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By Mike Scarcella WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to halt key parts of a judge's order requiring Alphabet's Google to make major changes to its app store Play, as the company prepares to appeal a decision in a lawsuit brought by "Fortnite" maker Epic Games. The justices turned down Google's request to temporarily freeze parts of the injunction won by Epic in its lawsuit accusing the tech giant of monopolizing how consumers access apps on Android devices and pay for transactions within apps. A federal appeals court in July upheld the judge’s sweeping order against Google. The injunction issued last year by U.S. District Judge James Donato requires Google to allow users to download rival app stores within its Play store and make Play's app catalog available to competitors. Those provisions do not take effect until July 2026. The judge also said Google must allow developers to include external links in apps, enabling users to bypass Google's billing system. That part of the injunction is due to take effect later this month. Google said in a statement that while it was disappointed by the Supreme Court's order, the company will continue its appeal. Epic Games chief executive Tim Sweeney said in a post on social media platform X that starting later this month, app developers will be "legally entitled" to steer Google Play users to out-of-app payment options without fees and other "friction." Donato issued his order in a lawsuit that Epic filed in 2020 against Google, alleging its restrictive app store rules violated antitrust law. Epic won a jury trial in San Francisco in 2023. Google has denied any wrongdoing. Google has called Donato's order unprecedented, and said it would cause reputational harm, safety and security risks and put the company at a competitive disadvantage if allowed to take effect. Google in its Supreme Court filing said the changes would have enormous consequences for more than 100 million U.S. Android users and 500,000 developers. Google said it plans to file a full appeal to the Supreme Court by October 27, which could allow the justices to take up the case during their nine-month term that began on Monday. Epic has said Google is relying on what it called "flawed security claims" to justify its control over Android devices. Epic had urged the justices to allow Donato's injunction to take effect "so consumers and developers can benefit from competition, choices and lower prices." In July, a three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the injunction, ruling that the record in Epic's lawsuit was "replete with evidence that Google's anticompetitive conduct entrenched its dominance." Google faces other lawsuits from government, consumer and commercial plaintiffs challenging its search and advertising business practices.  (Reporting by Mike Scarcella in Washington; Additional reporting by Andrew Chung in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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By Deepa Seetharaman and Kenrick Cai SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -OpenAI touted new partnerships to incorporate its AI products across diverse industries at its developer conference on Monday, aiming to drive the strong momentum it has enjoyed among consumers to its enterprise business. "You should expect a huge focus from us on really leaning into enterprise," CEO Sam Altman told journalists at a press conference following his keynote at San Francisco's Fort Mason Center. The company revealed a flurry of collaborations with companies including Spotify, Zillow and Mattel while debuting a set of fresh tools to help developers build new applications. That included a way for other apps to plug into ChatGPT and allow a user to ask questions or perform tasks in the app. One engineer gave a live demo showing how someone could use ChatGPT to generate a readymade playlist in Spotify, or ask Zillow to narrow down a list of properties to just show those with three bedrooms and three bathrooms. Executives said this was the start of a broader vision of transforming ChatGPT into a central portal where users can access a broader range of services. "What you're going to see over the next six months is an evolution of ChatGPT from an app that is really, really useful into something that feels a little bit more like an operating system," ChatGPT head Nick Turley said. Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, underscored that OpenAI was "committed to building the best enterprise platform." News of OpenAI's partnerships led shares of some of its partners like Zillow and Figma to climb initially, a sign of how the ChatGPT maker's imprimatur has become a way to legitimize companies' positioning in AI. Earlier on Monday, shares of AMD surged more than 34% after it signed a deal supplying chips to OpenAI. Spotify said in a press release about its partnership that it would not share user data with OpenAI to train models. Asked if the same policy applied to the other deals, Turley said it would abide by the preferences users selected in their data settings. OpenAI had always planned to target the enterprise market, but its AI models were not previously ready for the higher demands of business-use cases, Altman said. "We needed to let the models get better. The models are there now," he said, adding that the company had selected "a few active early partnerships." Brockman said the work that went into its models' self-claimed gold medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad would generate benefits for enterprises in other ways. OpenAI and other tech giants such as Alphabet and Microsoft have courted enterprise AI deals to help justify massive spikes in spending, though the returns across the industry have so far failed to match investment, recent surveys showed. The ChatGPT-maker outlined ambitious new plans in the last month to build $1 trillion or more of computing capacity and launched a viral AI-video-generating app called Sora, which has shot to the top of Apple's app rankings. All this has made OpenAI a massive money-losing operation to date. Altman said it was "not in my top 10 concerns, but we obviously someday have to be very profitable." Monday's moves are the latest in a stream of announcements for OpenAI, which sparked the modern AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT about three years ago. Many of Altman's ambitions are bold and expensive even by Silicon Valley standards, sparking some concerns among tech investors about whether or not AI investments are a bubble. Altman said during the question-answer session that many areas of the AI industry are "kind of bubbly," but that "real value will get created." (Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman and Kenrick Cai in San Francisco; Editing by Pooja Desai and Christopher Cushing)

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(Reuters) -Verizon Communications on Monday named former PayPal boss Dan Schulman as its new CEO, replacing Hans Vestberg in a leadership transition aimed at steering the telecom giant through slowing growth in the wireless market. The move comes at a time when Verizon is battling rising competition against the backdrop of slowing subscriber growth and cautious consumers unwilling to buy premium plans offered by wireless carriers. Vestberg, who took the helm in 2018, will remain with the company as a special adviser through October 4, 2026, Verizon said. Schulman, 67, led PayPal for nearly a decade before stepping down in 2023, steering the payments firm through its split from eBay and a surge in online transactions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Vestberg's tenure at Verizon was marked by heavy investments in 5G networks and efforts to diversify revenue through media and enterprise services, though the company later exited most of its media holdings. Verizon has faced mounting pressure from rivals AT&T and T-Mobile US as the U.S. wireless market matures. Verizon's stock has underperformed shares of rival telecom operators in the past few years. The appointment comes a few weeks after competitor T-Mobile announced a CEO replacement, reflecting a changing U.S. telecom sector with market leaders working to attract consumer dollars amid fierce competition. (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore and Maju Samuel)

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By Dawn Chmielewski and Helen Coster LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison has named Bari Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News, the news division of U.S. broadcaster CBS, as part of a deal to acquire the online news site she founded, The Free Press. The appointment is seen as Ellison's bet that Weiss, a successful entrepreneur and outsider with billionaire connections, can modernize and turn around the powerful but third-placed broadcast news network.   The companies did not disclose the deal value in Monday's announcement. A source familiar with the matter said it was for $150 million.  In an essay announcing the transaction on Monday, Weiss, 41, said the deal provides "a chance to help reshape a storied media organization—to help guide CBS News into a future that honors those great values that underpin The Free Press and the best of American journalism." Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, took over the CBS network and other Paramount properties earlier this year when his company Skydance Media merged with Paramount Global in a $8.4 billion deal. He helped secure regulatory approval for the deal with the promise that the CBS network would reflect "a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum." Monday's announcement capped months of talks between Ellison and Weiss. The newly minted media baron first floated the idea at July's Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, a frequent staging ground for major media mergers, according to media reports. Weiss previously worked in the opinion sections of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, describing herself as the most right-wing person at the Times and the most politically progressive at the Journal. Defying easy characterization, she has been critical of diversity initiatives, defended gay marriage, supported reproductive rights, and described herself as proudly pro-Israel. She resigned as opinion writer for the Times in July 2020, in a 1,500-word open letter in which she said she had been the subject of "constant bullying" by colleagues who disagreed with her views. She went on to launch an independent media company, The Free Press, which she began as a newsletter in 2021. FROM NEW YORK TIMES TO START-UP, AND BACK TO LEGACY MEDIA In 2022, she wrote that The Free Press was founded on a credo of "honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence." In a letter to Paramount employees on Monday, Ellison wrote that the company is a steward of one of the world's most iconic news organizations. “We are challenging ourselves to do better – recognizing that we have the ability to reach a broad audience and demonstrate constructive, respectful, and bipartisan dialogue in our own work,” he wrote. Weiss “brings a passion for reaching broad audiences through rigorous, fact-based reporting and a relentless commitment to amplifying voices from all corners of the spectrum,” he wrote. In a letter to CBS News employees, Weiss said that CBS was part of her family tradition. "Whenever I hear that tick, tick, tick or that trumpet fanfare, it sends me right back to our den in Pittsburgh,"  Weiss wrote in the letter seen by Reuters. "The opportunity to build on that legacy with you — and to renew it in an era that so desperately needs it — is an extraordinary privilege." Weiss said she wanted to hear from the staff at CBS News about what was working and what was not, with the goal of making CBS News the most-trusted news organization in America. She promised to listen with "an open mind, a fresh notebook and an urgent deadline." The clock is ticking for the traditional nightly newscast, whose audience is dwindling in an era of instant access to information online and on social media. The "CBS Evening News" show attracts an average of nearly 3.8 million viewers, fewer than its broadcast rivals, according to the most recent Nielsen data.  "Bari Weiss runs a small passionate team that truly understands how to build a brand and engage their followers," said LightShed Partners media analyst Richard Greenfield. "CBS News outside of '60 Minutes' does not mean much to the average consumer in 2025. (It) will be fascinating to see if and how Bari can change that." FREE PRESS CHALLENGES CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVES The Free Press has earned a reputation for challenging conventional narratives. Notable articles include a first-person essay from a then-senior editor at NPR, who accused the public radio network of liberal bias that cost it listeners' trust.  Another offered a whistleblower account of the Washington University Transgender Center at the St. Louis Children's Hospital, which reported vulnerable teenagers with mental health problems rushed into life-altering treatments. In a 2023 essay in Tablet magazine, Weiss argued for the dismantling of institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, writing that the movement "threatens not just Jews— but America itself."  The reaction to her hiring has been mixed. Judy Marie Muller, a former correspondent for CBS and ABC News, and a professor emerita of journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, called Weiss’ appointment a “sad shift.” "We can say what we want coming in — yes, let's stick to these high standards — and then we'll just see what happens," said Muller. "I think we have to watch what she does, not what she says." Weiss had never been a reporter and had "zero news experience," said Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter covering racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine. Weiss will report directly to David Ellison and help set an editorial course for CBS News.  The Free Press, which has about 1.5 million subscribers including 170,000 paying members, will remain independent, retaining its brand and operations, and will continue to publish, the companies said.  Prior to the Paramount-Skydance deal being cleared, Paramount paid $16 million to settle a 2024 lawsuit filed by U.S. President Donald Trump. The Federal Communications Commission has said the settlement and regulatory review were unrelated. (Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles and Helen Coster in New York, Aditya Soni and Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila, Nick Zieminski and Rosalba O'Brien)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

By Dawn Chmielewski and Helen Coster LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison has named Bari Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News, the news division of U.S. broadcaster CBS, as part of a deal to acquire the online news site she founded, The Free Press. The appointment is seen as Ellison's bet that Weiss, a successful entrepreneur and outsider with billionaire connections, can modernize and turn around the powerful but third-placed broadcast news network.   The companies did not disclose the deal value in Monday's announcement. A source familiar with the matter said it was for $150 million.  In an essay announcing the transaction on Monday, Weiss, 41, said the deal provides "a chance to help reshape a storied media organization—to help guide CBS News into a future that honors those great values that underpin The Free Press and the best of American journalism." Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, took over the CBS network and other Paramount properties earlier this year when his company Skydance Media merged with Paramount Global in a $8.4 billion deal. He helped secure regulatory approval for the deal with the promise that the CBS network would reflect "a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum." Monday's announcement capped months of talks between Ellison and Weiss. The newly minted media baron first floated the idea at July's Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, a frequent staging ground for major media mergers, according to media reports. Weiss previously worked in the opinion sections of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, describing herself as the most right-wing person at the Times and the most politically progressive at the Journal. Defying easy characterization, she has been critical of diversity initiatives, defended gay marriage, supported reproductive rights, and described herself as proudly pro-Israel. She resigned as opinion writer for the Times in July 2020, in a 1,500-word open letter in which she said she had been the subject of "constant bullying" by colleagues who disagreed with her views. She went on to launch an independent media company, The Free Press, which she began as a newsletter in 2021. FROM NEW YORK TIMES TO START-UP, AND BACK TO LEGACY MEDIA In 2022, she wrote that The Free Press was founded on a credo of "honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence." In a letter to Paramount employees on Monday, Ellison wrote that the company is a steward of one of the world's most iconic news organizations. “We are challenging ourselves to do better – recognizing that we have the ability to reach a broad audience and demonstrate constructive, respectful, and bipartisan dialogue in our own work,” he wrote. Weiss “brings a passion for reaching broad audiences through rigorous, fact-based reporting and a relentless commitment to amplifying voices from all corners of the spectrum,” he wrote. In a letter to CBS News employees, Weiss said that CBS was part of her family tradition. "Whenever I hear that tick, tick, tick or that trumpet fanfare, it sends me right back to our den in Pittsburgh,"  Weiss wrote in the letter seen by Reuters. "The opportunity to build on that legacy with you — and to renew it in an era that so desperately needs it — is an extraordinary privilege." Weiss said she wanted to hear from the staff at CBS News about what was working and what was not, with the goal of making CBS News the most-trusted news organization in America. She promised to listen with "an open mind, a fresh notebook and an urgent deadline." The clock is ticking for the traditional nightly newscast, whose audience is dwindling in an era of instant access to information online and on social media. The "CBS Evening News" show attracts an average of nearly 3.8 million viewers, fewer than its broadcast rivals, according to the most recent Nielsen data.  "Bari Weiss runs a small passionate team that truly understands how to build a brand and engage their followers," said LightShed Partners media analyst Richard Greenfield. "CBS News outside of '60 Minutes' does not mean much to the average consumer in 2025. (It) will be fascinating to see if and how Bari can change that." FREE PRESS CHALLENGES CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVES The Free Press has earned a reputation for challenging conventional narratives. Notable articles include a first-person essay from a then-senior editor at NPR, who accused the public radio network of liberal bias that cost it listeners' trust.  Another offered a whistleblower account of the Washington University Transgender Center at the St. Louis Children's Hospital, which reported vulnerable teenagers with mental health problems rushed into life-altering treatments. In a 2023 essay in Tablet magazine, Weiss argued for the dismantling of institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, writing that the movement "threatens not just Jews— but America itself."  The reaction to her hiring has been mixed. Judy Marie Muller, a former correspondent for CBS and ABC News, and a professor emerita of journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, called Weiss’ appointment a “sad shift.” "We can say what we want coming in — yes, let's stick to these high standards — and then we'll just see what happens," said Muller. "I think we have to watch what she does, not what she says." Weiss had never been a reporter and had "zero news experience," said Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter covering racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine. Weiss will report directly to David Ellison and help set an editorial course for CBS News.  The Free Press, which has about 1.5 million subscribers including 170,000 paying members, will remain independent, retaining its brand and operations, and will continue to publish, the companies said.  Prior to the Paramount-Skydance deal being cleared, Paramount paid $16 million to settle a 2024 lawsuit filed by U.S. President Donald Trump. The Federal Communications Commission has said the settlement and regulatory review were unrelated. (Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles and Helen Coster in New York, Aditya Soni and Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila, Nick Zieminski and Rosalba O'Brien)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

By Akash Sriram (Reuters) -Tesla teased an October 7 event, in which investors and analysts anticipate the unveiling of a more affordable vehicle to counter falling sales, sending the shares of the Elon Musk-led electric automaker more than 5% higher on Monday. In a nine-second video posted on social media platform X on Sunday, Tesla showed a vehicle with its headlights illuminated in a dark setting, while hinting at an event set for Tuesday in a separate video that had "10/7" at the end. The teaser follows Tesla's record third-quarter deliveries, driven by a surge in EV purchases ahead of the expiration of the $7,500 U.S. EV tax credit on September 30.  However, analysts expect Tesla's annual deliveries to fall for a second straight year to about 1.62 million vehicles, as expiring incentives and a demand slowdown linked to CEO Musk's polarizing politics weigh on sales. Tesla has previously delayed rolling out a lower-cost version of the Model Y in the U.S. It said in June it had made "first builds" of the vehicle, but would start selling it in the fourth quarter and ramp up output at a pace that would be slower than planned. The stripped-down version is designed to be roughly 20% cheaper to produce than the refreshed Model Y and could scale to about 250,000 units a year in the U.S. by 2026. Tesla has not revealed details of how it plans to cut costs. Analysts have said reducing the size of the battery, changing to cloth seats from leather and removing some audio speakers, the glass roof and the rear touchscreen would be key to Tesla trimming costs. The scale of the cost cut is crucial for Tesla's already squeezed margins and will be closely watched. Wall Street expects Tesla's deliveries to jump next year to 1.85 million vehicles, with the cheaper model accounting for 155,610 units in 2026, according to Visible Alpha estimates. "Tesla is teasing something big as a flurry of X posts has fans bracing for what looks like the launch of a more affordable Model Y tomorrow," said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst, Hargreaves Lansdown, who personally owns Tesla shares. "The price tag will be the real tell, offering clues on how far Tesla has pushed cost savings and how much new demand it can unlock." The company has not introduced a new mass-market vehicle in years, relying heavily on incremental updates to the Model 3 and Model Y to drive sales. Sales of its last major launch, the Cybertruck, have struggled, with Tesla offering thousands of dollars in discounts for vehicles in inventory in the past few months.  A U.S. recall filing in March showed 46,096 Cybertrucks had been built between its introduction in November 2023 and early this year. (Reporting by Mrinmay Dey and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Jamie Freed, Mrigank Dhaniwala and Arun Koyyur)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

(Reuters) -The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been probing marketing platform AppLovin's data-collection practices, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. Shares of the company were down 14% at market close. The agency has specifically reviewed allegations that AppLovin violated platform partners' service agreements to push more targeted advertising to consumers, the report said. SEC enforcement officials assigned to cyber- and emerging technologies have been handling the matter, the report said. The probe is in response to a whistleblower complaint filed earlier this year, along with multiple short seller reports published in the past several months, Bloomberg said. The regulator has not accused AppLovin or its officials of wrongdoing, and it was not clear how advanced the review was, according to the report. An AppLovin spokesperson said that it does not comment on any potential regulatory matters. The SEC said it is currently not able to respond to many inquiries from the press due to the government shutdown. Three short sellers targeted the company earlier this year. Fuzzy Panda Research said in February that AppLovin steals data from Meta . Culper Research had alleged AppLovin exploits "app permissions that enable advertisements themselves to force-feed silent, backdoor app installations directly onto users' phones." Another short seller, Muddy Waters Research, said in March that code showed that AppLovin was collecting and structuring user IDs from its key platform partners, which appears to be a major violation of the platforms' terms of service. Later that month, two analysts disputed Muddy Waters' claims. AppLovin said it has retained law firm Quinn Emanuel to investigate the short seller activity. AppLovin, which in April submitted a bid for TikTok assets outside of China, sold its mobile games studio to London-based mobile game developer Tripledot Studios for about $800 million in a cash-and-stock deal. (Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Sahal Muhammed and Alan Barona)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

By Deepa Seetharaman and Kenrick Cai SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -OpenAI touted new partnerships to incorporate its AI products across diverse industries at its developer conference on Monday, aiming to drive the strong momentum it has enjoyed among consumers to its enterprise business. "You should expect a huge focus from us on really leaning into enterprise," CEO Sam Altman told journalists at a press conference following his keynote at San Francisco's Fort Mason Center. The company revealed a flurry of collaborations with companies including Spotify, Zillow and Mattel while debuting a set of fresh tools to help developers build new applications. That included a way for other apps to plug into ChatGPT and allow a user to ask questions or perform tasks in the app. One engineer gave a live demo showing how someone could use ChatGPT to generate a readymade playlist in Spotify, or ask Zillow to narrow down a list of properties to just show those with three bedrooms and three bathrooms. Spotify said in a press release about its partnership that it would not share user data with OpenAI to train models. Asked if the same policy applied to the other deals, ChatGPT head Nick Turley said it would abide by the preferences users selected in their data settings. OpenAI had always planned to target the enterprise, but its AI models were not previously ready for the higher demands of business-use cases, Altman said. "We needed to let the models get better. The models are there now," he said, adding that the company had selected "a few active early partnerships." Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, said the work that went into its models' self-claimed gold medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad would generate benefits for enterprises in other ways. OpenAI and other tech giants such as Alphabet and Microsoft have courted enterprise AI deals to help justify massive spikes in spending, though the returns across the industry have so far failed to match investment, recent surveys showed. The ChatGPT-maker outlined ambitious new plans in the last month to build $1 trillion or more of computing capacity and launched a viral AI-video-generating app called Sora, which has shot to the top of Apple's app rankings. All this has made OpenAI a massive money-losing operation to date. Altman said it was "not in my top 10 concerns, but we obviously someday have to be very profitable," while Brockman underscored that OpenAI was "committed to building the best enterprise platform." Monday's moves are the latest in a stream of announcements for OpenAI, which sparked the modern AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT about three years ago. Many of Altman's ambitions are bold and expensive even by Silicon Valley standards, sparking some concerns among tech investors about whether or not AI investments are a bubble. Altman said during the question-answer session that many areas of the AI industry are "kind of bubbly," but that "real value will get created." (Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman and Kenrick Cai in San Francisco; Editing by Pooja Desai)

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(Reuters) -AI-powered customer survey software maker Qualtrics has agreed to buy healthcare market research company Press Ganey Forsta in a $6.75 billion deal, both companies said on Monday. The deal comes at a time when tech giants are racing to secure proprietary datasets to train their artificial intelligence models. The deal would give Qualtrics access to the healthcare survey firm's deep hospital ties and datasets, which it would use to help healthcare providers to improve tracking patient satisfaction and offer better care. Press Ganey, owned by Ares Management and Los Angeles-based private equity group Leonard Green & Partners, works with over 41,000 hospitals, health plans and life sciences organizations, and collects and analyzes feedback from patients and caregivers, integrating it with clinical and safety data to provide insights to healthcare organizations. Under the deal's terms, Press Ganey will be paid in a combination of cash and privately held Qualtrics' stock. U.S.-based Qualtrics, which is owned by private equity firm Silver Lake, provides tools for measuring and analyzing customer, employee, product and brand experiences. It serves large enterprises, governments and universities, with clients including Microsoft, BMW, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. German software company SAP, which bought Qualtrics in 2018 for $8 billion, sold its majority stake to private investment firms Silver Lake and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in a deal valued at about $12.5 billion in 2023. The Financial Times first reported the development earlier in the day. (Reporting by Puyaan Singh and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru, Additional reporting by Siddhi Mahatole; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

(Reuters) -AI-powered customer survey software maker Qualtrics has agreed to buy healthcare market research company Press Ganey Forsta in a $6.75 billion deal, both companies said on Monday. The deal comes at a time when tech giants are racing to secure proprietary datasets to train their artificial intelligence models. The deal would give Qualtrics access to the healthcare survey firm's deep hospital ties and datasets, which it would use to help healthcare providers to improve tracking patient satisfaction and offer better care. Press Ganey, owned by Ares Management and Los Angeles-based private equity group Leonard Green & Partners, works with over 41,000 hospitals, health plans and life sciences organizations, and collects and analyzes feedback from patients and caregivers, integrating it with clinical and safety data to provide insights to healthcare organizations. Under the deal's terms, Press Ganey will be paid in a combination of cash and privately held Qualtrics' stock. U.S.-based Qualtrics, which is owned by private equity firm Silver Lake, provides tools for measuring and analyzing customer, employee, product and brand experiences. It serves large enterprises, governments and universities, with clients including Microsoft, BMW, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. German software company SAP, which bought Qualtrics in 2018 for $8 billion, sold its majority stake to private investment firms Silver Lake and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in a deal valued at about $12.5 billion in 2023. The Financial Times first reported the development earlier in the day. (Reporting by Puyaan Singh and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru, Additional reporting by Siddhi Mahatole; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)