Google's antitrust loss and Samsung's Galaxy AI expansion top the Innovation Index

Welcome to ZDNET’s Innovation Index, which identifies the most innovative developments in tech from the past week and ranks the top four, based on votes from our panel of editors and experts. Our mission is to help you identify the trends that will have the biggest impact on the future.

Not really an innovation, per se, but: our top spot this week goes to Google, which has been found in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act for monopolizing search by a US District Court judge. Of course, the company has already announced it plans to appeal the decision. In the interim, the ruling won’t really affect the search giant’s position (or how users browse the web). And as ZDNET contributor Steven Vaughan-Nichols points out, if we use US versus Microsoft as a reference, it’s unlikely Google will be hit that hard by the decision anyway. At the same time, however, search is evolving — OpenAI has finally revealed SearchGPT, if preliminarily, and other AI-powered engines are springing up all over the place. Especially after the company’s AI Overview feature flopped, Google’s future may not be as secure as it might think. 

Coming in second is Samsung for delivering elements of its Galaxy AI to more devices — several million mid-range models, to be precise — sometime in the next two months. This move is especially notable as the release of Apple Intelligence, in beta and actuality, lags, and contrasts with the fact that Apple’s AI will only be available to select newer models due to its processing requirements. With reports that the company may even charge a monthly subscription fee for Apple Intelligence, Samsung’s rollout looks competitive. Even if users need to purchase Samsung’s newest model to access every Galaxy AI feature, something is better than nothing. 

In spot #3 is the AI agent and its impact on our working lives. Research from McKinsey shows that agentic systems, which can act independently, will increasingly influence how AI is deployed. Though they aren’t new, AI agents now have more agency thanks to generative AI’s natural language abilities, and are moving “from thought to action”. The development means big changes in how all kinds of roles, technical and otherwise, are carried out. In short, we can expect to share the proverbial water cooler with more AI agents soon. 

Closing out the Index this week is the steady creep of the mundane AI scam into our everyday lives, even our relatively offline hobbies. ZDNET’s David Gewirtz looked into how AI-generated knitting and crochet patterns create headaches for crafters because, much like AI-generated code, they don’t always work in the real world. The problem is an example of the larger consequences of gen AI content becoming normalized in many environments: it’s easier than ever to churn out and sell digital material quickly, cheaply, and at scale, and the results are harder to spot. It’s worth taking a closer look (and beefing up on media literacy), even where you least expect it.