Weekly output: AT&T’s mass-market plans, digital transformations, ROI of AI, AI in Android and Chrome development, Firefox as anti-Chrome, AT&T’s Build-A-Plan, DeepMind CEO on AGI, Starship v3 launch

After yet another week of travel–this time to the Bay Area, spending one day in San Jose at TechEx North America and then the next two days at Google I/O–I’m not going anywhere for the next two work weeks. I’m happy about that.

In addition to everything below, I wrote a post for Patreon readers about two recent challenges I experienced with public speaking: doing a solo PowerPoint presentation and then moderating a panel without being able to see how much time was left or even revise my handwritten notes.

5/18/2026: AT&T’s mass-markets chief: Consumers aren’t ‘chomping at the bit for 6G’, Light Reading

I interviewed Jenifer Robertson, executive vice president and general manager of mass markets at AT&T, at the wireless trade group CTIA’s summer in D.C. two weeks ago, and then getting some clarification about that company’s fiber-buildout plans took longer than I would have expected.

5/18/2026: Fireside Chat: My Transformation Stalled–What’s Gone Wrong?, TechEx North America

The first of two panels i did at TechEx in my second year speaking at this conference had me quizzing Manav Khatri, VP of product and strategy at Ford Credit, and Romona Brown, North American president at Prosci, about how companies can go awry when trying to advance digital transformations of legacy platforms.

5/18/2026: Panel: Measuring Success: ROI of AI and Automation in Business Transformation, TechEx North America

My second panel at TechEx, in the potentially dicey postprandial timeslot, had me quizzing Leo Le Hoang Dung, director of manufacturing digital systems and regional digital transformation at Procter & Gamble; Alice Hilson, senior director of digital innovation and enterprise technology at DuPont; and Brenton House, IBM’s principal advisor for automation and emerging technology. I was pleasantly surprised to see the number of people watching exceed the seats available.

5/19/2026: Google Unwraps Plans to Put AI to Work for Android, Web Developers, PCMag

I wrote part of this on the day before Google I/O and the rest early in the morning before the opening keynote.

5/20/2026: Firefox wants to be the anti-Chrome browser for the AI era, Fast Company

I scheduled an interview at Web Summit Vancouver with Ajit Varma, Mozilla’s head of Firefox, without realizing that my Fast Co. editor Harry McCracken had also booked time with him. But Harry didn’t have time to write something from his interview and generously handed his recording to me.

5/21/2026: AT&T Adds a New (But Retro) Wireless Plan Option: Data By the Bucket, PCMag

My advance copy of AT&T’s press release didn’t mention some important details, so I appreciated an AT&T publicist fielding questions I sent late in the day from Pacific Time while he was working in Central Time.

5/22/2026: DeepMind CEO: ‘AGI’ Is Coming Soon, But Here’s the Test It Must Pass First, PCMag

My one datelined I/O post from Mountain View covered a talk that DeepMind CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis did with Axios co-founder Mike Allen that shed a little light about how one of the more accomplished people in AI sees where this technology is going.

5/23/2026: SpaceX Starship Hits Some Targets, Misses Others on Latest Test Flight, PCMag

I was ready to write about a launch of SpaceX’s Starship v3 Thursday, but a series of last-minute scrubs pushed that test flight to Friday and gave me enough time to write a little more of the story in advance.

Weekly output: WiFi hotspots, Android 17 + Gemini Intelligence, earning trust in AI, staying IRL in an AI world, AI image generation, photonics + data centers, Bill Gross on AI

SAN JOSE, Calif.–I’m back on the West Coast only three days after returning from Web Summit Vancouver, and my excuse for yet another transcon flight involves two different events: TechEx North America at the convention center here, where I’m moderating two panels Monday, and then Google I/O a little up the peninsula in Mountain View Tuesday and Wednesday. This is my second year at the first event but will be my 12th in-person I/O.

5/11/2026: The Best Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wirecutter

This update to this guide was originally going to review the Franklin A70 hotspot that AT&T introduced last year, but as I was about to file my edits I learned that AT&T was discontinuing that model. So I took out all of the copy assessing the A70 and restored the discussion of older models, which still left plenty of new text covering, among other things, how most high-end smartphone plans now include more data than you get with hotspot-only plans.

5/12/2026: In Android 17, ‘Gemini Intelligence’ Can Automate Tasks Across Apps, PCMag

Google dumped an enormous amount of news one week before I/O, to the point that I needed almost 1,200 words to cover it without even getting into Googlebook laptops, since PCMag’s Michael Kan wrote up that part of Google’s news. I trust that Google left something else to announce onstage at I/O Tuesday.

5/12/2026: Data done right: Earning consumer trust in an AI-first world. Web Summit

This was the second year in a row I had a Web Summit Vancouver panel featuring Pamela Snively, chief data and trust officer with Telus Communications. Knowing my fellow speaker’s conversational style made this panel easy; the topic was also a good one to explore.

5/12/2026: The Analog Renaissance, Why Human Connection and IRL Is the Most Radical Innovation, Frontier Collective

I showed up 5 minutes late to this offsite panel hosted by a local tech group because my floatplane joyride ended almost 30 minutes later than scheduled, a timing failure that in retrospect seems like something I was asking for. I then had a fun discussion with my fellow speakers–Raven White, TED’s director of audience development and community; Heather Odendaal, WNORTH CEO and founder; and Johnny Rodgers, a founding principal engineer at Slack–but I feel bad about inflicting “where is Rob?” uncertainty on the organizers and forcing emcee Theodora Jean to field my position for the first few minutes.

5/13/2026: What it actually takes to train frontier models, Web Summit

This was a late addition to my schedule, leaving no time for a prep call beforehand with Black Forest Labs co-founder Tim Dockhorn. That, in turn, meant I only discovered on stage that he can answer questions exceedingly briefly–which required me to improv a bunch of new questions. This sort of thing has happened on panels before; this time, I didn’t feel like I was flailing around onstage quite so much.

5/14/2026: Can Photonics Make the AI Data Center Boom More Palatable?, PCMag

Since my research for this started at NTT Research’s Upgrade conference in mid April, I was happy I finally got this written–including quotes from my interview of the photonics firm Taara’s CEO at Web Summit Vancouver that helped this post be about more than just the expenses-comped NTT event. I was not so happy to discover that I left two errors into the copy, one about the distances that Taara’s silicon-photonics chipset can send data through the air and another about this firm’s spot in the extended Google corporate universe.

5/15/2026: Bill Gross thinks AI companies are running out of ways to avoid paying creators, Fast Company

This is the first time in a long time–maybe ever, actually–where I wrote a story from an interview as an edited transcript instead of writing a more-structured piece with selected quotes plugged in where I saw fit. I enjoyed the challenge of finding the most enlightening exchanges about the longtime Silicon Valley founder and investor’s new venture ProRata and the state of AI in general out of 6,000-plus words of AI-generated transcript from my phone’s Google Recorder app (which I then checked by playing back the original recording).

Live at TechEx Europe 2025 in Amsterdam, booth 261.
Swing by for a quick Passbolt demo, a chat about open-source credential management, grab some swag or just to say hi. 👋

#TechExEurope #TechEx #OpenSource #Cybersecurity #PasswordManager

Attending TechEx 2025? The Passbolt team will be at RAI Amsterdam on 24–25 September.

Visit booth 261 for a live demo, a chat about open source, security or anything else, and a few freebies. 🎁

📅 See you there!

#TechEx #TechExEurope #OpenSource #DevOps #PasswordManager

Passbolt is heading to TechEx 2025!

The team will be at RAI, Amsterdam from 24 - 25 September, 2025. Join us for a live product demo, fun conversations about open source password manager, cybersecurity or really anything.

If you're attending, stop by at Stand 261 and you could walk away with some cool freebies. 🎁

#TechEx #TechExEurope #OpenSource #DevOps #PasswordManager