is actually correct is not material — it has no chance of identifying flawed or highly unreliable data because it doesn’t know what it looks like. 

In short,  if it’s never been trained on data labeled as false, how could it possibly recognize it? (The full study from Yale is here.) 

Even the US government is finding genAI claims going too far. And when the feds say a lie is going too far, that is quite a statement.

FTC: GenAI vendor makes false, misleading claims

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that one large language model (LLM) vendor, Workado, was deceiving people with flawed claims of the accuracy of its LLM detection product. It wants that vendor to “maintain competent and reliable evidence showing those products are as accurate as claimed.”

Customers “trusted Workado’s AI Content Detector to help them decipher whether AI was behind a piece of writing, but the product did no better than a coin toss,” said Chris Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Misleading claims about AI undermine competition by making it harder for legitimate providers of AI-related products to reach consumers.

“…The order settles allegations that Workado promoted its AI Content Detector as ‘98 percent’ accurate in detecting whether text was written by AI or human. But independent testing showed the accuracy rate on general-purpose content was just 53 percent,” according to the FTC’s administrative complaint. 

“The FTC alleges that Workado violated the FTC Act because the ‘98 percent’ claim was false, misleading, or non-substantiated.”

There is a critical lesson here for enterprise IT. GenAI vendors are making major claims for their products without meaningful documentation. You think GenAI makes stuff up? Imagine what comes out of their vendor’s marketing department. 

Amazon recently unveiled a new warehouse robot that can “feel,” according to the company. 

Called the Vulcan robot, the two-armed beast is already working in Amazon fulfillment centers in Spokane, WA, and Hamburg, Germany, where it’s handled more than half a million orders.

The Vulcan’s sense of touch comes from force-sensitive grippers and sensors on its joints, which provide data to its AI about the edges, contours, and resistance of the items it picks up, moves, and places in a new location. With this faculty, Vulcan can grip a soft bag of candy gently, but a heavy coffee table book more firmly without crushing the candy or dropping the book. 

One way to look at the benefit of a robot that can detect what it’s gripping is that it provides flexibility, enabling a wider range of products to be handled. According to Amazon, Vulcan can handle about 75% of the million or so products in a typical Amazon warehouse.

Aaron Parness and his roughly 250-person robotics team at Amazon created the Vulcan robot. The company revealed it to the world on May 7 at its “Delivering the Future” event in Dortmund, Germany. 

Mixed feelings about tactile robots

Vulcan is the first Amazon robot with what the company calls a “genuine sense of touch,” thanks to force feedback sensors and AI-powered software that lets it “feel” items, not just see them (cameras are the main sensors on most Amazon robots). 

If you’re familiar with my views on anthropomorphicization (i.e., “humanizing”) of robots and AI, you might guess what I’m about to say. Amazon says its Vulcan robot can feel (without quotation marks). This isn’t true. 

When a robot like Vulcan “feels” something, it uses sensors that measure force, pressure, and sometimes texture or shape, turning these signals into data that AI can interpret. Vulcan’s sensors are built into its gripper and joints, so when it touches or grasps an object, it detects how much force it’s applying and the contours it’s encountering. Machine learning algorithms then help Vulcan decide how to adjust its grip or movement based on this feedback.

By contrast, a person feels with a network of millions of nerve endings in the skin, especially in the fingertips. These nerves send detailed, real-time information to the brain about pressure, temperature, texture, pain, and even the direction of force. The human sense of touch is deeply connected to memory, emotion, judgment, and consciousness.

Robots like Vulcan can now match or even exceed humans in detecting pressure or identifying textures, but their “feeling” is purely mechanical and digital. They don’t experience sensation or emotion, and they only know what their sensors can measure and their software can interpret. Humans, on the other hand, feel in a way that’s physical, emotional, and conscious.

With that caveat out of the way, it has to be said that Vulcan is pretty amazing. 

Giving warehouse workers a hand

Parness says Vulcan’s sense of touch is a breakthrough because it brings “physical intelligence” to robots, and that’s the categorical breakthrough here. The main advance robots will undergo over the next decade or two will involve sensors increasingly being able to detect and adapt to real conditions in the real world and being trained in virtual physical AI environments. 

Despite the advanced state of Vulcan’s technology, its main job is actually limited:  to pick products from bulk storage and pack them into movable shelves, a task that used to require human dexterity. 

Vulcan is neither a humanoid robot nor is its hand modeled after human hands. I’ve weighed in before about how modeling factory robots after human body parts makes no sense. 

Vulcan’s “hand” combines a conveyor belt gripper with a spatula-like tool, both of which are fitted with sensors that constantly measure pressure and torque. A ruler-like tool attached between the paddles acts as a spatial guide, nudging existing items in storage bins to create space for the new items it is laying into place. 

The robot’s AI, trained on thousands of hours of physical interaction data, calculates the right amount of force for each object in real time. Vulcan can work up to 20 hours a day without ever taking a coffee break or using the bathroom, moving at speeds comparable to a human worker, but always behind a safety fence in case it suddenly goes bananas like that Chinese robot in the TikTok video people have been talking about and misinterpreting. (It just malfunctioned. It didn’t try to “attack” people.) 

The Vulcan robot has real limitations. For example, it’s too weak to lift anything heavier than 8 pounds and can only move products from one place to another. If the robot encounters an unfamiliar item or something that exceeds its 8-pound weight limit, it flags a human worker for help.

Grasping the importance of tactile robots

Vulcan isn’t the only robot with a sense of touch. RoboTact and RoboTouch sensors, developed over decades and now used in everything from humanoid robots to service bots, give machines the ability to sense contact, pressure, and even the shape of objects, allowing for delicate and precise handling. 

Sanctuary AI enhanced its Phoenix robot with tactile sensors that let it handle complex, touch-driven jobs. Their technology means Phoenix can detect things like slippage or excessive force, even when it can’t see what it’s doing. 

Meta created its Digit 360 sensor, a fingertip-shaped device that can register forces as tiny as one millinewton and pick up details down to seven microns. The sensor is still in the lab, but Meta’s partnership with GelSight and Wonik Robotics is helping to eventually bring these sensors into real-world use. 

Eventually, robots with a sense of touch will revolutionize robotics and enable them to perform a wide range of tasks that robots currently cannot do, like picking strawberries, performing surgery, and defusing bombs.

But for now, Amazon is using some of the most advanced tactile robots on the planet to help ship bathrobes, books, and batteries to customers.

Researchers at ETH Zürich have discovered yet another security flaw that they say impacts all modern Intel CPUs and causes them to leak sensitive data from memory, showing that the vulnerability known as Spectre continues to haunt computer systems after more than seven years. The vulnerability, referred to as Branch Privilege Injection (BPI), "can be exploited to misuse the prediction Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Twelve more suspects were charged in a RICO conspiracy for their alleged involvement in the theft of over $230 million in cryptocurrency and laundering the funds using crypto exchanges and mixing services. [...]

On Thursday, CISA warned U.S. federal agencies to secure their systems against ongoing attacks exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in the Chrome web browser. [...]

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new malware campaign that makes use of a PowerShell-based shellcode loader to deploy a remote access trojan called Remcos RAT. "Threat actors delivered malicious LNK files embedded within ZIP archives, often disguised as Office documents," Qualys security researcher Akshay Thorve said in a technical report. "The attack chain leverages mshta.exe for Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Modern apps move fast—faster than most security teams can keep up. As businesses rush to build in the cloud, security often lags behind. Teams scan code in isolation, react late to cloud threats, and monitor SOC alerts only after damage is done. Attackers don’t wait. They exploit vulnerabilities within hours. Yet most organizations take days to respond to critical cloud alerts. That delay isn’t [email protected]

ChatGPT is testing support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), which will allow the AI to connect to third-party services and use them as context. [...]

OpenAI may be planning to challenge Microsoft Teams Copilot integration with a new "Record" feature in ChatGPT. [...]

AI agents will fundamentally change the value of content and the way people work with data and files, said Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, during a Wednesday webcast that was part of the company’s Content+AI Virtual Summit.

The traditional approach to managing content is fundamentally changing with AI, Levie said.

Over the last two decades, Box has changed its focus from file storage to extracting value from content in those files. The company provides collaborative tools and integrates popular apps for users to work with those files and data.

Extracting value from the content in stored files will take on new meaning with AI. The amount of unstructured data within files has grown at an exponential pace over the last few decades, but most of the data is underutilized, Levie said.

AI will provide instant answers from unstructured data, fundamentally changing the value of content stored in systems. It will also automate workflows and introduce an AI-first culture, Levie said.

“We have the opportunity to drive an incredible amount of new experiences,” Levie said. “We need a better and modern way to manage information.”

Box has kept up with various stages in AI evolution, with integration of AI models and more recently AI agents. As AI advances, the vendor is allowing its clients to do more advanced data extraction, multi-step reasoning, and more complex task planning.

“We didn’t think about AI as an add-on capability on the side,” but as central to the Box platform, Levie said.

For example, the Box interface has an agent that can answer queries and work with content within specific folders. It provides multimedia responses to queries, linking to videos, charts, and citations within files stored in the system.

The company on Wednesday launched a series of new AI agents that serve different objectives, including a “Search” agent for basic results from files and a “Deep Research” agent that digs deeper into information for more comprehensive answers.

The Deep Research agent works with large volumes of enterprise content in files, summarizes findings, and provides links to relevant files.

Box is also integrating a new AI agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot, allowing users of Word, PowerPoint, and other software to work with data stored in Box systems.

In the coming years, Microsoft plans to integrate thousands of agents from third parties such as Box and Adobe to improve user productivity.

Many of Box’s competitors are also offering their own AI technology, though agent-to-agent integrations between vendors are growing.

Forrester Research has a roadmap for broad adoption of various agent technologies in coming years. It shows helper-style agents like the ones announced by Box taking off gradually in 2026.

Helper-style AI agents will see broad adoption by next year, according to Forrester. More complex agents capable of executive decision-making will take a little longer.

Forrester Research

But as AI agents advance to solving problems and making executive decisions, things will get more complex, said Craig Le Clair, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester.

There’s a huge gap between vendors of AI agents and the actual adoption profile of users and buyers, Le Clair said. “The gap that exists there is astounding,” he said.

Companies are advancing with AI agents, but it’s much more complex when it comes to sophisticated solvers and managing agents, Le Clair said.

“If you’re in a financial institution, you’ve built all these layers of process, control, risk mitigation, and reporting around the technology underneath. And you don’t change that easily, because it takes legal, compliance, meetings, security. It takes longer to change the processes that sit above the technology,” Le Clair said.

The Windows 10 KB5058379 cumulative update is triggering unexpected BitLocker recovery prompts on some devices afters it's installed and the computer restarted. [...]

Saudi Arabia unveiled a series of blockbuster AI partnerships with US chip makers, cloud infrastructure providers, and software developers this week, signaling its ambition to become a global AI hub.

Leveraging its $940 billion Public Investment Fund (PIF) and strategic location, Saudi Arabia is forming partnerships to create sovereign AI infrastructure including advanced data centers and Arabic large language models. Google, Oracle, and Salesforce are deepening AI and cloud commitments in Saudi Arabia that will support Vision 2030, a 15-year program to diversify the country’s economy.

Within that, the $100 billion Project Transcendence aims to put the kingdom among the top 15 countries in AI by 2030.

The deals announced during this week’s US-Saudi investment summit in Riyadh include a $20 billion commitment from Saudi firm DataVolt for AI data centers and energy infrastructure in the US and an $80 billion joint investment by Google, DataVolt, Oracle, Salesforce, AMD, and Uber in technologies across both nations, according to a White House fact sheet

The Riyadh summit, attended by US President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, drew tech luminaries including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su.

AI factories

Humain, an AI company backed by PIF, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, was at the center of much of the deal-making. Nvidia said it will supply Humain with hundreds of thousands of its most advanced GPUs over the next five years with which the company will build “AI factories” with a capacity of up to 500 megawatts. The first of those will contain 18,000 Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, it said.

AMD announced a five-year, $10 billion collaboration with Humain to deploy up to 500 megawatts of AI compute in Saudi Arabia and the US, aiming to deploy “multi-exaflop capacity by early 2026.”

AWS, too, is expanding its data centers in Saudi Arabia to bolster Humain’s cloud infrastructure.

Saudi Arabia has abundant oil and gas to power those data centers, and is growing its renewable energy resources with the goal of supplying 50% of the country’s power by 2030.

“Commercial electricity rates, nearly 50% lower than in the US, offer potential cost savings for AI model training, though high local hosting costs due to land, talent, and infrastructure limit total savings,” said Eric Samuel, Associate Director at IDC.

Located near Middle Eastern population centers and fiber optic cables to Asia, these data centers will offer enterprises low-latency cloud computing for real-time AI applications.

Late is great

There’s an advantage to being a relative latecomer to the technology industry, said Eric Samuel, associate director, research at IDC. “Saudi Arabia’s greenfield tech landscape offers a unique opportunity for rapid, ground-up AI integration, unburdened by legacy systems,” he said.

Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said the investments signify Saudi Arabia’s “ambition to become a central hub for AI development, rivaling established tech centers in the US and China.”

Other analysts weighed in on Saudi Arabia’s goals. Neil Shah, vice president research at Counterpoint Research, said the push could make it the next “oil hub” for AI, serving both local and global needs, while Amandeep Singh, practice director at QKS Group, said, “This isn’t just about money. It’s a strategic play to become a long-term AI power and a neutral meeting point for global AI.”

Despite the vast political and financial resources in play, though, the analysts forecast challenges ahead when it comes to attracting top talent, reducing reliance on Western chips, and building data governance trust.

While Saudi Arabia is a lucrative new market for companies such as Nvidia and AWS, “They must navigate questions of control and compliance,” said QKS Group’s Singh. Aligning with Saudi Arabia’s push for digital sovereignty requires a delicate balance between Western regulations, export restrictions, and the Kingdom’s drive for independence.

Political risks

IDC’s Samuel noted that initiatives like Humain can foster trust and alignment with national priorities, but added, “With the right oversight and governance, political risks can be managed and long-term AI development secured.”

Building a real AI power bloc in the Middle East is still a tough climb, the analysts said.

“Saudi Arabia’s ambition needs more than just cash to turn into real influence in the region,” said Singh. “They need shared tech foundations, common AI standards across countries, and everyone to agree on policies — and we’re not quite there yet.”

Making strong partnerships with other companies and countries will be key for Saudi Arabia to turn its big investments into lasting global influence, the analysts said, making sure its AI plans become more than just a showpiece.

Turning Saudi Arabia’s AI ambition into real regional power won’t be easy. “Money alone won’t get you there — you need shared foundations, aligned policies, and buy-in from the neighborhood,” said Singh.

Hackers are running a worldwide cyberespionage campaign dubbed 'RoundPress,' leveraging zero-day and n-day flaws in webmail servers to steal email from high-value government organizations. [...]

Chrome users are advised to update their browser immediately to fix a critical vulnerability that is being exploited to launch account takeover attacks.

In some environments, this could even give attackers the ability to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA).

The recently-reported vulnerability, one of four fixed in a Wednesday update, is tracked as CVE-2025-4664 and affects all versions of Chrome prior to version 136.0.7103.113.

Google’s advisory says very little about the flaw beyond stating, “Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2025-4664 exists in the wild.”

That explains the urgency of the fix being issued outside the normal update cycle, an ‘emergency patch’ if you like. These come along occasionally, and given the daily use of browsers, are always a priority for users and admins alike.

The FBI warned that cybercriminals using AI-generated audio deepfakes to target U.S. officials in voice phishing attacks that started in April. [...]

It hasn’t been that long since Apple had no status at all in enterprise IT. Its products were used in some creative departments and at home, but that’s as far as things went. The iPod and iPhone changed all that, even while general exposure to powerful mobile tech transformed perceptions around what to expect from the tools you use at work.

The Apple user experience is the company’s biggest not-so-secret weapon, and it is interesting that even decades since the first PCs appeared, Apple still delivers intuitive user experiences  people enjoy using.

Consumer simple, enterprise ready

Those user experiences have generated expectations, and as my old chum Dean Hager, former Jamf CEO liked to describe it, people entering the workplace wanted the systems they used there to be as easy and intuitive to understand as the Apple products they used elsewhere. Apple’s user experience eventually became something incoming enterprise employees expected — many would simply quit their job if they were using crummier tech at work than they were at home.

At the end of the day, Apple won the enterprise one consumer user at a time.

But the other piece to Apple’s success is that organizations that have deployed Apple products at scale have experienced significant improvements on their bottom line. Multiple reports tell us employees are happier using Apple products, they’re more productive using Apple products, and spend less on tech support on Apple products than on PCs. Staff retention rates improve even as productivity grows — and the reduced tech support costs make life easier for IT and dramatically reduce the Total Cost of Ownership of an Apple fleet. 

How Apple wins for enterprise IT

None of this came easy. Apple had to take its basic product (the Mac) and its OS X operating system and figure out how to best apply that tech to mobile devices. That’s what we began to get with the iPod and saw in living Technicolor with the iPhone; Apple took the power of computing and placed it inside the device you always have with you – your phone.

Of course, the ability to run more complex applications on your iPhone made it possible for employees to get more work done using the device, which spawned the Bring Your Own Device wave that really began to express itself around 2010.

Not only did employees want to be able to use the same platform at work as at home, but they also wanted to use the same mobile devices at work as at home. The biggest evidence of that was the abject failure of Windows Mobile as it showed people didn’t want to use the same PC they used at work in their mobile existences; they remained hooked on experience Apple’s ease-of-use. 

They did then. 

They do now.

The evidence is everywhere

You can see this is the direction of travel each time you read yet another report explaining Apple’s growing enterprise sales across all of its products, or the fast-proliferating number of Very Large Indeed Apple deployments at giant global companies. Not to mention that once employee choice schemes are put in place, the majority of employees seem to prefer Apple to any other platform. While it’s still early days on spatial computing, we can already see Vision Pro devices staking spaces across key industries as Apple takes what was once more or less the Mac experience and makes it both ambient and hyper-mobile.

Spatial computing isn’t just about computing that surrounds you, it’s about computing that takes you there.

Along this journey, Apple has thought deeply about what it offers and attempted to take down barriers to enterprise deployment. That’s why the company provides APIs for Mobile Device Management; that’s why it has high-grade security features I’m certain the company’s own CEO also uses, such as Lockdown Mode; that’s also why it remains so deeply committed to delivering regular software and hardware updates, so no enterprise professionals find themselves left insecure or abandoned on their workplace tech journey. 

Want to do more? You can, thanks to the company’s’ rich set of developer tools, which provide a robust environment for enterprise development and integration. 

Support and updates

The fact that Apple’s hardware is reliable is also good for enterprise sales. Coupled with annual software updates that bring sometimes-exciting new features, user engagement remains high throughout the usable life of these devices, which now usually extends to an easy five years. Once that time is up, the resilience and reliability of the devices means they still fetch good value in the second-user markets; most major purchasers might also draw reassurance that the recycling and salvaging of the products will have some impact on their own carbon targets. 

Enterprises also like reliability for another reason, it helps them plan ahead. 

Not only do they know that it is unlikely Apple will make too many major changes (though we do experience smaller ones), but they also know that unlike Windows 11, you will not wake one morning to find your PC has been updated to a new operating system without consent. These little communications do count, particularly if you are running several hundred systems in your fleet. You also cannot ignore the impact of the CrowdStrike debacle on that lovely feeling of peace and calm enterprises perhaps enjoyed before it took place.

Apple’s platform security may not be something we can take for granted any longer, but it still exists — and while it makes sense to stay watchful, it remains unmatched. Its major software updates remain free (at least until regulators utterly wreck the company’s business). That’s always an easy budget line item at the end of the day. 

What Apple gets wrong

It is interesting, given all that it gets right, the extent to which critics like to focus on what Apple gets wrong. Some of the most common criticisms could translate into easy wins for Apple: Yes, I think it should provide more in-depth granular information to assist enterprise IT deployments, but I would also argue that its free certification courses remain the best possible way to find the answers you need to begin managing larger or newer Apple deployments. Those courses are free, well-constructed and give you a thorough grounding for this work. Though I would really like Apple to give Configurator the power to register multiple devices at once – and a little more automation would come in useful to a lot of admins, particularly in the education sector. 

But what’s super-interesting about so many of the criticisms made around Apple in the enterprise is that they tend toward being smaller, more granular problems that the company could conceivably resolve once it stops pouring all of its R&D resources into AI development. 

And that’s my point, really — to quietly point out that the nature of the criticisms Apple’s current enterprise solutions receive actually reflect how successfully it has penetrated the sector. It is now being asked to solve really complex questions that reflect the myriad complexities of enterprise IT requirements. It won’t solve all of them overnight, but its progress in the sector since earlier this century suggests it will probably get around to resolving many of them, one challenge at a time.

And, rest assured, while Apple never speaks about it, I’m confident that the company does actually read criticism; it just needs to be selective concerning which challenges to solve first. And at times it must also consider whether those challenges will still be relevant a few years as tech deployment requirements change.

Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

Austrian privacy non-profit noyb (none of your business) has sent Meta's Irish headquarters a cease-and-desist letter, threatening the company with a class action lawsuit if it proceeds with its plans to train users' data for training its artificial intelligence (AI) models without an explicit opt-in. The move comes weeks after the social media behemoth announced its plans to train its AI modelsRavie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Nova Scotia Power confirms it suffered a data breach after threat actors stole sensitive customer data in a cybersecurity incident discovered last month. [...]

insta_photos – Shutterstock.com

As the spring 2025 edition of Fiverr’s “Business Trends Index” shows, companies are looking for specialists who can effectively implement AI agents. According to new data from the freelancer platform, search queries for this expertise have risen by 18,347% in the last six months. In Germany, inquiries increased by an even larger 19,033%.

According to Fiverr, this is due to technological advances in the field of agentic AI, which enable “digital colleagues” to perform tasks such as reading emails, scheduling meetings, or answering customer inquiries independently and without constant supervision. While experts predict that agentic AI could become a trillion-dollar market, many companies are struggling with the challenges of implementing the technology — so they’re turning to freelancers with these specific skills.

“Nearly 30% of my Fiverr assignments are for AI agent development, with demand shifting dramatically from simple chatbots to multi-agent systems that work across web, WhatsApp, and voice channels,” says Mark Kashef, an AI consultant on Fiverr and founder and CEO of Prompt Advisors. “Companies have gone from asking ‘What can AI do?’ to ‘How quickly can we integrate AI into our workflows?’ — with automation, voice and integration requests now making up 49% of my project pipeline.”

[ Related: Freelancers now represent more than one in four US workers ]

Yoav Hornung, Head of Verticals at Fiverr, explains the increased demand with the strong discrepancy between companies’ ambitions and their technical realities. Despite the great interest in AI agents, most companies do not know exactly what they are or how they can be used. This knowledge gap is driving the increased demand for freelancers.

“Now that generative AI is widely available, many companies are turning to freelancers to elevate their content with new perspectives, creativity, and expertise that will elevate their work beyond what automation alone can achieve,” says Hornung.

According to Fiverr, this paradox is reflected in the 641% increase in global demand for freelancers who can “humanize” AI content — rewriting chatbot scripts, marketing emails, and website content to make it appear more natural.

“I thought my copywriting services wouldn’t be as much in demand after the launch of ChatGPT, but I get requests almost daily to rework AI texts so they still sound human,” the platform operator quotes Gabrielle Gerbus, a freelance brand developer.

In addition to AI itself, companies are also increasingly relying on freelance experts to implement workflow automation tools. Fiverr data shows a growing demand for experts in workflow tools such as Go High Level (up 1,489%) and Make.com (up 1,083%). Experts who can create newsletters on trend platforms such as Substack (up 2,028%) and Beehiiv (up 1,211%) are also increasingly in demand.