Digital Transformation

United States – October 27, 2026 -- WaitWell released staff booking links that let each staff member create up to 10 links per location, alongside a rebuilt staff scheduling view, and announced a larger release for November.

Staff booking links open a booking site with the person preselected

Each link opens the booking site with that staff member already selected, photo and bio included. Links can be fixed to one service or leave the choice to the customer, and they can carry an expiry date. Staff can turn off or delete a link at any time, and the list shows how many times each link has been opened and offers a QR code.

Staff can also store their own meeting link in a profile section under account preferences. That link is used when they are assigned to a ticket. If none is on file, WaitWell creates one.

Canada – October 27, 2026 -- Service-operations software provider WaitWell grew 500% over three years and ranked No. 57 of 375 on Canada's Top Growing Companies list.

The platform has served nearly 45 million people and saved more than 12.8 million hours of waiting. Thousands of service locations across the United States and Canada have adopted it over the period.

Existing clients drive a significant share of WaitWell's growth

Growth came from two sources: new clients and existing clients that widened their use of the platform. The company says the second group accounted for a significant portion of the increase.

New clients include the Nevada DMV, Vancouver Coastal Health, SKIMS and UC Berkeley.

Clients typically expand in stages. A client may start with queue management, then add scheduling, more locations and more service types.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- Some 89% of organizations surveyed for the World Quality Report 2025 are piloting or deploying GenAI-augmented Quality Engineering (QE), but only 15% have reached enterprise-wide implementation. Respondents reported an average productivity gain of 19%. Vendors such as AppsTek are pitching agentic QE as a way to hold down testing unit costs as release volumes grow.

Maintenance work pushes up the cost of enterprise test automation

Each release adds workflows, integrations and regression paths while QE budgets stay tightly controlled. The pressure shows up in maintenance, contractor spend, rework and cost per release.

Singapore – October 27, 2026 -- Teekay hosted two interns for 12 weeks through a Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) program, and one of them built a machine learning workflow to forecast vessel earnings from voyage, market, bunker, port and utilization data.

Intern deploys fleet procurement website in Singapore

Data analytics student Jonathon Lee worked on procurement and commercial analytics under Yi Chuen Ho, Regional Commercial Operations Manager, and Sajeev Soman, Manager, Procurements & Contracts. He built and deployed a fleet procurement website end to end, with dashboards for spares delivery and port call costs.

He also automated a previously manual charterer name-matching process.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- Teekay Tankers has named this quarter's winners of its Hazard Reporting Awards, recognizing the vessel teams that reported the highest number of hazards through the company's cloud-based digital platform.

Teekay Tankers turns hazard reporting into a quarterly team contest

The company has gamified the process. Vessels are placed into teams that compete every quarter to report the most hazards. Winners are recognized publicly and receive a prize.

Seafarers log unsafe acts and conditions on a mobile-friendly platform

Crews use the platform to flag unsafe acts or unsafe conditions on board as they notice them. Early and frequent reporting lets senior management implement corrective action outside regular on-board inspections.

United States – October 27, 2026 -- An analysis of 5,723 patients on Foundayo (oral orforglipron) found that 40.3% had no evidence of prior GLP-1 medication use, according to Truveta, which is pitching real-time "healthcare intelligence" to life science, healthcare and government teams.

Foundayo uptake runs mostly through primary care

Truveta researchers used Truveta Data to identify patients with a Foundayo prescription or medication dispense between April 1 and July 6, 2026. The drug was approved for obesity in April 2026.

General practice clinicians accounted for 60.0% of prescriptions, and advanced practice providers for another 31.9%. Only 0.1% of patients had evidence of recent oral semaglutide use.

United States – October 27, 2026 -- Computer-assisted navigation was used in 41.0% of endoscopic sinus surgeries in 2026, up from 29.2% in 2018, a 40.4% relative increase, according to a Truveta Data analysis of adult patients.

Navigation used in 35.5% of 98,971 procedures over the study period

The analysis covered endoscopic sinus surgeries performed between January 1, 2018, and August 31, 2026. Visits within 90 days of a prior surgery code were counted as a single procedure. Navigation was identified through a specific add-on CPT code.

HANOI – October 27, 2026 -- Viettel High Technology Industries Corporation has migrated more than 100 million subscribers and about 5,000 tariff plans at Viettel, Vietnam's largest mobile operator, to its in-house cloud-native charging system vOCS 4.0. The three-month cutover ran on a live national network with no service disruption.

Phased cutover with instant rollback limits the risk of replacing a charging system

Replacing a charging system is one of the riskiest projects an operator can undertake, and many operators therefore stay on legacy platforms. Viettel High Tech, part of Viettel Group, reduced the risk through real-time data synchronization, parallel running and a phased cutover, with instant rollback at every stage.

Brazil – October 27, 2026 -- Brazilian flat glass maker Vivix expects to cut furnace energy consumption by 3%-5%, extend furnace lifespan by one year and shorten its data collection and analytics cycle by 80%, based on a pilot of an executable digital twin (xDT) built with Siemens, Snowflake and NVIDIA.

Vivix targets blind spots in 1,550°C-1,600°C float-glass furnaces

The furnace is one of the most critical and hardest-to-observe assets in float-glass production. At operating temperatures of roughly 1,550°C to 1,600°C, teams have limited direct visibility into how combustion gases, molten glass and refractory walls interact. Vivix supplies glass and mirrors to the construction and furniture markets.

Portland – October 27, 2026 -- Multnomah County, Oregon, migrated a decade-old SQL Server environment to a modern data platform in five months, a timeline that public sector organizations often stretch over years, according to a session at this year's Snowflake Summit.

Multnomah County replaces undocumented SQL Server estate with AI-assisted migration

The county's legacy environment spanned dozens of business intelligence workloads and had been built by engineers who had since left. Documentation was sparse, the architecture was inconsistent and costs were climbing.