Rob Strechay

VentureBeat names Rob Strechay as its first Lead Analyst, expanding its enterprise AI research push

Rob Strechay, until recently managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research, has joined VentureBeat as our first Lead Analyst and a founding analyst of VentureBeat Research. His arrival is the next step in a deliberate move at VentureBeat toward deeper specialization: analysis built for the technical decision-makers — the directors, VPs, CIOs, and CTOs — who are evaluating, buying, and deploying enterprise AI.

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Microsoft AI’s MAI-Transcribe-2 undercuts OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs on price and speed

That figure deserves a pause. When Microsoft AI shipped the first model in this line just five months ago, it charged $0.36 an hour. Thursday's early-bird price cuts that by roughly 72%. For an enterprise processing 100,000 hours of call-center audio a year — a modest volume for a large bank or telecom — the bill drops from $36,000 to $10,000. At that level, transcription stops being a line item anyone argues about.

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Your files stay put: Perplexity’s hybrid AI keeps confidential data off the cloud

The company says it is the first time an AI agent can begin a task in the cloud and dynamically hand off the confidential portions of that same task to a model running on the user's own hardware, without restarting the job or losing context. The feature becomes available today through Perplexity's desktop app for enterprise customers that opt in, as well as Pro and Max subscribers, on any Apple silicon Mac running macOS 15 or later.