Tuesday, October 20, 2026
PepsiCo beat revenue forecasts on the strength of its international business but lowered its earnings outlook for 2026, said recovery in North America was taking longer than planned, and confirmed it will raise prices on some chips and sodas after cutting them earlier in the year.
OpenAI dropped the planned October release of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal testing, its head of safety systems said, found it did not stay within scope or ask permission before acting. A day later, at DevDay, it launched GPT-6.1 Sol at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, a fifth of GPT-6 Astra's standard prices. For buyers, the second announcement matters more than the first.
Microsoft folded chat, an agent, a code builder and native Word, Excel and PowerPoint into a single Copilot application on 25 September, and split the bill in two: a flat per-user subscription for everyday use, and a usage meter denominated in Copilot Credits for everything agentic. Thirty million paid seats out of a commercial base above 450 million is the number the launch is aimed at.
Advertising spent a century building a comparable unit so that two buyers could argue about price instead of arguing about what they were buying. Creator deals never got one, and every negotiation still starts from nothing.
Telematics programmes offer a genuine saving to drivers who qualify, which necessarily means the pool left behind is paying what it actually costs.
Software companies spent a decade giving away a usable product to build a funnel. The economics of that giveaway changed when the marginal cost of a free user stopped rounding to zero.
For a widening set of manufacturers, the machine is now the customer acquisition cost and the maintenance agreement is the business. The shift is rewriting how these companies are valued.