News

St. Louis – September 28, 2026 -- Balto Software has launched Kodi, an AI coworker for contact center leaders that moves beyond generating insights to directly executing approved changes across the tools teams use to run daily operations.

Kodi investigates problems and implements fixes without manual handoffs

Kodi can investigate underlying customer interactions, identify factors driving a given outcome, and present evidence before recommending a course of action. Once a leader reviews and approves the recommendation, Kodi executes it directly within Balto's platform through Agent Assist, coaching modules, QA scorecards, compliance scorecards, Notes, dynamic prompts, checklists, dashboards, and data fields.

Kyle Jones, VP of Product at Balto, said most insights tools stop at identifying a problem, while Kodi is designed to carry the process through to execution inside the platform.

San Francisco – – September 28, 2026 -- Fulcrum has launched a certificate workflow that turns an emailed request into a complete, endorsement-ready certificate in under a minute, built on the same policy data the platform already uses for policy checking and proposal generation.

Fulcrum reads the policy instead of filling a template

The workflow parses the inbound request and any attached contract, compares the demanded coverage against what the client's policy actually provides, and flags requests the policy cannot satisfy before an account manager commits to anything. It locates the relevant endorsement forms inside the policy itself, pulls them, sorts them by the situation they apply to, and attaches them, using description-of-operations language the agency has already approved and shaped to each client's preferences. Account managers review and approve every certificate before it issues.

Denver – September 28, 2026 -- Vertafore has launched its Velocity Document Intelligence Agent, an AI tool that cut document research time by up to 90% in early testing, reducing tasks that took 20 minutes to just two minutes.

AI agent automates research across insurance documents

Available within Vertafore's ImageRight platform, the Document Intelligence Agent lets agency, MGA, and carrier teams ask questions in natural language to search across Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, images, and emails. The tool synthesizes answers with document- and page-level source citations, using contextual meaning rather than keyword matching to surface relevant information.

West Palm Beach – September 28, 2026 -- Sterling Organization has acquired a three-property, grocery-anchored shopping center portfolio totaling 277,057 square feet on behalf of its Sterling United Properties (SUP) fund series. The portfolio is 99% leased collectively and spans two California assets and one Hawaii property, each anchored by a Safeway supermarket.

Portfolio combines Bay Area and Honolulu assets across 277,057 square feet

The acquisition includes Safeway Burlingame, a 70,174-square-foot center that is 100% leased, and Pleasanton Gateway Shopping Center, a 128,275-square-foot property that is 99% leased, both in the San Francisco Bay Area. The third asset, Kapahulu Shopping Center in Honolulu, totals 78,608 square feet and is 97% leased, marking Sterling's first investment in Hawaii.

Rosemont, Ill. – September 28, 2026 -- More than 75 million people in the United States live in a county without a vascular surgeon, according to new county-level data released by the American College of Surgeons (ACS), exposing a care gap as the population most vulnerable to vascular disease grows sharply toward 2030, when all baby boomers will be at least 65.

New mapping tool counts just 4,685 vascular surgeons across 3,144 U.S. counties

The ACS Surgical Workforce Mapping Tool, built with the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS), found an average of 1.4 vascular surgeons per 100,000 people nationwide. While 290 hospital referral regions contain at least one vascular surgeon, 2,320 counties within those same regions have none, showing that regional averages mask local access failures.

Stamford, Conn. – September 28, 2026 -- Charter Communications' Spectrum brand has activated compute capacity across more than 1,000 owned and operated edge data centers, placing processing power within 10 milliseconds of 500 million connected devices in U.S. homes and businesses.

The buildout, branded Edge Compute Infrastructure (ECI) and powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing platforms, combines Spectrum's fiber network with distributed facilities to move AI processing closer to where data is generated -- a requirement as AI shifts from answering text prompts to controlling physical machines such as robots and sensors.

Grapevine, Texas – September 28, 2026 -- Kubota Tractor Corporation has named ten community nonprofits as winners of its 2026 Hometown Proud grant program, each receiving $25,000 in cash and $25,000 toward Kubota equipment purchases, totaling $500,000 in combined funding and machinery across the country.

Program draws more than 1,100 applications in its sixth year

Kubota's review process selected 10 winners from over 1,100 submissions, covering agricultural education, workforce development, food security, youth empowerment and environmental stewardship projects. Since the program launched, Kubota has distributed more than $2.9 million in total funding and equipment to hometown initiatives nationwide.

Boston – September 28, 2026 -- John Hancock has expanded its protection insurance portfolio, enhancing its Protection Indexed Universal Life solution (Protection IUL 26) and its term life insurance suite to give financial professionals more tools for addressing clients' long-term planning needs.

Longevity Preparedness Index shows US adults score just 60 out of 100

John Hancock's 2025 Longevity Preparedness Index, developed with the MIT AgeLab, found that U.S. adults averaged only 60 out of 100 in overall preparedness for longer lives. The study, based on a representative sample of 1,307 Americans surveyed between May 14 and June 5, 2025, found planning needs extend across health, care, housing, community, and major life transitions—beyond a single financial goal.

Dallas – September 28, 2026 -- Conifers has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Standalone AI SOC Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment (doc # US54127026, September 2026), the company announced.

Conifers' CognitiveSOC platform unifies fragmented security operations into one adaptive system

The recognition arrives as security operations centers confront autonomous agents built on frontier models capable of discovering vulnerabilities and moving across systems at machine speed. Conifers built its CognitiveSOCTM platform to connect threat intelligence, threat hunting, detection engineering, investigation, and remediation into a single continuously adapting operating layer, replacing disconnected tools and manual handoffs. Every CognitiveSOC decision includes a reasoning trace analysts can inspect, with machine-speed actions constrained by permissions, policies, and approval thresholds set by security teams.

New Orleans – September 28, 2026 -- LabWare has launched LabWare WATER, a cloud-based SaaS platform designed to help smaller municipal water utilities manage sampling, laboratory testing, documentation, and regulatory reporting from a single system.

LabWare unveils WATER platform to cut compliance paperwork for utilities

The solution targets utilities that test in-house, outsource to contract laboratories, or run hybrid operations, replacing spreadsheets and paper records with a unified SaaS system. LabWare WATER covers the full compliance lifecycle, from scheduling monthly, quarterly, annual, and event-driven sampling to tracking chain-of-custody documentation and flagging exceedances, missing results, and overdue reporting deadlines.