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Bloody Action Hands-on: Ninja Gaiden Ragebound is NES-inspired, retro ninja action done right, and the perfect entrée to whet your appetite for Ninja Gaiden 4 In a preview of The Game Kitchen's next title, Ninja Gaiden loses a dimension, but keeps the quality. Image credit: VG247 Article by Connor Makar Staff Writer Published on April 16, 2025 Some things are just better together. Wine and cheese. Salt and Pepper. Bass drum and hi-hat. All these are good, but having played through The Game Kitchen's next bloody action romp, Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, I'm convinced some of that one combination deserves a spot pretty high up the list of all-time best pairings: Ninja Gaiden and 2D. The Game Kitchen proves the combo is just as effective as it was in the NES days. For those who don't know, The Game Kitchen was responsible for the excellent Blasphemous and Blasphemous 2, which brought side-scrolling action gameplay, gorgeous art, and rich religious theming together in a wonderful blend I can't help but recommend. It seems the team, fresh from depicting rampant violence of a Catholic nature, has decided to put down the Mea Culpa and pick up the Ninjato. You couldn't have picked a better team to make Ragebound, as the gory combat, traversal, and deep-rooted challenge makes the transition seamlessly. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. When first discussing Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, there are three main topics of merit: the gameplay itself, the presentation, and the difficulty. The Game Kitchen smash all three, in a way that makes it hard to imagine truly old school Ninja Gaiden fans being upset with. Sure, you can't beat the classics, but as far as odes to the past go, this seems to me to be a pretty darn good one. The feel of gameplay in Ragebound is tight, responsive, and drenched in that visceral feedback that's downright mandatory in good side-scrollers. Hits feel good in Ragebound, which is important, because the game's bread-and-butter is high octane slicing and dicing. Playing through the tutorial and two missions, every weapon and ability I used felt responsive and cathartic. Even movement - itself key to the overall play experience in side-scrollers - felt fast and punchy. It's the kind of game that melts away in your hand, along with the hours you spend behind the controller. As you proceed through the story, you confront various oni (read: demons). These can be, broadly speaking, broken up into two categories of foe: small and large. Small enemies are killable in a single hit, while larger blokes take a few blows (or an enhanced strike) to take down. There's also a colour-coded mechanic that adjusts the flow of brawls. Occasionally, enemies will radiate a blue or red aura and through killing select softies with that same aura, you are granted a single hit of an enhanced attack in that colour, which you can use to fell a particularly powerful that shares the same hue. You soar through levels at a breakneck pace, granted you know what you're doing. | Image credit: The Game Kitchen Conseqently, fights in Ragebound are practically mini-puzzles in which you must quickly determine the optimal route through an encounter, making use of what opportunities arise to quickly dispose of the forces of evil. It's a restriction sure, but not burdensome. DmC: Devil May Cry this is not. I found myself engorged in the process. Seeing what you're about to face, and figuring out on the fly how best to make my way through in good time and health. Ninja Gaiden Ragebound is visually stunning. It perfectly captures that retro aesthetic, while also pushing things somewhat given the resources provided with modern hardware. The game loads quickly, and looks great. Each enemy is distinct and recognisable, variants present in different levels. When you kill an enemy with one of those aforementioned enhanced attacks, they fold into themselves in a puddle of blood and gore, collapsing pleasingly like a chocolate lava cake. Delicious. The most notable part of the game's presentation are the fantastic stage transitions and boss fights. You leap out a window from the tutorial right into mission one a massive encounter, with no load time whatsoever. The bosses are vast and bombastic affairs, set in vibrant arenas and shooting out massive attacks that capture the attention and summoned from my mouth audible sounds of approval throughout my time playing. Take a gander at this pixel work. The game is quite the looker. | Image credit: The Game Kitchen As is gospel for the Ninja Gaiden series, the game is hard. Hard, but not unfair. You're given all the tools you need to blast through levels fast and clean, and given ample information ahead of fights to determine how exactly to overcome challenges without having your ankles shattered. Still, hits you do take hurt, and you're lacking something like passive life regeneration, your life being a resource more than an area of constant worry. Checkpoints are present, though scarce, and it feels as though you're met with a choice in Ragebound: get good, or struggle. This is exactly what you'd want from any Ninja Gaiden game, and that feeling here adds all the more to my claim that this is a brilliant revival of classic Ninja Gaiden. You see, it's core to the fun. Enemies attack from awkward angles, perhaps they're positioned in such a way that forces you to leap over platforms or through a particular ability through a gap in the wall, but nothing is sprung on you without warning. Ragebound, like classic Castlevanias, Mega Man games, or other retro royalty, teaches you what you need to know with a soft and nurturing hand, before using that same hand to throw punches your way. You can dodge them (the game makes sure you know how) but a punch is a punch and the bruise-averse should keep this in mind. At the end of the tutorial, you fight Ryu Hayabusa. This is a fight you're meant to lose. Losing most of your health transitions you straight into the first real mission, as Ryu goes off to do Ninja Gaiden 1 stuff as you set off on your own new adventure. However, if you dodge well and strike where you can, you can whittle down his health! At roughly 70%, Ryu starts pulling out some nasty attacks that are incredibly hard to avoid with your starting kit. I confirmed with one of the devs present that this is a fight you can win, but it's extremely hard. I wasn't able to do it, the best I got in my short time playing was 60%. But you can do it. I can see your eyes widening, masochists. Even the first boss isn't exactly a pushover, setting the tone for the rest of my preview. | Image credit: The Game Kitchen The team at The Game Kitchen didn't need to add that, but they did because they understand what makes a game like Ragebound so appealing. The fight is filled with "oh sh*t" moments as Ryu pulls absurd aerial attacks out and throws them at you. It's hard, but the game knows you want to win that fight. On top of that, when you lose, he Izuna Drops you. It's exactly what I wanted from Ragebound, and there's a good reason I spent the last 30 minutes of my preview time trying to take him down. Ninja Gaiden Ragebound seems to me to be an absolutely fantastic addition to the Ninja Gaiden series, even if it isn't mainline. It represents everything I feel is important to the series, and fits nicely into the canon in a way that should be pleasing to old fans too. I would highly recommend keeping an eye on this one, it's a scorcher. Ninja Gaiden Ragebound is coming sometime in 2025, to PC. This game was previewed at the Dotemu offices in Paris, with travel and accommodation handled by Dotemu.

Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube808k Cyberpunk 2077 had a notoriously rough launch back in 2020. The game is in far better shape today, but memories of five years ago had us feeling slightly apprehensive when the open-world RPG was announced as a Switch 2 launch title — are we going to see a launch day repeat? Does Switch 2 have the power for decent performance? What about the sections that even the PS5 struggles with? To put some of those worries to rest, the tech wizards over at Digital Foundry have gone hands-on with the Switch 2 version of the game, and are here to provide a technical breakdown of what they saw. Now, it's worth bearing in mind that the Cyberpunk 2077 DF's Richard Leadbetter got to play at the recent Switch 2 Experience in London was already weeks-old code, and he flags that performance may well be better on the final launch build. That said, it seems to be okay so far — and that's in the Phantom Liberty's Dogtown (one of the most demanding areas in the game). In docked, Digital Foundry's Oliver McKenzie describes the footage as "similar to what you would expect out of last-gen consoles" (the Phantom Liberty DLC wasn't released on last-gen), with a level of visual fidelity that you'd never expect from the OG Switch. Performance is a little mixed in more demanding areas, though the pair point out that this is the same even on beefier consoles. "It seems that the game is both CPU and GPU-limited," Leadbetter commented, stating that travelling at speed or getting into large firefights does result in performance dips, though some busy market scenes ran better than expected. As for handheld, things seemed to run "fine" in earlier sections of the game, with less taxing indoor sequences running noticeably better than the more demanding outdoor sections. The HDR 10, however, is "fantastic", with Cyberpunk's neon lights and overall aesthetic working well on the Switch 2's fancy new LCD screen. "The concept that we're seeing anything playable at all is quite remarkable," Leadbetter commented, "even in this early form". The 5th June launch date is close, and Digital Foundry hopes that CD Projekt Red has some optimisations lined up before then, but the fact this even exists is cause for celebration at the moment, it seems. Breathtaking? We'll soon be playing with power Will you be picking up Cyberpunk 2077 on Switch 2? Let us know in the comments. [source youtube.com] Related Games See Also Share:0 0 Jim came to Nintendo Life in 2022 and, despite his insistence that The Minish Cap is the best Zelda game and his unwavering love for the Star Wars prequels (yes, really), he has continued to write news and features on the site ever since. Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment... Related Articles My Nintendo Adds A Switch 2 Reward (North America) It's a keychain! Nintendo Confirms US Price For 'Switch 2 Welcome Tour' Quick, act surprised! Switch 2's Backwards Compatibility List Provides Updates On Two Titles Here's what you can expect

Another highly valued startup has just been added to the mix in the ongoing legal drama between Rippling and Deel: U.K. fintech giant Revolut. In his blockbuster affidavit that reads like it’s straight out of a movie, Irish Rippling employee Keith O’Brien claimed that he was paid about $6,000 a month to spy on Rippling. He alleged the first $6,000 payment was sent to his Revolut account by Alba Basha Westgarth, the wife of Deel’s COO Dan Westgarth, back in November 2024. At the time, Alba Basha Westgarth was working as the crypto compliance lead at Robinhood, according to a LinkedIn profile reviewed by TechCrunch that has since been deleted. Robinhood told TechCrunch that she left Robinhood earlier this year, but did not elaborate about why. The deleted LinkedIn profile lists her location as Dubai – that’s the same place, known as an extradition haven, where Deel’s CEO and legal director are now located as Rippling tries to serve them papers.  Rippling is now suing Revolut to get the full name and address of the “Alba Basha” listed as the sender on that $6,000 receipt, court records show. Rippling is also seeking all account opening documentation—things like IDs and utility bills—to definitively confirm her identity. In response, Revolut has hired a top lawyer in Ireland. It also sent a letter responding to Rippling last week, which a lawyer for Rippling described as “helpful but complicated” in a court hearing without elaborating. To be clear, there’s no indication or accusation that Revolut has done anything wrong here. The E.U. has strict privacy laws, so supplying that kind of information isn’t simple, especially in a civil case like this one. A key sticking point is that there hasn’t been an order from the Irish court itself on Revolut to provide the information.  Revolut declined to comment specifically on the case but told TechCrunch that, in general, it will “always comply with any court order request for disclosure.” Whether Revolut ends up providing more details about the “Alba Basha” behind the transfer remains to be seen. The only other option under European privacy laws would be customer consent, which seems unlikely in this case. Deel, which has denied all wrongdoing to the media, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Deel COO Dan Westgarth and Alba Basha Westgarth didn’t respond either. Rippling declined to comment. Although the evidence isn’t yet definitive, the Irish High Court gave a clue that it may honor Rippling’s wishes to verify Alba Basha’s identity in some way or form. After a lawyer for Rippling rattled off evidence connecting Alba Basha to Dan Westgarth, including a Facebook photo of the two together, during an April 2 court hearing, Judge Mark Sanfey remarked that “it could be a coincidence, but it’s unlikely!”

So, someone pointed out to me that I didn’t announce the winners of the last sketch, whoops! In 1st place @eaacon Edit with finished work: [Ice Punch VFX] First Post: Hey everyone! I’ve always wanted to participate in one of these, and since I recently finished my portfolio feels like the perfect time. Although like I only really have around a week, I won’t put too much pressure on myself and I’ll do my best! I started thinking about ideas a few days ago and I’m thinking something like ice punch from Pokemon with an asset like Iceborn gauntlet from League of Legends? Anyways for now here’s a… Second Place @Hovl Hi, I want to participate. I don’t have enough time this month but I will try. Upd. My final work: [Ice effect] [Sketch 65: Winter Spell] Congrats to the winners! Thanks again to all our participants, and happy sketching

Academia, principally, is a driver of legacy. From founders to traditions, a college campus is a defining place for communities. As it ages, a campus becomes a mechanism for understanding architectural influence. Students will come and go, but buildings endure generations. At Rice University, a new student center designed by Olson Kundig (OK), with Page as the executive architect, seeks to make its mark on the 100-year-old campus, harnessing its past to shape student futures.  A longstanding residential college tradition shaped Rice through its first centennial, now the university has a need for more accessible and hospitable spaces. With rising enrollment rates, a growing graduate population, and needs of the student body diversifying, The Moody Center Complex for Student Life (MCCSL) will broaden Rice’s offerings for collective student engagement. “It is so interesting to work on an academic project at this moment in time, and to support the goals of bringing people together—keeping that physical gathering aspect of higher education alive,” shared Kirsten Ring Murray, principal and owner of OK. “[We are] embracing those traditions, but at the same time setting up a university or college to grow and to change and to provide more for more types of students.” At Capacity Two separate buildings, Rice Memorial Center (RMC) and Ley Student Center (LSC), make up the current “student hub” on campus. Across both buildings, students can buy textbooks, share a meal together, or host a weekly club meeting. However, with support services, student-run businesses like the Coffeehouse, the radio station KTRU, and organizations battling for space, it can feel cramped. Along with providing gathering spaces for students, the Moody Center Complex will offset some of the office spaces.  The ground floor design of the Moody Center Complex is anchored by a student-run coffee shop that will be moving out of the RMC. (Courtesy Olson Kundig) In 2020, Rice held a design competition for proposals to expand and replace the RMC. Adjaye Associates was tapped for the project, but was later removed by Rice University. , the project was first paused due to economic issues, then subsequently “reset” in 2023 following allegations of sexual misconduct raised against David Adjaye. Adjaye denies the claims. The new facility by Olson Kundig will complement the existing RMC and LSC, creating one unified network of buildings, driving student traffic through the central quad. The project is supported by a $100 million commitment from the Moody Foundation. Upon completion of the new construction, both extant buildings will undergo renovations, creating a more functional space for the increasing student population.  “My hope is that [the new student center] will provide opportunities for our students to form meaningful connections, not only with one another, but also with a vast network of scholars and leaders from local to global communities,” said Elle Moody, a trustee of both the Moody Foundation and Rice, in a recent press release.  Connecting Through History The axial vistas of the central quadrangle at Rice University have been in development since the school’s General Plan—designed by Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson Architects—was issued in 1910. The landscape of the front half of the quad, divided by a path behind Fondren Library, was updated by Nelson Byrd Woltz (NBW) last year. The addition of the Moody Center Complex marks another major upgrade to the intermediate site.  As Olson Kundig took reference of the existing buildings, it noted that structures framing Rice quads contain an elongated linearity. The design seeks to maintain this linearity, but flips the standard orientation: facing the quad as opposed to the road which activates the lawn in a modern way. The design of the facade is also informed by precedence for building patterns, forms, and materiality. This is most notable in the masonry details, along with the building’s subtle, renaissance-inspired tripartite configuration.  Elevated on a five-foot plinth, the building’s structure creates new opportunity for movement across the central quad. (Courtesy Olson Kundig) Sire plan (Courtesy Olson Kundig) Though naturally occurring plants, trees, and shrubbery grow all over campus, the land by Lawson Grove is environmentally rich. In its design, Olson Kundig promotes accessing the abundance of nature on the campus, which itself is an arboretum. In accordance with the NBW update, which saw the addition of over 24,000 new plants and 90 new trees to the quad, OK has saved as many trees as possible in its plans. The firm’s use of breezeways engages with the covered loggias and live oak canopies that are a staple of Rice’s campus and architectural typologies of the South. Covered paths provide additional shade, encouraging outdoor engagement even in hot weather. The creation of an indoor-outdoor flow provides a space for more than just coffee and meetings—but the potential for picnics or a game of frisbee with respect for Houston’s fluctuating weather. “It’s a bit of a social experiment where we’re wondering if architecture can, in fact, encourage people to come together,” OK principal and owner Alan Maskin shared with AN about the project. “I’ve always believed that people feel most comfortable when they can see into spaces and see themselves reflected, before they even walk through the door, in ways that make them feel welcome.” In its announcement, the university noted that the input of Rice students on the new construction is “integral to shaping its campus experience,” and with half the team at OK composed of Rice alums, the design is a chance to consider how they can improve their alma mater. “It’s a real strength and a very fortunate feeling to have half the team have first-hand experience [of campus],” shared Blair Payson, a principal and owner at OK and Rice alum.  Continuous Evolution Organized through levels, the ground floor of the Moody Center Complex features a lobby, open gathering space, and a cafe. A student-run coffee shop serves as an anchor to the ground floor design, featuring fixed places for things like a photo wall while providing a certain flexibility that allows the space to evolve over time. The upper floors house additional classrooms, student services offices, and clustered meeting rooms. The interior architecture draws connections to the exterior landscape. (Courtesy Olson Kundig) Through warm tones and wood accents, the palette of the interiors creates a visual connection to the outdoor environment. Generous glazing throughout seeks to democratize the availability of natural light, a deviation from the more classical, narrow window patterns in pre-existing buildings. OK stays conscious of shading and solar orientation to maximize lighting without sacrificing privacy. This approach to transparency also increases fluidity, allowing the space to be more easily adapted in the future. OK hopes to achieve LEED Gold status on the project. Spatially, the indoor-outdoor flow of the building is emphasized by the massing itself. To accommodate flood planning, the center is elevated from the quad on a five-foot plinth. In response to the elevation, tiers attached to the front facade create space for leisure and sun coverage while maintaining access to a primary thoroughfare for students to move across the central quad. “We think that this building is going to be one that continues to evolve. Student facing programs evolve quite often, so we’re thinking of the building as a somewhat flexible framework of private and public working spaces, gathering spaces, lots of nooks and crannies for people to occupy,” Ring Murray added. “We’re setting it up for really comfortable, organic, evolving uses.” The “opportunity pavilion” is open, flexible space that can be used for a variety of programming. (Courtesy Olson Kundig) One such example is what Olson Kundig refers to as the “opportunity pavilion.” Sitting on a key access point with Brochstein Pavilion and a James Turrell Skyspace on the other end, the opportunity pavilion is an open, flexible space, with seating for up to 300 people. Designed entirely for fluid use, the space is envisioned to hold anything from lectures to job fairs. Additionally, an attached stage provides opportunities for film and music programming. The building, in a way, is a reflection of Rice University itself—a campus based on tradition, with a formidable connection to history. “It’s also tied to the part of [Rice] that does extraordinary research and has incredible technical and academic abilities,” Maskin added. “These offerings are all about the future, and if this building can bridge those two aspects of Rice University, then I think we’ll have done a good thing.” The MCCSL will officially break ground on May 8, with a projected completion in fall 2027.

Markus Schümmelfeder has spent more than a decade looking for ways to help biopharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim exploit digital and data. He joined the company in February 2014 as corporate vice-president in IT and became CIO in April 2018. “It was a natural evolution,” he says. “Over time, you see what can be done as a CIO and have an ambition to make things happen. This job opportunity came around and it was when digitisation began. I saw many possibilities arising that were not there before.” Schümmelfeder says the opportunity to become CIO was terrific timing: “It was a chance to bring technology into the company, to make more use of data, and evolve the IT organisation from being a service deliverer into a real enabler. My aim for all the years I’ve been with Boehringer is to integrate IT into the business community.” Now, as the company’s 54,000 employees use more data than ever before across the value chain, including research, manufacturing, marketing and sales, Schuemmelfeder’s aim is being realised. He says professionals across the business understand technology is crucial to effective operational processes: “It’s about bringing us close together to make magic happen.” Schümmelfeder says one of his key achievements since becoming CIO is leading the company on a data journey. His vision supported the company’s progress along this pathway. “I went to the board and said, ‘This is what we should do, what we want to do, what makes sense, and what we perceive will be necessary for the future’,” he says. “We started that process roughly five years ago and everyone knows how important data is today.” Making the transition to a data-enabled organisation is far from straightforward. Rather than being focused on creating reports, Schümmelfeder says his vision aimed to show people across the organisation how they could exploit information assets effectively. One of the key tenets for success has been standardisation. “This is a fundamental force, and the team has done good work here,” he says. “10 years ago, we had between 4,500 and 5,000 systems across the organisation. Today, we have below 1,000. So, we reduced our footprint by 80%, which is a great accomplishment.” Standardisation has allowed the IT team to deliver another part of Schümmelfeder’s vision – a platform-based approach to digitisation. Rather than investing in point solutions to solve specific business challenges, the platform approach uses cloud-based services to help people “jump start topics” as the business need arises. The crucial technological foundation for this shift to standardisation has been the cloud, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and a range of consolidated enterprise services, such as Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes, Atlassian Jira and Confluence, Databricks, and Snowflake. Schümmelfeder says the result is a flexible, scalable IT resource across all business activities.  “You can create a cloud environment in minutes,” he says. “You can have an automated test environment that is directly attached and ready to use. You can create APIs immediately on the platform. We want people to deliver solutions at a faster pace, rather than creating individual solutions again and again.” Boehringer recently announced the launch of its One Medicine Platform, powered by the Veeva Development Cloud. The unified platform combines data and processes, enabling Boehringer to streamline its product development. Schümmelfeder says the technology plays a crucial enabling role. The One Medicine Platform is integrated with Boehringer’s data ecosystem, Dataland, which helps employees make data-driven decisions that boost organisational performance. Dataland has been running since 2022. The ecosystem collates data from across the company and makes it available securely for professionals to run simulations and data analyses. “In the research and development space for medicine, there was nothing like a solid enterprise platform,” says Schümmelfeder, referring to his company’s relationship with Veeva. “We had about 50, maybe even more, tools that were often not interconnected. If you wanted to replicate data from one service to another, you’d have to download the data, copy and paste, and so on. That approach is tedious.” The One Medicine Platform allows Boehringer to connect data across functions, optimise trial efficiency around its research sites, and accelerate the delivery of new medicines to treat currently incurable diseases. Schümmelfeder says the Veeva technology gives the business the edge it requires. “We saw we were slower than our competitors in executing clinical trials. We thought we could be much better. We wanted to look for a new way of executing clinical trials, and we needed to discuss our processes and potentially redefine and change them based on the platform approach,” he says. “We chose Veeva because it was the most capable technology to help us deliver the spirit of a platform. It’s also an evolving technology with good future potential.” Schümmelfeder says the data platform he’s pioneered is helping Boehringer explore emerging technologies. One key element is Apollo, a specialist approach to artificial intelligence (AI), allowing employees to select from 40 large language models (LLMs) to explore their use cases and exploit data safely. He says this large number of LLMs allows Boehringer employees to select the best model for a specific use case. Alongside mainstream models like Google Gemini and Open AI’s ChatGPT, the company uses niche models dedicated to research that can deliver more appropriate answers than general models. Schümmelfeder says Boehringer does not develop models internally. He says the rapid pace of AI development makes it more sensible to dedicate IT resources to other areas. The company’s staff can use approved models and tools to undertake data-led research in several key areas: “We have a toolbox staff can dip into when they realise an idea or use case.” He outlines three specific AI-enabled use cases: Genomic Lens generates new insights that enable scientists to discover new disease mechanisms in human DNA; the company uses algorithms and historical data to identify the right populations for clinical trials quickly and effectively; and Smart Process Development, which applies machine learning and genetic algorithms to create productivity boosts in biopharmaceutical processes. “My aim for all the years I’ve been with Boehringer is to integrate IT into the business community” Markus Schümmelfeder, Boehringer Ingelheim Another key area of research and development is assessing the potential power of quantum computing. Schümmelfeder suggests Boehringer has one of the strongest quantum teams in Europe. He recognises that other digital and business leaders might feel the company’s commitment is ahead of the adoption curve. “And I would say, ‘Yes, you’re right’, but then you need to understand how this technology works. We are helping to make breakthroughs, to bring code to the industry and to discover how we will use quantum. So, we have a strong team that brings a lot to the table to help this area evolve,” he says. “I’m convinced quantum computing will be a huge gamechanger for the pharma industry once the technology can be used and set into operations. That situation is why I believe you have to be involved in quantum early to understand how it works. You need to bring knowledge into the organisation and be part of making quantum work.” While Schümmelfeder acknowledges Boehringer isn’t pursuing true quantum research yet, the company has built relationships with other technology specialists, such as Google Research. He says these developments are the foundations for future success in key areas, such as understanding product toxicity: “It’s relatively early, but you can see the investment. I hope we can see the first real use cases by the end of this decade.” Schümmelfeder considers the type of data-enabled organisation he’d like to create during the next few years and suggests the good news is that the technological foundations for further transformation are now in place. “We don’t need a technology revolution, I think we’ve done that,” he says. “We’ve done our homework, and we’ve standardised and harmonised. The next stage is not about more standardisation, it’s more about looking specifically at where we need to be successful. That focus is on research and development, medicine, our end-customers and how to improve the lives of patients and animals. That work is at the core of what we want to do.” With the technology systems and services in place, Schümmelfeder says he’ll concentrate on ensuring the right culture exists to exploit digitisation. That focus will require a concerted effort to evolve the skills across the organisation. The aim here will be to ensure many people in all parts of the business have the right capabilities. “When you talk about data, you don’t need 10 people able to do things, you need thousands of people who can execute,” he says. “You need to bring this knowledge to the business. That means business and IT must integrate deeply to make things happen. The IT team has to go to the business community and ask big questions like, ‘What do you need? Tell me the one thing that can make you truly successful?’” Schümmelfeder says that finding the answers to these questions shouldn’t be straightforward. Sometimes, he expects the search to be uncomfortable. IT can’t sit back – the company’s 2,000 technology professionals must drive the identification of digital solutions to business problems. Line-of-business professionals must also feel comfortable and confident using emerging technologies and data. He says the company’s Data X Academy plays a crucial role. Boehringer worked with Capgemini to develop this in-house data science training academy. Data X Academy has already trained 4,000 people across IT and the business. Schümmelfeder hopes this number will reach 15,000 people during the next 24 months and allow data-savvy people across the organisation to work together to develop solutions to intractable challenges. “We want to ask the right questions on the business side and create lighthouse use cases in IT that show people what we can do,” he says. “We can drive change together with the business and create an impact for the organisation, our customers and patients.” Read more data and digital interviews with IT leaders The importance of building a data foundation: We speak to Terren Peterson, Capital One’s vice-president of engineering, about how data pipelines and platforms are essential for AI success. Interview: James Fleming, CIO, Francis Crick Institute: Helping to cure cancer with computers puts digital leadership on another level – and the world-leading research institute is turning to data science and artificial intelligence to achieve its groundbreaking goals. Interview: Wendy Redshaw, chief digital information officer, NatWest Retail Bank: The retail bank is moving at pace to introduce generative AI into key customer-facing services as part of a wider digital transformation across the organisation.

The popular virtual meeting service has been hit with a major outage. Time to call it a day?

Why create an AI model focused solely for the enterprise? Answer by Sean White.

In context: Prompt injection is an inherent flaw in large language models, allowing attackers to hijack AI behavior by embedding malicious commands in the input text. Most defenses rely on internal guardrails, but attackers regularly find ways around them – making existing solutions temporary at best. Now, Google thinks it may have found a permanent fix. Since chatbots went mainstream in 2022, a security flaw known as prompt injection has plagued artificial intelligence developers. The problem is simple: language models like ChatGPT can't distinguish between user instructions and hidden commands buried inside the text they're processing. The models assume all entered (or fetched) text is trusted and treat it as such, which allows bad actors to insert malicious instructions into their query. This issue is even more serious now that companies are embedding these AIs into our email clients and other software that might contain sensitive information. Google's DeepMind has developed a radically different approach called CaMeL (Capabilities for Machine Learning). Instead of asking artificial intelligence to self-police – which has proven unreliable – CaMeL treats large language models (LLMs) as untrusted components inside a secure system. It creates strict boundaries between user requests, untrusted content like emails or web pages, and the actions an AI assistant is allowed to take. CaMeL builds on decades of proven software security principles, including access control, data flow tracking, and the principle of least privilege. Instead of relying on AI to catch every malicious instruction, it limits what the system can do with the information it processes. Here's how it works. CaMeL uses two separate language models: a "privileged" one (P-LLM) that plans actions like sending emails, and a "quarantined" one (Q-LLM) that only reads and parses untrusted content. The P-LLM can't see raw emails or documents – it just receives structured data, like "email = get_last_email()." The Q-LLM, meanwhile, lacks access to tools or memory, so even if an attacker tricks it, it can't take any action. All actions use code – specifically a stripped-down version of Python – and run in a secure interpreter. This interpreter traces the origin of each piece of data, tracking whether it came from untrusted content. If it detects that a necessary action involves a potentially sensitive variable, such as sending a message, it can block the action or request user confirmation. Simon Willison, the developer who coined the term "prompt injection" in 2022, praised CaMeL as "the first credible mitigation" that doesn't rely on more artificial intelligence but instead borrows lessons from traditional security engineering. He noted that most current models remain vulnerable because they combine user prompts and untrusted inputs in the same short-term memory or context window. That design treats all text equally – even if it contains malicious instructions. // Related Stories CaMeL still isn't perfect. It requires developers to write and manage security policies, and frequent confirmation prompts could frustrate users. However, in early testing, it performed well against real-world attack scenarios. It may also help defend against insider threats and malicious tools by blocking unauthorized access to sensitive data or commands. If you love reading the undistilled technical details, DeepMind published its lengthy research on Cornell's arXiv academic repository.