Category: 3. Business

NEW YORK, March 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — As AI becomes embedded in enterprise decision-making, the American Arbitration Association^® (AAA), the global leader in alternative dispute resolution (ADR), is focusing on educating the legal community on best practices around AI governance and how it must evolve in practice and execution to meet the moment.

At Legalweek 2026, the AAA convened legal and technology leaders, including Galia Amram of Open AI, Anna R. Gressel of Freshfields, and Henry Hagen of Moderna, for a discussion on how governance builds trust and accountability into enterprise AI adoption. During the panel, “Trust Is the Product: How AI Governance and Legal Oversight Is Driving Successful Adoption,” the AAA shared preliminary findings from its national survey on AI governance and announced a new professional education series with Creative Lawyers and the Practising Law Institute (PLI), launching in the fourth quarter of 2026.

“AI adoption is no longer theoretical. It’s shaping decisions across industries,” said Bridget McCormack, president and CEO of the AAA. “The question now is not whether organizations will use AI, but how they will govern it. Trust will belong to institutions that can demonstrate their systems are structured, supervised, and accountable. Governance is what turns experimentation into durable progress.”

The forthcoming study, “AI Governance: From Principles to Practice,” is expected to survey 500 general counsels, C-suite leaders, and technology executives across U.S.-based companies to explore how legal and technical teams collaborate to implement AI governance, where operational gaps persist, and what structures are required to govern AI systems throughout their lifecycle. The full study, to be released in Spring 2026, is designed to serve as a national benchmark for enterprise-wide AI governance and implementation.

Preliminary findings indicate that, while many organizations have AI governance frameworks in place, implementation often lags—particularly when translating principles into technical controls and aligning decision-making across teams.

“AI governance is not a policy exercise; it is an operational discipline,” said Sasha Carbone, general counsel at the AAA. “Organizations are discovering that drafting principles is the easy part. The harder work is defining decision rights, documenting risk acceptance, and ensuring accountability across the system lifecycle. Governance must be built into how decisions are made, not layered on after the fact.”

This research initiative reflects the AAA’s broader commitment to advancing responsible AI governance across industries, grounded in its own experience embedding structured oversight into AI-driven innovation.

AI Governance Education for Legal Leaders

To further support legal leaders navigating AI governance, the AAA, in partnership with Creative Lawyers and the Practising Law Institute (PLI), will launch a new AI governance program series later in 2026. The program will address foundational governance structures, organizational implementation strategies, risk and vendor oversight, and positioning governance as a strategic advantage.

“Corporate counsel are navigating rapid AI adoption alongside an evolving regulatory landscape,” said PLI President Sharon L. Crane. “Through this collaboration with the AAA, we are providing practical, structured guidance that helps legal leaders move from awareness to implementation, equipping them with the tools to build and sustain effective AI governance programs.”

To be among the first to receive the final study, including detailed findings and practical guidance for legal and business leaders, register at https://feature.adr.org/AAA-AI-Governance-Survey.

About the American Arbitration Association
The American Arbitration Association is the largest private provider of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) services in the world. Marking its centennial in 2026, the American Arbitration Association has transformed how legal issues are resolved for better since 1926, turning disputes worldwide into opportunities for understanding and progress. A not-for-profit organization, the American Arbitration Association’s mission is to deliver ADR services with integrity, transparency, and innovation. For more information, visit www.adr.org/.

SOURCE American Arbitration Association

Antitrust authorities make use of settlement and commitments as enforcement tools

Signaling a willingness on the part of businesses under investigation and authorities to cooperate, 43% of decisions involved a settlement in 2025, an uptick from 38% in 2024. 50% of the decisions involving a settlement resulted in authorities requiring, or parties committing to, a change in conduct.

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), for example, accepted court enforceable undertakings from suppliers of car technology products, golf equipment, and drones to remove clauses restricting distributors’ ability to advertise products below a specified price. This is a trend that can be seen in Beyond fines, soft enforcement rises, discussing authorities’ willingness to take a light-touch approach to achieving impactful enforcement.

Territorial supply constraints in the EC’s “terrible ten”

The EC published its “Single Market Strategy” in May 2025, in which it designated unjustified territorial supply constraints (TSCs) as one of the “terrible ten” practices most harmful to the functioning of a unified EU market. It considered that, in the retail sector, TSCs limit consumer choice and contribute to significant price differences across the EU, “notably for daily consumer goods.”

Addressing TSCs is a fascinating example of where the EU’s single market objectives align with its antitrust objectives. In September 2025, a number of member states urged the EC to utilize means beyond antitrust law. They suggested, for example, that the EC could use the ongoing revision of the Unfair Trading Practices Directive to identify additional unjustified harmful supply restrictions. A proposal for enforcement tools targeting TSCs is expected in late 2026 – the EC published a call for evidence in early March 2026.

In the meantime, the EC is continuing to apply antitrust law to the issue. In 2024, it fined Mondelēz for hindering the cross-border trade of chocolate, biscuits, and coffee products between EU member states, and Pierre Cardin and its licensee Ahlers for restricting cross-border sales of clothing.

In 2025, while there were no fines for conduct involving territorial restrictions, the EC carried out dawn raids at the premises of companies active in the non-alcoholic drinks sector in several EU member states and asked for information in the personal care sector. The EC stated that it was investigating “possible restrictions on the trade of goods in the Single Market and market segmentation.”

Every month, YouGov identifies the brands generating the strongest surge in consumer conversations in Canada.

Using data from YouGov BrandIndex, our daily brand tracking solution, we measure Word of Mouth, the percentage of people who say they have talked about a brand with friends or family in the past two weeks.

The brands featured here recorded the largest increase in conversation levels over a four-week period, calculated as the difference between their lowest and highest Word of Mouth scores during that time, using a four-week moving average.

Word of Mouth marketing: Brands recording the greatest growth in February 2026

1. Amazon: +7.97 percentage points (from 31.53% on February 1 to 39.50% on February 24)
2. YouTube: +5.16 percentage points (from 24.48% on February 4 to 29.65% on February 27)
3. Walmart: +4.38 percentage points (from 30.51% on February 4 to 34.89% on February 24)

Together, these brands drove the biggest shifts in real-world brand conversations this month.

What started out as a response to labor shortages in poultry processing plants during the COVID-19 pandemic has turned into a robotics system that can learn by imitating human movements to handle chickens.

Using an advanced imitation learning algorithm and camera perceptions, researchers with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station have developed ChicGrasp, a dual-jaw robotic gripper with pinchers that can grasp a chicken carcass by the legs, lift and hang it on a shackle conveyor to be moved on for further processing.

“Embodied AI is used to create intelligent, agent-like robotics to interact with a real-world environment,” said Dongyi Wang, leader of the project and an assistant professor in the Departments of Biological and Agricultural Engineering and Food Science. 

“It’s a physical art that has just developed in the past couple of years, which you see in things like full self-driving cars,” he said. “We are trying to do similar things using that imitation learning idea, but in chicken processing.”

The work has been supported by a $1 million grant from a joint program between the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation. Wang is a faculty member in the College of Engineering and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences at the U of A. The experiment station is the research arm of the U of A System Division of Agriculture.

Results of the study behind the development of ChicGrasp were published in Advanced Robotics Research. All computer-aided design files, code and datasets from the project were released as open source, providing what the team describes as a reproducible benchmark for agricultural robotics and robot learning.

Imitation learning with ‘diffusion policy’

Traditional robotic methods, such as using suction cups or pre-programmed scripted motions, struggle in the unpredictable conditions of a poultry processing line. The birds are cold, slippery and not uniform in size or posture. Slight changes in leg position or carcass orientation can cause robotics to fail. To address this, Wang’s team designed a system that learns from human teachers rather than treating the gripper and control algorithm separately.

Amirreza Davar, a graduate student in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biological and Agricultural Engineering, designed the gripper and modified the imitation learning to fit into the robotic system, Wang said.

“In imitation learning, the role of the human is to give a trajectory, give a ground truth to the robot, so we don’t need to start from scratch to learn,” Davar said. “It’s more efficient and more accurate. From the get-go, the robot knows what we need to do.”

The camera inputs, movements or trajectories, are stored in a directory that serves as the basis, or “low-dimensional” data, to control each joint in the robotic arm. The specific imitation learning algorithm used, diffusion policy, was introduced in 2023 by Cheng Chi of Columbia University and colleagues at the Toyota Research Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

The system allows for an adaptive framework for continuously refining grasping strategies by formulating robot control as a “conditional denoising process,” Davar explained.

By comparison, other robotics learning methods failed entirely under the same conditions.

“That’s why we’re getting inspired by this algorithm for the poultry industry,” Davar said. “Years ago, robots were programmed specifically to this specific coordinate at this specific time. But what if, like in the poultry industry, things are not predictable? You cannot engineer the robot to go exactly in this position. The chickens come in various sizes, and chicken legs are not always in the same position. So that’s why we wanted the robot to be able to adjust based on that specific scenario.”

Davar said the importance of the work behind ChicGrasp is not limited to the gripper itself. 

“It’s the whole idea of imitation learning and generalization combined with the gripper that makes it applicable and practical in the industry down the line,” he said. 

The speed gap

So far, ChicGrasp has shown a nearly 81% success rate, but the researchers emphasized that speed is still a challenge for industrial use. 

A human can pick up a chicken carcass and hang it on the shackle conveyor in about three seconds. The full cycle for ChicGrasp is about 38 seconds. 

Closing the speed gap will require both motion-level and algorithm-level changes, the study noted. This work would include the use of more aggressive velocity and acceleration limits for the robotic gripper arms and reducing idle time delays.

The cost for building the ChicGrasp prototype, using off-the-shelf robotic arm hardware and 3D-printed pieces for the gripper, was about $59,000.

Open-sourced for the field

By releasing both hardware designs and training data publicly, the team hopes to accelerate innovation in agricultural engineering, where reproducible datasets and benchmarks have historically been limited.

Davar was the first author of the study, titled “ChicGrasp: Imitation-Learning-Based Customized Dual-Jaw Gripper Control for Manipulation of Delicate, Irregular Bio-Products.” Wang is the corresponding author. 

Co-authors included graduate students Siavash Mahmoudi, Chaitanya Pallerla and Pouya Sohrabipour in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering. Pallerla is also in the Department of Food Science. 

Other co-authors included Wan Shou, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; Phil Crandall, professor of retail food safety in the Department of Food Science; and Zhengtong Xu and Yu She in the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University.

This work was supported by awards No. 2023-67021−39072, 2023-67022−39074 and 2023-67022−39075 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture in collaboration with the National Science Foundation through the National Robotics Initiative 3.0.

To learn more about ag and food research in Arkansas, visit aaes.uada.edu. Follow the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station on LinkedIn and sign up for our monthly newsletter, the Arkansas Agricultural Research Report. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit uada.edu. To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit uaex.uada.edu.

About the Division of Agriculture: The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices. Through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service, the Division of Agriculture conducts research and extension work within the nation’s historic land grant education system. 

The Division of Agriculture is one of 20 entities within the University of Arkansas System. It has offices in all 75 counties in Arkansas and faculty on three system campuses.  

Pursuant to 7 CFR § 15.3, the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture offers all its Extension and Research programs and services (including employment) without regard to race, color, sex, national origin, religion, age, disability, marital or veteran status, genetic information, sexual preference, pregnancy or any other legally protected status, and is an equal opportunity institution.

Get the real picture of how sustainability teams are—and aren’t—using AI. 

Based on a new survey of 200+ companies, non-profits, and more, this webinar will cover insights into how sustainability teams are incorporating AI into their work, as well as candid impressions of how it’s going, from a panel of leaders in the sustainability field. 

Stacy Cline, Senior Director of Sustainability at Gitlab, will also talk about how Gitlab is pioneering new strategies and tools to help developers create efficient, low-emission AI tools.

Some of the survey findings we will discuss include:

AI benchmarks
Where sustainability teams use AI today (data cleanup, draft disclosures, supplier outreach) and where there is untapped potential.

Time and focus
How ESG teams spend their hours across reporting, supplier engagement, and reduction work.

Policy impact
How regulatory requirements and uncertainty affect team priorities.

 If you can’t tune in live, register anyway and we’ll send you the recording. Trouble registering? Try switching your browser and double check that cookies are enabled. If you are still having issues, please contact support@trellis.net.

At the 2026 Committee of Supply Debate on 3 March 2026, Minister of Manpower, Mr Tan See Leng announced that a new ONE Pass (as defined below) (AI and Tech) Track will be introduced in January 2027.

The ONE Pass (AI and Tech) Track is expected to replace the existing Tech Pass.

The Overseas Networks & Expertise Pass (ONE Pass) is a personalised work pass for top talents in all sectors, such as business, arts and culture, sports, academia and research. 

To be eligible for a ONE Pass, the pass holder must, amongst others, have earned or will earn a fixed monthly salary of at least SGD 30,000 and must have worked for an established company for 12 consecutive months leading up to the date of application or will work for an established company in Singapore. In addition to this, it is expected that a new criteria that the applicant’s current or last-held employment must be in a tech company, a tech division within a company or a tech venture capital firm will be introduced.

We expect for further information on the ONE Pass (AI and Tech) Track to be provided closer to the implementation date.