Canva encourages internal AI use while Chipotle speeds up hiring: this week's AI news roundup

From expansion in Mexican style restaurants to experimental launches in India, here’s a roundup of the news stories that grabbed our attention this week.

Chipotle uses AI hiring platform to speed up recruitment by 75%

Scott Boatwright, CEO of Chipotle, spoke this week at the Fortune COO summit about how AI is helping to speed up growth at the restaurant chain. AI technology, like Chipotle’s hiring platform Ava Cado, is key to this growth. Chipotle employs over 130,000 employees, and Boatwright said that the AI hiring platform is reducing hiring time by 75%. Boatwright tied this AI-powered hiring efficiency to the company’s ability to open over 300 new restaurants in 2025, "almost one every 24 hours".

Google launches AI Mode in India

Google has launched its experimental AI Mode search feature in India, having previously tested it in the US. It’s billed as a search feature that transforms traditional keyword search into a more interactive, AI-driven experience. Powered by Google’s Gemini model, Google says “it lets you ask longer, more complex or nuanced questions that would have previously required multiple searches”.

Optimism about AI tempered by infrastructure challenges

There’s continued optimism and investment about AI adoption amid greater-than-expected infrastructure challenges, according to a survey from Prove AI of 1,000 business decision-makers in the US and Canada, From Pilot to Production: The State of AI Adoption in 2025. The report shows a shift from AI experimentation to widespread adoption and deployment in the last 12 months. 68% of businesses are now in the active production phase with AI solutions, and 55% of businesses have at least three live use cases. Nearly 70% of businesses report that at least one of their planned AI initiatives is behind schedule, with concerns about data quality and availability, challenges integration with legacy systems, and a lack of explainability and trust in AI initiatives among the leading causes of delay.

Canva CTO urges staff to find the AI tools that work for them

Canva’s CTO Brendan Humphreys, is leading an internal push to make AI a core part of how the company works, according to a number of reports. The Australian company now allows its roughly 5,000 employees to choose and use any enterprise-grade AI tools that meet security and trust standards. According to CIO Intelligence, Humphreys says the “vast majority” of the company’s engineers have experimented with AI, and 50% of them use AI tools daily. Humphreys would like to see this rise to 80% by the end of this year. 

Thinking Machines Lab raises $2 billion in seed funding

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has raised $2 billion in seed funding for her AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab. This values the new company at $10 billion, a staggering amount for a company that is still in stealth mode and has yet to announce any products. The company is structured as a public benefit corporation and aims to build products with “an emphasis on collective research culture, human-AI collaboration, model intelligence, and research and product co-design”. Murati has already hired a number of high-profile researchers.