Vantage Point is joined by two coordinating palettes, Drift and Mellow, inspired by optimism, restoration and the quiet beauty of everyday moments

OAK BROOK, Ill., Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Ace Hardware, the world's largest hardware cooperative, today announced Vantage Point (38B-4) as Clark+Kensington's 2027 Color of the Year, available at participating Ace Hardware stores nationwide and online at The Paint Studio. A sophisticated take on blue, Vantage Point adds depth and dimension to the 2027 Clark+Kensington Color Trends collection.

"Homeowners are looking for more moments of connection at home, and color can have a powerful impact on how a space makes us feel," said Kim Lefko, Chief Marketing Officer at Ace Hardware. "Vantage Point brings a sense of warmth and character to interiors, offering a versatile blue that feels fresh for 2027 yet timeless enough to live with for years to come."

Selected by color trend forecasting partner Colour Hive in collaboration with the Clark+Kensington design team, Vantage Point reflects a growing desire for interiors that feel both uplifting and restorative. Its rich blue hue, softened by subtle undertones, balances familiarity with boldness, creating a distinctive backdrop for any space. As the focal point of the 2027 collection, Vantage Point is complemented by two curated palettes, Drift and Mellow. Together, they capture different moments of the day: the optimism of a new dawn and the soothing stillness of afternoon as it gives way to dusk.

- Drift: Inspired by the hopeful feeling of a new day, Drift pairs gentle hues such as Almond Biscotti (N-W21), Cappuccino Foam (16A-1), Catching Rays (19B-2), Of the Wind (36A-2), and Family Reunion (25A-3) to evoke light and create moments of joy.

- Mellow: Capturing the soft glow of the horizon, Mellow blends warm neutrals and rich, earthen tones for a relaxed, enveloping feel. In addition to Vantage Point (38B-4), the palette includes Charley's Horse (11A-5), Pure Zen (06A-2), Antique White (CW-W7), and Adobe Hut (N-C3).

Clark+Kensington paints are premium paint-and-primer-in-one products, designed to provide exceptional coverage, smooth application, and long-lasting durability. Made in the USA and available exclusively at Ace Hardware, Clark+Kensington delivers quality results for DIYers and professionals alike.

"At Ace, we believe creating a beautiful, elevated space shouldn't require a luxury price tag," said Lefko. "Vantage Point captures that balance, offering a trend-forward approach to color, while Clark+Kensington delivers the premium quality, durability and ease of application homeowners expect at an accessible price."

To explore the full 2027 Clark+Kensington Color Trends collection and find inspiration for your next project, visit your local Ace Hardware or browse The Paint Studio online at acehardware.com/thepaintstudio.

About Ace Hardware

Ace Hardware is the largest hardware cooperative in the world, serving more than 8,950 locally owned and operated stores around the globe, while providing the best products, services, and operating methods to almost 5,300 Ace retail stores in the United States.  Ace Hardware's family of brands includes Ace Hardware, Emery Jensen Distribution, and independent retailers worldwide. Headquartered in Oak Brook, Ill., Ace operates an expansive network of U.S. distribution centers, along with international capabilities in Ningbo, China.  Since 1924, Ace has been a part of local communities, known as the place with the helpful hardware folks.  For more information, visit acehardware.com or newsroom.acehardware.com.

Contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Ace Hardware Corporation

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Glacis to place OVERT, its open standard for verifying AI safeguards, under CHAI and AIGovOps Foundation stewardship

Agreement provides for shared stewardship of the open, royalty-free standard for AI operational evidence, with CHAI contributing healthcare expertise and Glacis serving as non-voting editor

SEATTLE, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Glacis Technologies, Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) and the AIGovOps Foundation today announced an agreement establishing a framework for the shared stewardship of OVERT (Observable Verification Evidence for Runtime Trust), an open technical specification developed by Glacis for verifiable operational evidence from AI systems. CHAI will work with its community to identify healthcare-specific needs and inform continued development.

Once the stewardship arrangement formally takes effect, CHAI and AIGovOps will jointly oversee the OVERT specification. Glacis will initially maintain the specification and operate its registry. Stewardship will take effect at the time specified in a separate commencement certificate signed by all three parties.

As AI systems move beyond retrieving, summarizing and analyzing information to supporting decisions and taking actions within healthcare workflows, organizations need more practical ways to understand how those systems operate.

Existing governance policies, system logs and vendor documentation all provide important pieces of the picture. OVERT is designed to complement them with standardized, independently verifiable evidence about AI actions captured within an implementation's declared scope.

OVERT defines a common format for evidence generated when an AI system acts. It specifies how to create independently verifiable records showing whether declared governance policies, security controls and oversight requirements were applied at runtime, including the tool calls made by AI agents, without requiring protected content to leave the operator's environment.

"We wrote OVERT because we saw a proof gap in how critical AI safeguards are monitored, especially in healthcare," said Joe Braidwood, founder and CEO of Glacis Technologies. "We built it for everyone to use, our competitors included. That is why CHAI and AIGovOps will steward the standard, with Glacis as a non-voting editor. We will keep building implementations and compete on them like everyone else."

"Governance that lives in a document cannot be checked. Governance that runs as code can," said Ken Johnston, co-founder of the AIGovOps Foundation. "OVERT gives practitioners a shared way to show that a control executed, and shared stewardship means no single vendor decides what counts as evidence."

"Healthcare organizations are asking for more technically rigorous ways to understand how AI operates within live workflows and whether defined safeguards are being applied," said Brenton Hill, Head of Operations and General Counsel at CHAI. "By helping steward OVERT, CHAI can bring an open approach to decision-level evidence before our community for scrutiny, input and continued refinement. This is a tangible step toward giving organizations greater transparency into AI-enabled actions and greater confidence in how these systems are governed at scale."

What this looks like in practice: A healthcare organization requires that a given AI workflow have appropriate authorization, defined data boundaries and clinician review before it acts. With OVERT, runtime evidence documents whether those exact requirements were invoked for that specific AI action, creating a record that can later be reviewed by the organization or another authorized reviewer.

CHAI develops voluntary, consensus-informed resources that help healthcare organizations evaluate and strengthen responsible AI governance across different risk levels and use cases. OVERT provides a technical format that may help organizations translate their own governance requirements into observable evidence within live workflows. Through this collaboration, CHAI will bring the specification before its community to explore its relevance across healthcare environments and help inform its continued development without prescribing a particular AI vendor, model or application architecture.

OVERT is a voluntary technical specification. It does not establish regulatory or legal requirements, certify the safety or effectiveness of an AI system, or determine whether an organization has complied with applicable law. Organizations remain responsible for defining appropriate controls and meeting their legal, regulatory and operational obligations. The collaboration does not establish a post-market monitoring network.

The OVERT specification, governance model and implementation guidance are published at overt.is, where organizations can review the standard and get involved.

About Glacis Technologies

Glacis Technologies develops runtime evidence infrastructure for AI systems. Its technology operates at the point where AI actions occur, enabling organizations to apply defined controls and generate tamper-evident, independently verifiable evidence of how those controls operated. Glacis is backed by AI House, Geoff Ralston's Safe AI Fund (SAIF), Mighty Capital, Plug and Play and Lionheart Ventures, and was recently selected for the Lloyd's Lab Accelerator, the innovation program of the Lloyd's insurance market, as one of ten companies in its latest cohort.

About OVERT

OVERT is an open standard released under a royalty‑free patent covenant. The published standard and its source text are available at overt.is.

Implementation is permitted without royalty; conformance requires independent attestation.

About Coalition for Health AI (CHAI)

CHAI was started by clinicians. The coalition's mission is to build the broadest possible consensus across the health ecosystem to help ensure health AI is trusted, secure and safe. The CHAI membership is open and rapidly expanding. Today, we consist of more than 3,000 members including health systems, patient advocacy groups, academia, and a wide range of industry start-ups and incumbents. CHAI is committed to convening and dialogue to achieve consensus. There are no limits to who can join and participate. Learn more about CHAI membership at chai.org/membership.

About the AIGovOps Foundation

The AIGovOps Foundation is a nonprofit based in the Seattle area that develops open-source tools and a practitioner community for AI governance. Its work translates governance policies into executable controls and supports verifiable records of how those controls operate. Learn more at aigovops-foundation.com.

SOURCE Glacis Technologies, Inc.

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Run Your Entire Data & AI Program From a Prompt or Agent, in BigID Claude, Copilot, GPT and Gemini

NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- BigID today launched AgentIQ, a fully agentic automation interface to BigID that that allows customers to operate their data security and compliance program autonomously, operationalized from a prompt or agent interface anywhere they work: inside BigID or directly from Claude, Copilot, GPT or Gemini. Customers can now write custom prompts or leverage pre-built BigID agents to retrieve, report, respond or remediate data and AI security and compliance violations.

One Request, Start to Finish

BigID AgentIQ brings full agentic controls to customers to simplify BigID operation for data and AI security / compliance.

- Ask anything about the data or AI landscape, across cloud, SaaS, on-prem, databases, files and get customer reporting back.

- Investigate data and access violations and quickly determine who and what was impacted

- Consult and Reason with your model of choice regarding industry best practices, regulatory compliance and security frameworks

- Assess Risk ranked by sensitivity, exposure, activity, and business context

- Act on it: revoke access, remediate exposure, apply retention, quarantine, enforce policy, fulfill requests

- Automate Remediation: leverage BigID agents or bring your own to fully operationalize and automate remediation actions. AgentIQ will run autonomously and continuously.

"Every data & AI program is capped by how many people you can put on it. AgentIQ removes the cap," said Dimitri Sirota, CEO and Co-founder of BigID. "You describe the outcome you want and the program delivers it: find the risk, decide what matters, act on it, prove it happened. The reason it works on BigID is context. An agent without deep data context will give you confident, wrong answers about your most sensitive data."

No Console Required

While AgentIQ is available from inside BigID, AgentIQ can also deliver BigID wherever teams already work, with no new interface to adopt and no security analyst required to run a query:

- Claude, GPT, Gemini and Copilot

- Custom enterprise agents and internal AI platforms

- BigID itself

What It Looks Like in Practice

Examples of the work AgentIQ carries end to end today, each triggered by a single request:

- "Find sensitive data exposed to the internet, rank it by business risk, and revoke public access on the top ten." The agent identifies exposure across systems, prioritizes it, fixes it on approval, and logs every action.

- "Which AI systems are touching regulated data, and which violate our policy?" The agent finds both shadow and sanctioned AI, maps the data each system consumes, and flags violations before an auditor finds them.

- "Who has access to customer PII they no longer need? Remove it." The agent investigates permissions across systems, identifies excessive and stale access, and revokes it.

- "Fulfill this data subject request everywhere this person exists." The agent carries out a privacy request across all the systems that hold a person's data and orchestrates fulfillment.

Buy. Build. Bring.

- Buy BigID's agents and deploy in minutes with no agent engineering

- Build your own on BigID's AgentIQ platform and action surface, wired to your workflows and policies

- Bring the agents from popular Ai platforms and have them work directly with BigID via BigID's secure MCP.

"Customers were clear on two points: nobody wants another console, and nobody wants to bet their security program on a single model," said Nimrod Vax, Head of Product and Co-founder of BigID. "So we built the layer, not the destination. Whatever agent, model, or surface a customer standardizes on, BigID is the intelligence and action layer underneath it."

Guardrails, Enforced in the Stack

- Agents inherit the requesting user's permissions , enforced at the API and MCP layer rather than in a system prompt

- Every agent action is logged and attributable to a person

- Enterprise controls including password vaulting, BYOK, telemetry, and air-gap support

- No lock-in to one vendor's agent, one model, or one interface

AgentIQ spans BigID's 200+ integrations across on-prem, cloud, SaaS, and API data sources, covering data at rest, in motion, and in use. Learn more at bigid.com/agentiq.

About BigID

BigID helps organizations connect the dots in data & AI: for security, governance, privacy, compliance, and AI data management. BigID enables customers to find, understand, manage, protect, and take action on high-risk & high-value data, wherever it lives. Customers use BigID to reduce their AI & data risk, automate security and privacy controls, achieve compliance, and understand their data throughout their entire data landscape: from the cloud, on-prem, and everywhere in between. BigID has been recognized for innovation as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer; named to the Forbes Cloud 100; the Inc 5000 for 4 consecutive years; the Deloitte 500 for 4 consecutive years; Market Leader in Data Security Posture Management (DSPM); and an RSA Innovation Sandbox winner.

SOURCE BigID

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SLIPNOT® Introduces SLIPNOT® Sweep - A Sweepable, Durable Non-Slip Flooring Product for Dry Processing Facilities

NFSI high-traction certified product provides superior safety, durability and cleanability

DETROIT, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- SLIPNOT®, the leading provider of specialized safety flooring products and surface technologies, announces the introduction of the patent-pending SLIPNOT® Sweep – a sweepable, durable, non-slip flooring product engineered specifically to end the compromise between safety and sanitation in medium- to low-hazard zones in dry processing facilities. The new flooring solution transforms processing areas, staircases and walkways into safe, hygienic non-slip surfaces in facilities for dry food, baking, dairy powder and pharmaceutical manufacturing, as well as plastics and wood processing.

"The introduction of SLIPNOT Sweep provides facility managers, quality assurance leaders and plant operations with a long-awaited solution that meets safety and sanitation standards, audits and workflows in dry processing facilities," said Scott Sargent, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at SLIPNOT. "It transforms potential slip, trip and fall hazard areas into high-performance, sanitary environments allowing people to move faster and more safely."

Addressing the Industry Challenge of Safety and Sanitation

For years, dry processing facilities have had to choose between employee safety and plant sanitation. Traditional non-slip floors feature microscopic grooves and crevices that easily trap fine powders, organic dust and debris. While many plants have turned to dotted metal, assuming it would sweep clean easily, the raised beads still trap debris. Since these facilities limit or restrict wet washdowns or power washing to prevent microbial risks like Listeria and Salmonella, their hard-to-clean surfaces create harborage points that turn into sanitation hazards.

SLIPNOT Sweep eliminates the compromise between safety and sanitation.

"We've taken our leading SLIPNOT surface and filled in the microscopic valleys while leaving the millions of high-traction, tool-steel hard peaks exposed," said Quinn Poor, Manager of Engineering and Product Development. "That means our customers have a product that is easy to clean and provides the grip needed to work safely."

Superior Durability, Cleanability and High Traction

SLIPNOT Sweep combines high-traction safety with strict hygienic design and offers three distinct advantages:

- Extreme Durability: The high-friction safety flooring, currently available in stainless on stainless steel substrate, has unmatched bond strength. This means the surface will not peel, flake or delaminate. Because the surface is grit-free, it eliminates particle shedding that can contaminate product lines or wear down under heavy foot or rolling-cart traffic.

- Hygienic Cleanability: In food processing areas, the surface must be fully seam-welded to avoid underlying bacterial harborage gaps. SLIPNOT pre-masks the perimeter edges of each surface prior to the SLIPNOT installation process. This allows field installers to perform full-seam welds without burning or delaminating the surrounding finish.

- High Traction: The surface, which is NFSI high-traction certified, maintains a high coefficient of friction (COF). In-house testing proves that SLIPNOT Sweep exceeds 0.88 wet DCOF and a dry DCOF of 0.71, which are well above industrial safety standards.

Unmatched Long-Term Value

SLIPNOT Sweep eliminates the hidden costs of legacy anti-slip options. While tapes, paints and grit coatings need constant reapplication and increase ongoing downtime, this new product is a safe, high-durability solution that provides long-term value.

- Maximizes Uptime: In high volume production facilities, saving 15 to 30 minutes of sanitation time per line and can save hundreds of hours of production availability annually.

- Eliminates Maintenance: Replaces recurring expenses for temporary tapes, paints and grit coatings as well as labor touch-ups.

- Protects Profitability: Continuous slip resistance safeguards against expensive injury claims, compliance fines and liability.

American-made in Detroit and backed by a one-year warranty, the new SLIPNOT Sweep complements the core product portfolio of fully customizable flooring solutions.

For more information about SLIPNOT Sweep, visit slipnot.com/products/sweep/.

About SLIPNOT

SLIPNOT is the pioneer and leading provider of high-durability, slip-resistant metal flooring products and surface technologies for walkways, entryways, stairs, rails, ladders and other critical access areas. Proudly made in Detroit, USA, SLIPNOT transforms potentially hazardous spaces in food and beverage manufacturing, industrial facilities, infrastructure, commercial buildings and retail environments into safer, more efficient spaces. SLIPNOT products help safety managers and building owners reduce slip-and-fall risk in demanding environments. For more information on how to create a SLIPNOT environment, visit www.SLIPNOT.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

SOURCE SLIPNOT

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A decade of real-world autonomy and enterprise growth positions Simbe to power the physical intelligence layer for retail

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Simbe, the physical intelligence platform for retail, today announced that it has surpassed 3,000 autonomous units under contract: the largest commercially committed fleet of shelf intelligence technology identified in company research. In the decade since introducing Tally, the world's first inventory robot, Simbe is building on that sustained leadership to evolve from leading in autonomous shelf digitization to building a broader platform for the physical store.

Today, Simbe combines autonomous robots, computer vision, RFID, handheld and fixed sensing to continuously capture what is happening inside retail locations: from inventory availability and product location to prices, promotions, and merchandising conditions. Together, these capabilities make Simbe the only multimodal platform purpose-built for the physical store, turning live retail environments into machine-readable infrastructure.

Every deployment expands Simbe's understanding of what is true inside stores: capturing individual inventory conditions, how they change over time, and the patterns that emerge across entire store chains. Simbe brings this ground truth together, powering an expanding set of applications, workflows, AI agents and connected devices.

"Retailers are increasingly deploying physical intelligence across the enterprise," said Deborah Weinswig, Founder & CEO of Coresight Research. "Simbe's 3,000 unit milestone reflects that shift: trusted shelf-level data is becoming foundational to store operations, digital commerce, merchandising and supply chain decisions."

Simbe's deployment scale also places the company among a small group of physical AI companies operating fleets at thousands-unit scale. While many physical AI companies remain in pilots or early production, Simbe has spent a decade operating autonomously in dynamic public environments and scaling across leading retail enterprises:

- More than 75 retail banners globally across nearly a dozen countries.

- The first and only company to earn UL 3300 certification for a robot designed to operate in public.

- More than 90% of store managers working alongside Tally say the technology makes their jobs better.

"What works once in a lab doesn't often work in the real world, and it's brutally hard to build robotics that operate reliably across thousands of stores for the world's largest retailers," said Aidan Madigan-Curtis, Partner of Eclipse. "Simbe is the real deal. In a category full of promise, they're one of the rare companies delivering at global scale—showing how physical AI is becoming essential infrastructure for retail."

At scale, Simbe has advanced from robots that digitize shelves to shelf intelligence that informs the retail enterprise. Today, Simbe is focused on creating the physical intelligence layer for orchestrating increasingly autonomous store operations.

"Retail is one of the clearest proving grounds for physical AI at commercial scale, and this is just the beginning" said Brad Bogolea, co-founder and CEO of Simbe. "A decade of operating autonomously in stores has given us the foundation to think far beyond the robot. We're building the physical intelligence layer that enables retailers to understand and operate stores with greater autonomy."

About Simbe

Simbe is the physical intelligence and orchestration layer for retail. Its vertically-integrated platform combines autonomous robotics, computer vision, RFID, fixed sensing, and edge AI to continuously understand what is happening inside physical stores, orchestrate action, and verify intended outcomes. Every deployment expands Simbe's understanding of how conditions change, revealing patterns across entire store chains—from inventory availability and product location to prices, promotions, and merchandising conditions.

That intelligence powers a growing set of applications, workflows, AI agents, and connected devices, turning live retail environments into machine-readable infrastructure for increasingly autonomous store operations. Deployed across thousands of locations, Simbe empowers store teams and elevates the shopper experience in nearly a dozen countries.

CONTACT: [email protected]

SOURCE Simbe Robotics

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New in-store software solutions will give grocers and CPG brands a live view of every store, so shelves stay stocked and customers can find what they need

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Instacart (NASDAQ: CART), a leading grocery technology company, today announced new in-store software that will enable grocers and CPG brands to access a real-time digital view of grocery shelves. The new solutions will map the entire store down to individual products on shelves, allowing grocers and CPG brands to virtually explore aisles, understand what is happening on shelves, and take action in real time. By turning the physical store into a live, actionable map, Instacart will help the entire grocery ecosystem keep products in stock and make it easier for customers to find what they need.

Instacart's network of approximately 600,000 shoppers visits stores across North America more than 15 times per store per day on average, generating over 10 million unique data points daily. Instacart is leveraging the data Instacart shoppers collect from shelf scans to create a real-time view of what is happening on store shelves. Combined with insights from more than 1.6 billion lifetime orders and shelf imagery capturable by both Instacart shoppers and Caper Carts – powered by Arpalus computer vision technology – Instacart gives retailers and CPG brands unprecedented, real-time visibility into what is available, where there are spikes or drop-offs in demand affecting inventory, and how in-store merchandising impacts sales.

"Grocery stores are the most complex physical environments in retail. A single store carries tens of thousands of items and the floor changes by the minute as customers shop, brands restock, and associates move displays," said Ryan Hamburger, Chief Commercial Officer at Instacart. "Traditional inventory systems weren't built for today's reality – they rely on estimates and periodic counts, leaving grocers and brands with an incomplete picture of what's actually happening on shelves. By turning the insights Instacart generates every day into real-time intelligence for the physical store, we'll give retailers and CPG brands a level of visibility that drives better business outcomes and experiences for every customer."

Building a real-time view of every store, aisle by aisle

What sets Instacart's in-store software solutions apart from other shelf-monitoring tools is the depth of grocery-specific data behind it. Most solutions solely track items received and sold; Instacart shows grocers and CPG brands exactly what is on the shelf, where customers are shopping, which displays are driving sales, and where gaps are costing revenue.

For store managers, that intelligence will come to life in a virtual view of the store through Inventory Intelligence, where they can walk any aisle, view shelf performance, and explore stocking, merchandising, and planogram changes before making them in-store. Instacart's in-store software solutions will offer:

- Real-time shelf visibility: See what is on the shelf, continuously updated as Instacart shoppers scan throughout the day – enabling in-store teams to replenish high-margin, high-velocity items faster, merchandisers to optimize shelf layouts and displays, and supply chain teams to improve demand forecasting and replenishment.

- Merchandising optimization: Identify high-velocity products that may need more shelf space and where a simple change, like adding another facing, could help recover lost sales.

- Demand forecasting: Anticipate which products are likely to run out before they do, helping teams prioritize restocking ahead of holidays and other periods of peak demand.

For CPG brands, Instacart is bringing new visibility into what happens with their products in stores with the Store Excellence Portal. Brands will receive a daily, store-level view of what is on the shelf, helping them identify where gaps are costing sales, where customers are switching to competitors, and which stores and SKUs need attention. Instacart's new solution helps brands understand:

- Lost sales estimation: See how much revenue is being lost down to the store and UPC – refreshed daily – giving teams an estimated dollar figure to act on.

- Substitution and competitive benchmarking: Track whether consumers who could not find your product switched to a different pack size or competitor, and see how your availability stacks up against the category - turning an empty shelf into an actionable sales signal.

- Seasonal and forward-looking monitoring: Stay ahead of peak periods by tracking depletion patterns in the weeks before demand spikes and comparing against years of historical availability data. Built-in forecasting will flag which stores and SKUs are likely to go out of stock before it happens.

These new in-store software solutions are rolling out with select grocers and CPG brands, with more launching in the coming months.

"Identifying out-of-stock issues has typically meant piecing together information from multiple systems and our store managers spending a lot of time on the floor," said Dylan Queen at Queen's Price Chopper. "Having visibility to on-shelf realities and inventory trends over time will help us better orchestrate replenishment across the store and respond to gaps quicker."

"One of the greatest challenges we see in retail is prioritizing where to send resources to create the greatest impact for brands," said Andy Keenan, Executive Vice President & GM, Branded Retail Services at Advantage Solutions. "We partner closely with Instacart, and one of our biggest unlocks has been accessing their Store Excellence Portal data. We can identify where products are missing, prioritize by sales opportunity, and direct resources to the shelves that need it most. That's helped us recover lost sales and improve on-shelf availability for the brands we serve."

These AI solutions are part of the Instacart Enterprise platform. Learn more at company.instacart.com/enterprise-platform.

About Instacart

Instacart is a leading grocery technology company that partners with more than 2,200 retail banners – representing nearly 100,000 stores – to transform how people shop for the groceries they need from the retailers they trust, while creating flexible earning opportunities for shoppers. Through the Instacart Marketplace, Instacart Enterprise platform, and Instacart Ads ecosystem, the company powers ecommerce, fulfillment, in-store technology, AI offerings, and advertising for partners. For more information, visit www.instacart.com/company. Maplebear Inc. is the registered corporate name of Instacart.

SOURCE Maplebear Inc. dba Instacart

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Niagara ASR and Nith TTS streaming models reach production release in a single SDK

WATERLOO, ON, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Applied Brain Research (ABR) today announced general availability of the ABR SDK and the Niagara ASR and Nith TTS model families, a production toolkit for building real-time voice interfaces that run entirely on edge processor hardware.

The SDK provides streaming automatic speech recognition and streaming text-to-speech through a single API, so a developer can enable a responsive voice interface on the device itself. Because the latency-critical speech input and output processing runs locally, there is no speech AI dependency on a network, voice data does not leave the device, and the interface continues to operate when connectivity is unreliable.

"A voice interface is only usable if it answers immediately, which makes real-time performance the binding constraint for edge applications," said Kevin Conley, CEO of Applied Brain Research. "ABR's models and SDK are designed to deliver leading accuracy with the lowest latency on constrained edge hardware. Customers and hardware partners evaluating the SDK are consistently surprised by the response times and accuracy they measure."

Features

The current release provides a Python library over a stable C ABI, with C and Java bindings to follow in the coming weeks. A single SDK covers ABR's Niagara speech recognition and Nith speech synthesis families running simultaneously, starting with English, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.

Each model is distributed as a self-contained package holding the compiled library, the model weights and the configuration in one directory. Changing language or upgrading to newly trained weights requires only a change of the path. There is no inference backend to select and no cross-compilation step.

Two add-on capabilities are available to address brand- and domain-specific applications. For TTS, voice cloning generates a new synthesis voice from a short reference recording using consent-based training. For ASR and TTS, custom vocabulary allows a product's domain terms, proper nouns and product names to be recognized and pronounced correctly by both the recognition and synthesis models, without retraining.

Performance

ABR's Niagara streaming ASR models produce first text from the initial audio in as little as 115 milliseconds. The Nith streaming TTS models produce first audio from initial text in as little as 147 milliseconds, measured on embedded application-class CPUs.

All models operate faster than real time on every supported platform.

Supported platforms

Linux x86-64, Linux ARM64 and Android ARM64 are currently supported. Acceleration on integrated NPUs and DSPs is also available on certain partner platforms. Additional silicon targets and support for RTOS running on Cortex-M class microcontrollers with NPUs are targeted for release before year end.

Evaluation and availability

Documentation is available on ABR's documentation portal. The SDK and application packages are available from the ABR developer portal. Self-managed registration enables access to free evaluation of the full SDK and available models. Pilot and production deployment are available under commercial license from ABR.

ABR's open non-streaming (batch) speech recognition models appear on the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard, where niagara-38m-batch.en is the most accurate model under 100 million parameters, at a mean word error rate of 9.69 percent as of the date of this release. niagara-19m-batch.en, one of the smallest on the leaderboard, outperforms models several times its size. Both can be tried in ABR's demo Space. The streaming models in the SDK use the same state space model architecture as these batch models and are trained on a superset of the same data.

About Applied Brain Research

Applied Brain Research develops efficient real-time speech and language AI that runs entirely on edge devices. Its Niagara ASR and Nith TTS model families deliver leading performance at a fraction of the size of comparable models. ABR derives significant efficiency and low latency from its state space model architectures, which originate from ABR's patented Legendre Memory Unit. ABR is based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. More at appliedbrainresearch.com.

SOURCE Applied Brain Research Inc.

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NYSE issues a pre-market daily advisory direct from the trading floor.

NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) provides a daily pre-market update directly from the NYSE Trading Floor. Access today's NYSE Pre-market update for market insights before trading begins.

Kristen Scholer delivers the pre-market update on September 21st

- Officials and guests of the United States Department of State will be at the NYSE as the High-level week of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly commences.

- In a statement, the U.S. Department of States says it will pursue one clear goal: delivering prosperity through peace, by bringing the UN 'back to basics.'

- The UN event convenes world leaders to New York each year.

- This year's UNGA theme is 'Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation: A United Nations that Delivers for All.'

- Forus CEO Sahir Jaggi will join NYSE Live to discuss the AI healthcare startup's latest funding round.

- The company announced $150 million in Series C funding earlier this month.

- Forus' latest funding round boosts its valuation to $3 billion.

- Forus is on a mission to connect doctors, pharmacies, payers, and the biopharma industry to bring new science to the patients who need it.

- Investors begin the week tracking the latest geopolitical and economic developments.

- ICE Brent Crude is trading at about $101 a barrel as the U.S. and Iran exchanged threats to continue attacks in the Middle East.

- The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield remains close to 5% after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates last week.

Opening Bell

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and officials of the United States Department of State recognize the 81st Session of the United States General Assembly

Closing Bell

Ecolab (NYSE: ECL) and the Water Resilience Coalition celebrate Climate Week NYC

For market insights, IPO activity, and today's opening bell, download the NYSE TV App and check out the NYSE YouTube: TV.NYSE.com and YouTube.com/@NYSEofficial

SOURCE New York Stock Exchange

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Human Nature spotlights solutions protecting water and strengthening local economies, from Arkansas Delta wetlands to Iowa farm fields and Mexican fishing communities

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The Walton Family Foundation is expanding its work to advance nature-based solutions, practical approaches that work with natural systems to protect water while strengthening communities and local economies. The focus is part of the foundation's evolving Environment Program strategy, pairing on-the-ground work with efforts to address the policies, financing and market conditions that can help effective solutions grow and endure.

Today, the foundation launched Human Nature, a new storytelling series featuring multimedia case studies showing what that approach looks like in practice. Through stories from Arkansas Delta wetlands, Iowa farm fields and fishing communities in Mexico, the series spotlights how communities are already working with nature to reduce flood risk, improve water quality, strengthen livelihoods and build resilience.

"When we take care of nature and work with natural systems, we are also taking care of people," said Moira Mcdonald, director of the Walton Family Foundation's Environment Program. "These nature-based solutions are already helping farmers keep more topsoil and profit on their land, helping fishing communities rebuild the stocks their livelihoods depend on, and helping people hold on to land that's been in their families for generations. We know these approaches can work. Now the challenge is helping more communities put them to work by bringing together local leadership, investment and policies that make proven solutions easier to adopt and sustain."

Natural approaches also have broad public support and a growing body of research behind them. A 2025 Morning Consult poll found that 80% of Americans say restoring and protecting wetlands to absorb floodwaters should be a priority for state and local governments. A June 2026 study from the University of Georgia's Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems found that when the full range of benefits natural infrastructure provides — including flood reduction, clean water, habitat and recreation — is accounted for, these approaches can deliver returns of up to $8 for every $1 invested.

Restoring Wetlands and Preserving Family Land in the Mississippi Delta

In the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, the foundation-supported Tri-State Conservation Partnership has helped place more than 1 million acres into USDA Wetland Reserve Easements, paying landowners to return frequently flooded farmland to wetlands. The approach lets farmers keep their most productive acres in production while retiring the acres most prone to flooding, restoring habitat and reducing flood risk while keeping land in local hands.

Local partners like The KKAC Organization, an Arkansas Delta land-retention and agricultural organization, help connect landowners, including historically underserved rural communities who have long faced barriers to holding on to their land, with these federal conservation programs.

Financing Conservation on Iowa Farms

In Iowa, the Environmental Defense Fund partnered with CoBank on a sustainability-linked loan with Heartland Co-op. The loan lowers interest rates as farmers adopt cover crops and saturated buffers: financing that has already helped fund 160,000 acres of cover crops and roughly 90 saturated buffers that keep nutrient-rich water out of the water supply.

Elsewhere in Iowa, the foundation is working with the American Flood Coalition to help farmers like Loran Steinlage of FLOLO Farms adopt relay cropping, overlapping crops to keep roots in the ground year-round. The practice cuts erosion, boosts water retention and is estimated to add $51 per acre in farm profit, with the potential to cut downstream flooding by as much as 30%.

Rebuilding Fisheries in Coastal Mexico

On Mexico's Baja Peninsula, NGOs, Niparajá and Comunidad y Biodiversidad (COBI), have helped fishing communities establish networks of community-run fish refuges, marine zones temporarily closed to fishing to let depleted species recover. Now in continuous operation for 15 years, the refuges have helped rebuild fish populations while training local fishers as scientific monitors. The model has proven durable enough that the Mexican government plans to more than triple the number of fish refuge zones in 2026.

Learn more at: waltonfamilyfoundation.org/human-nature

About the Walton Family Foundation

The Walton Family Foundation is, at its core, a family-led foundation. Three generations of the descendants of our founders, Sam and Helen Walton, and their spouses work together to lead the foundation and create access to opportunity for people and communities. We work in three areas: improving education, protecting rivers and oceans and the communities they support, and investing in our home region of Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta. To learn more, visit waltonfamilyfoundation.org and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and X.

SOURCE Walton Family Foundation

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Two Vice Presidents Join Castillo Engineering to Scale Utility Solar & Storage Offerings

Aaron Carrillo and Devin Radovich bring shared experience in scaling engineering teams, lowering project costs & lead times

MAITLAND, Fla., Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Castillo Engineering, a leading national solar and energy storage engineering firm, announces the appointment of two executives to lead its next phase of growth: Aaron Carrillo as Vice President of Operations, and Devin Radovich as Vice President of Sales and Marketing. The two previously worked together at Renewable Energy Systems Americas (RES), a partnership that will accelerate Castillo's scaling of its utility-scale engineering capacity.

After spending six years in the Arizona Army National Guard and obtaining his Engineering degree from ASU, Aaron Carrillo built over a decade of experience in scaling engineering organizations at Tesla and EVS. At Tesla, he scaled his own PV and BESS team from 25 to 70 designers, and as part of the leadership team, grew the 100-designer residential team to 300.

As a leader in EVS' PV and BESS services, Carrillo helped grow the engineering team from 20 to 60 employees, increasing the firm's utility-scale project throughput from 3-5 projects per year to 20-30 per year. Carrillo built that growth, while maintaining EVS' standing as a Top 20 Renewables Engineering Firm, by developing standardized processes and quality systems designed to hold up as headcount and project volume increase.

"I've spent my career scaling engineering teams by building systems that let them grow without losing what made them good in the first place," says Carrillo. "The Castillo team already has that instinct, with strong technical work, long-lasting client relationships, and a culture that's centered around passion, process, and people. Together with Devin, I'm excited to help this team grow into one of the country's top solar engineering firms."

Carrillo's arrival pairs operational scaling with Devin Radovich's 30 years of experience in construction and energy, including nearly 15 years in renewables. Radovich brings a deep understanding of the utility-scale project lifecycle, having developed and delivered nearly 3 GW of solar, wind, battery storage, and transmission projects. As Vice President of Sales & Marketing, he is focused on strengthening relationships with EPCs, developers, and owners while supporting Castillo's continued growth.

Carrillo and Radovich often collaborated at RES, with good results; on one utility-scale project, their championing of black steel piles in place of galvanized steel saved more than $7 million and cut lead times in half.

"Having worked together before, I'm thrilled that Aaron and I are bringing our shared approach and complementary skillsets to Castillo," says Devin. "He builds the operational systems that let an engineering team grow without losing quality, while I tell that story to the market. I'm looking forward to building lasting partnerships through trust, communication, and a shared commitment to success."

About Castillo Engineering

Castillo Engineering is a leading utility-scale design and engineering firm specializing in full-service solar, energy storage, and high-voltage solutions. The firm's services provide comprehensive support from initial feasibility studies through construction close-out. As Engineer of Record, Castillo Engineering ensures projects are completed on time and within budget, consistently delivering high-quality, innovative solutions to developers, EPC contractors, and utilities nationwide. With over 25 years of experience and more than 10GW of successful projects, the firm navigates national, state, and local codes with precision. Castillo Engineering is based in Maitland, Florida and is licensed in all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Learn more at castillope.com.

Castillo Engineering Media Contact

Allison Ruedig

[email protected]

872-870-1302

SOURCE Castillo Engineering

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