Bitcoin culture, by nature, is anarchical and chaotic. It has to be, given the nature of Bitcoin itself and the people who adopted it: free-market libertarians who’ve gone all in on turning computer code into a form of money divorced from central banks, government intervention, and traceability. In short, it’s the exact opposite culture of Washington, DC, home of the federal government, where everyone agrees that the American dollar exists and is worth X amount because the government says so.
Artificial Intelligence
Bitcoin does cultural diplomacy in a dive bar
So it was a bizarre shock to K Street, the corporate lobbying heart of the nation’s capital, when it was announced that Pubkey, a Bitcoin-themed dive bar from New York City, would open its second location in downtown DC — smack dab in expense-card restaurant territory. And that’s to say nothing of the local city news sites. “Raise your hand if you plan to never set foot in there,” wrote a commenter on PoPville, a popular Washington blog that chronicles local news and had broken the news of Pubkey’s opening.
Crypto has a highly controversial reputation in town, even apart from its general cultural reputation: the Biden administration had been aggressive in trying to curb the industry’s growth, claiming that several major corporations did not have sufficient anti-money laundering protections in place. President Donald Trump’s full-bore tilt in the opposite direction — dropping the Department of Justice’s efforts to prosecute crypto crimes, pardoning several crypto executives who’d been found guilty of various financial crimes, making his own meme coin — has turned the regulation of digital tokens into a deeply partisan issue.
“Our top priority is trying to figure out how to soften that [hostility],” Thomas Pacchia, the founder of Pubkey’s New York City location, told me. To hear Pacchia put it, Pubkey DC — located strategically in the heart of DC’s lobbying neighborhood and close enough to Capitol Hill — was going to be a vessel for the Bitcoin community’s political aspirations and influence. But rather than dump money into endless lobbying against the interests of much larger crypto behemoths (and to say nothing of traditional financial institutions), Pubkey was going to do it through soft power. Instead of policy white papers and government affairs work, they were going to invite people — Republican, Democrat, important people, not-important people — into their quirky, very nice, superchill world, full of Bitcoiners who wanted to work with the government rather than evade them at all costs.
First things first: hide the wonky policy stuff behind the bar — literally.
I’d heard through the lobbyist grapevine that Pubkey would also share a lease with the Bitcoin Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank researching the social impact of the coin. I have never seen a Washington think tank whose entrance was behind a bar. In fact, when I attended Pubkey’s VIP preview in November, I couldn’t tell that this massive bar and event space, filled with old Chesterfield sofas and layered with Armenian rugs the size of studio apartments, contained an honest-to-goodness think tank, unless you saw the glowing neon sign that said BITCOIN POLICY INSTITUTE at the very, very back of the venue.
Between me and the entrance to BPI were a hundred-plus VIP guests — elected officials, Washington power players, and staffers galore. I initially planned on taking notes of who was in attendance. I soon gave up, because there was so much other stuff to look at.
In the two hours I was at the event, I saw the following:
- Two white Santas and one Black Santa
- A mariachi band
- US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent
- A man playing an electric double bass over his head
- Tammy Haddad, unofficial nonpartisan queen of DC society, claiming dibs on the podcast studio
- A stairway under a podcast studio that would eventually lead to a basement chophouse (not a steakhouse, a chophouse)
- Two troupes of Chinese lion dancers
- Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY)
- An portrait of Pepe the Frog dressed as Napoleon
- A negroni sbagliato served in a High Life bottle
- The word NAKAMOTO everywhere (as in Satoshi)
- A small lightboard with the current USD market value of Bitcoin (which has dropped precipitously from its summer highs)
- One baby Chinese lion dancer tottering behind the grown-up lion dancers
But the weirdest thing of all was how many people in the crowd were wearing suits.
This was exactly what Pacchia envisioned. “There are good dive bars and good hospitality in DC, for sure,” he told me later, wearing the Mario Kart bomber jacket that he’d worn in a photo with Secretary Bessent. “But the way the city operates, it’s very transient, depending on the administration: people coming and going, policymakers, staffers, the colleges and universities.” People, in other words, who could ultimately write the laws that regulate cryptocurrency like bitcoin.
The first part of that plan was to shape lawmakers’ understanding of Bitcoin, and to Pacchia, that meant bringing a curated version of Bitcoin’s oddball culture to DC: deeply nerdy protocol discussions set in a fun, affordable bar with a good burger and a secret chophouse and football and trivia and Mario Kart tournaments. But if young, broke staffers wanted to just get a post-work drink and not think about Bitcoin, other than the small sign behind the bar tracking the price of Bitcoin, that was fine too. “We wanted to cast a really wide net and just show people that the Bitcoin culture and the Bitcoin community is broadly misunderstood. We’re normal people, kind of nerdy, really into this thing. You can come here, and it’s not going to be a church.”
The advocacy part was definitely there, in the form of a giant event space behind the bar where Pubkey planned to host the evening events that make Washington run: fireside chats, summits, small conferences, and happy hours. There was even a large stage that could either be used for anything from panel discussions to live music. “DC’s more event driven,” said Pacchia, noting that the original Pubkey also hosts podcasts, panels, and get-togethers — just in a cramped Greenwich Village underground dive bar. “We wanted to combine all the different spaces that we have in New York, just with a lot more square footage to be able to host events.”
Loyal customers had been clamoring for Pubkeys in other cities, from San Francisco to Barcelona. Instead, Pubkey decided to go to a deeply partisan city where at least half of its residents loathed the concept of cryptocurrency. Sure, they had a few allies among the Democrats, such as Rep. Torres and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), but the majority of the party, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Biden, are hostile. It didn’t help that Trump had visited the New York Pubkey during his 2024 presidential campaign, paying for his smashburgers in Bitcoin, and Kamala Harris didn’t. (Pacchia says that he extended invites to both the Biden and Harris campaigns, but never heard back.) And even some Republicans remain hostile: the previous restaurant had been a popular hangout for Republican staffers and the reporters who covered them, and when it closed in April, one could hear people yelling Fuck bitcoin! from the karaoke room in the basement.
The concept of Pubkey as Bitcoin cultural diplomacy that transcended partisanship — a cryptocurrency version of Barack Obama’s beer summit — does sound overly idealistic in DC, where the current political climate has exacerbated people’s tendency to separate into Republican and Democrat bars. Liberals frequently gather to protest outside Butterworth’s, a recently opened gastropub whose investors include several high-profile MAGA influencers. A recent attempt to open a bipartisan bar, Political Pattie’s, was widely mocked by Republicans and Democrats alike — so much that it closed within 75 days.
But at its core, Pubkey DC is a pro-Bitcoin interest group that happens to be inside a bar capturing those elusive yet attainable Cozy Vibes: an affordable menu, a lot of comfy couches, and enough TVs to air as many major sporting events as possible. (They are probably going to host a Super Bowl party.) And crucially, it’s edited out all the elements of a culture that would horrify politicians — the kind that would result in, say, fraudsters pulling multibillion-dollar scams while living in a Bermuda polycule, or shady actors ordering drugs and assassinations on the Silk Road, or wealthy people being kidnapped and held hostage for their crypto. (At least downtown DC is heavily policed.)
The venue already has a few high-profile cheerleaders — including Tammy Haddad, the founder of Haddad Media, whose name is synonymous with the concept of throwing huge parties and exclusive events full of Washington’s most influential people.
When I got on the phone with Haddad, she had just come from another Pubkey event, Crypto Christmas, where three leading Senators were in attendance — Cynthia Lummis, Bill Hagerty, and Tim Scott — and dozens of young Capitol Hill staffers. “Who would think Crypto Christmas would be on 7th Street?” she told The Verge in an interview. “Some people might think it would be at the Willard Hotel or the Four Seasons, but no.”
Haddad, also the founder of the Washington AI Network, compared Pubkey’s ethos to net neutrality’s grassroots approach to winning political capital. “Back then it was more astroturfing and in states. But this is right in the downtown community, not [just with] lobbyists, but everyone else that they can bring into the party. It’s an interesting idea. I would argue it’s a new kind of coalition building.”
As she viewed it, Bitcoin and crypto was now in the next stage of its yearslong plan to gain legitimacy: now that they had a handful of strong political allies in the states and inside Washington, they needed to play the long game by opening the discussion about Bitcoin’s future to anyone and everyone who could not score an invite to an exclusive event for policymakers at the Four Seasons. And, more importantly, they needed to show the political world that Bitcoin was not a coin solely defined by its extremely dark and checkered past.
“It’s not like Pubkey is just trying to sell drinks,” she said.
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Artificial Intelligence
Ronnie Sheth, CEO, SENEN Group: Why now is the time for enterprise AI to ‘get practical'
Before you set sail on your AI journey, always check the state of your data – because if there is one thing likely to sink your ship, it is data quality.
Gartner estimates that poor data quality costs organisations an average of $12.9 million each year in wasted resources and lost opportunities. That’s the bad news. The good news is that organisations are increasingly understanding the importance of their data quality – and less likely to fall into this trap.
That’s the view of Ronnie Sheth, CEO of AI strategy, execution and governance firm SENEN Group. The company focuses on data and AI advisory, operationalisation and literacy, and Sheth notes she has been in the data and AI space ‘ever since [she] was a corporate baby’, so there is plenty of real-world experience behind the viewpoint. There is also plenty of success; Sheth notes that her company has a 99.99% client repeat rate.
“If I were to be very practical, the one thing I’ve noticed is companies jump into adopting AI before they’re ready,” says Sheth. Companies, she notes, will have an executive direction insisting they adopt AI, but without a blueprint or roadmap to accompany it. The result may be impressive user numbers, but with no measurable outcome to back anything up.
Even as recently as 2024, Sheth saw many organisations struggling because their data was ‘nowhere where it needed to be.’ “Not even close,” she adds. Now, the conversation has turned more practical and strategic. Companies are realising this, and coming to SENEN Group initially to get help with their data, rather than wanting to adopt AI immediately.
“When companies like that come to us, the first course of order is really fixing their data,” says Sheth. “The next course of order is getting to their AI model. They are building a strong foundation for any AI initiative that comes after that.
“Once they fix their data, they can build as many AI models as they want, and they can have as many AI solutions as they want, and they will get accurate outputs because now they have a strong foundation,” Sheth adds.
With breadth and depth in expertise, SENEN Group allows organisations to right their course. Sheth notes the example of one customer who came to them wanting a data governance initiative. Ultimately, it was the data strategy which was needed – the why and how, the outcomes of what they were trying to do with their data – before adding in governance and providing a roadmap for an operating model. “They’ve moved from raw data to descriptive analytics, moving into predictive analytics, and now we’re actually setting up an AI strategy for them,” says Sheth.
It is this attitude and requirement for practical initiatives which will be the cornerstone of Sheth’s discussion at AI & Big Data Expo Global in London this week. “Now would be the time to get practical with AI, especially enterprise AI adoption, and not think about ‘look, we’re going to innovate, we’re going to do pilots, we’re going to experiment,’” says Sheth. “Now is not the time to do that. Now is the time to get practical, to get AI to value. This is the year to do that in the enterprise.”
Watch the full video conversation with Ronnie Sheth below:
Greg Holmes, Field CTO for EMEA at Apptio, an IBM company, argues that successfully scaling intelligent automation requires financial rigour.
The “build it and they will come” model of technology adoption often leaves a hole in the budget when applied to automation. Executives frequently find that successful pilot programmes do not translate into sustainable enterprise-wide deployments because initial financial modelling ignored the realities of production scaling.
“When we integrate FinOps capabilities with automation, we’re looking at a change from being very reactive on cost management to being very proactive around value engineering,” says Holmes.
This shifts the assessment criteria for technical leaders. Rather than waiting “months or years to assess whether things are getting value,” engineering teams can track resource consumption – such as cost per transaction or API call – “straight from the beginning.”
The unit economics of scaling intelligent automation
Innovation projects face a high mortality rate. Holmes notes that around 80 percent of new innovation projects fail, often because financial opacity during the pilot phase masks future liabilities.
“If a pilot demonstrates that automating a process saves, say, 100 hours a month, leadership thinks that’s really successful,” says Holmes. “But what it fails to track is that the pilot sometimes is running on over-provisioned infrastructure, so it looks like it performs really well. But you wouldn’t over-provision to that degree during a real production rollout.”
Moving that workload to production changes the calculus. The requirements for compute, storage, and data transfer increase. “API calls can multiply, exceptions and edge cases appear at volume that might have been out of scope for the pilot phase, and then support overheads just grow as well,” he adds.
To prevent this, organisations must track the marginal cost at scale. This involves monitoring unit economics, such as the cost per customer served or cost per transaction. If the cost per customer increases as the customer base grows, the business model is flawed.
Conversely, effective scaling should see these unit costs decrease. Holmes cites a case study from Liberty Mutual where the insurer was able to find around $2.5 million of savings by bringing in consumption metrics and “not just looking at labour hours that they were saving.”
However, financial accountability cannot sit solely with the finance department. Holmes advocates for putting governance “back in the hands of the developers into their development tools and workloads.”
Integration with infrastructure-as-code tools like HashiCorp Terraform and GitHub allows organisations to enforce policies during deployment. Teams can spin up resources programmatically with immediate cost estimates.
“Rather than deploying things and then fixing them up, which gets into the whole whack-a-mole kind of problem,” Holmes explains, companies can verify they are “deploying the right things at the right time.”
When scaling intelligent automation, tension often simmers between the CFO, who focuses on return on investment, and the Head of Automation, who tracks operational metrics like hours saved.
“This translation challenge is precisely what TBM (Technology Business Management) and Apptio are designed to solve,” says Holmes. “It’s having a common language between technology and finance and with the business.”
The TBM taxonomy provides a standardised framework to reconcile these views. It maps technical resources (such as compute, storage, and labour) into IT towers and further up to business capabilities. This structure translates technical inputs into business outputs.
“I don’t necessarily know what goes into all the IT layers underneath it,” Holmes says, describing the business user’s perspective. “But because we’ve got this taxonomy, I can get a detailed bill that tells me about my service consumption and precisely which costs are driving it to be more expensive as I consume more.”
Addressing legacy debt and budgeting for the long-term
Organisations burdened by legacy ERP systems face a binary choice: automation as a patch, or as a bridge to modernisation. Holmes warns that if a company is “just trying to mask inefficient processes and not redesign them,” they are merely “building up more technical debt.”
A total cost of ownership (TCO) approach helps determine the correct strategy. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia utilised a TCO model across 2,000 different applications – of various maturity stages – to assess their full lifecycle costs. This analysis included hidden costs such as infrastructure, labour, and the engineering time required to keep automation running.
“Just because of something’s legacy doesn’t mean you have to retire it,” says Holmes. “Some of those legacy systems are worth maintaining just because the value is so good.”
In other cases, calculating the cost of the automation wrappers required to keep an old system functional reveals a different reality. “Sometimes when you add up the TCO approach, and you’re including all these automation layers around it, you suddenly realise, the real cost of keeping that old system alive is not just the old system, it’s those extra layers,” Holmes argues.
Avoiding sticker shock requires a budgeting strategy that balances variable costs with long-term commitments. While variable costs (OPEX) offer flexibility, they can fluctuate wildly based on demand and engineering efficiency.
Holmes advises that longer-term visibility enables better investment decisions. Committing to specific technologies or platforms over a multi-year horizon allows organisations to negotiate economies of scale and standardise architecture.
“Because you’ve made those longer term commitments and you’ve standardised on different platforms and things like that, it makes it easier to build the right thing out for the long term,” Holmes says.
Combining tight management of variable costs with strategic commitments supports enterprises in scaling intelligent automation without the volatility that often derails transformation.
IBM is a key sponsor of this year’s Intelligent Automation Conference Global in London on 4-5 February 2026. Greg Holmes and other experts will be sharing their insights during the event. Be sure to check out the day one panel session, Scaling Intelligent Automation Successfully: Frameworks, Risks, and Real-World Lessons, to hear more from Holmes and swing by IBM’s booth at stand #362.
See also: Klarna backs Google UCP to power AI agent payments
Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.
AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.
FedEx is using AI to change how package tracking and returns work for large enterprise shippers. For companies moving high volumes of goods, tracking no longer ends when a package leaves the warehouse. Customers expect real-time updates, flexible delivery options, and returns that do not turn into support tickets or delays.
That pressure is pushing logistics firms to rethink how tracking and returns operate at scale, especially across complex supply chains.
This is where artificial intelligence is starting to move from pilot projects into daily operations.
FedEx plans to roll out AI-powered tracking and returns tools designed for enterprise shippers, according to a report by PYMNTS. The tools are aimed at automating routine customer service tasks, improving visibility into shipments, and reducing friction when packages need to be rerouted or sent back.
Rather than focusing on consumer-facing chatbots, the effort centres on operational workflows that sit behind the scenes. These are the systems enterprise customers rely on to manage exceptions, returns, and delivery changes without manual intervention.
How FedEx is applying AI to package tracking
Traditional tracking systems tell customers where a package is and when it might arrive. AI-powered tracking takes a step further by utilising historical delivery data, traffic patterns, weather conditions, and network constraints to flag potential delays before they happen.
According to the PYMNTS report, FedEx’s AI tools are designed to help enterprise shippers anticipate issues earlier in the delivery process. Instead of reacting to missed delivery windows, shippers may be able to reroute packages or notify customers ahead of time.
For businesses that ship thousands of parcels per day, that shift matters. Small improvements in prediction accuracy can reduce support calls, lower refund rates, and improve customer trust, particularly in retail, healthcare, and manufacturing supply chains.
This approach also reflects a broader trend in enterprise software, in which AI is being embedded into existing systems rather than introduced as standalone tools. The goal is not to replace logistics teams, but to minimise the number of manual decisions they need to make.
Returns as an operational problem, not a customer issue
Returns are one of the most expensive parts of logistics. For enterprise shippers, particularly those in e-commerce, returns affect warehouse capacity, inventory planning, and transportation costs.
According to PYMNTS, FedEx’s AI-enabled returns tools aim to automate parts of the returns process, including label generation, routing decisions, and status updates. Companies that use AI to determine the most efficient return path may be able to reduce delays and avoid returning things to the wrong facility.
This is less about convenience and more about operational discipline. Returns that sit idle or move through the wrong channel create cost and uncertainty across the supply chain. AI systems trained on past return patterns can help standardise decisions that were previously handled case by case.
For enterprise customers, this type of automation supports scale. As return volumes fluctuate, especially during peak seasons, systems that adjust automatically reduce the need for temporary staffing or manual overrides.
What FedEx’s AI tracking approach says about enterprise adoption
What stands out in FedEx’s approach is how narrowly focused the AI use case is. There are no broad claims about transformation or reinvention. The emphasis is on reducing friction in processes that already exist.
This mirrors how other large organisations are adopting AI internally. In a separate context, Microsoft described a similar pattern in its article. The company outlined how AI tools were rolled out gradually, with clear limits, governance rules, and feedback loops.
While Microsoft’s case focused on knowledge work and FedEx’s on logistics operations, the underlying lesson is the same. AI adoption tends to work best when applied to specific activities with measurable results rather than broad promises of efficiency.
For logistics firms, those advantages include fewer delivery exceptions, lower return handling costs, and better coordination between shipping partners and enterprise clients.
What this signals for enterprise customers
For end-user companies, FedEx’s move signals that logistics providers are investing in AI as a way to support more complex shipping demands. As supply chains become more distributed, visibility and predictability become harder to maintain without automation.
AI-driven tracking and returns could also change how businesses measure logistics performance. Companies may focus less on delivery speed and more on how quickly issues are recognised and resolved.
That shift could influence procurement decisions, contract structures, and service-level agreements. Enterprise customers may start asking not just where a shipment is, but how well a provider anticipates problems.
FedEx’s plans reflect a quieter phase of enterprise AI adoption. The focus is less on experimentation and more on integration. These systems are not designed to draw attention but to reduce noise in operations that customers only notice when something goes wrong.
(Photo by Liam Kevan)
See also: PepsiCo is using AI to rethink how factories are designed and updated
Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events, click here for more information.
AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.
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