After a delayed vote followed by eventual approval by the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, Linda McMahon has received confirmation from the Senate to take up the post as head of the Small Business Administration (SBA).
Reports Tuesday (Feb. 14) said the Senate voted in favor of McMahon 81-19.
“Mrs. McMahon made it very clear that she has the expertise, understanding and instincts necessary to bolster America’s small business community and advocate for much-needed regulatory reforms,” said Senator Jim Risch (R-ID), who is chairman of the Senate’s small business committee.
McMahon’s appointment follows after two failed runs as senator for Connecticut. Both times she lost to Democrats, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy; according to reports, both Blumenthal and Murphy backed her appointment to the SBA.
McMahon was the chief executive officer of World Wrestling Entertainment before she stepped down for her senate races.
The Senate’s Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee voted 18-1 last month to move McMahon through the approval process. Before that vote took place, however, reports said Senate Democrats had delayed the vote. After she was approved by the committee, Risch issued another statement in support of President Trump’s pick to lead the SBA.
“It goes without saying that a nearly unanimous committee vote to approve her nomination shows that members from both sides of the aisle have great confidence that she is the right leader for the SBA,” he stated.
Wayfair has reduced the time needed to curate product listings by 67%, saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and improved some conversion rates by 2% by deploying Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
The online retailer shared these results in a Sunday (Jan. 10) press release emailed to PYMNTS announcing that it is using Google’s Gemini models on Vertex AI to enhance its product catalog and unlock “the next generation of retail experiences.”
“With Google Cloud, we’ve been able to efficiently scale and enrich our product catalogs, enabling us to support a more seamless and engaging shopping experience for our customers,” Wayfair Chief Technology Officer Fiona Tan said in the release.
Gemini on Google Cloud improved Wayfair’s time-to-market by automatically categorizing products across its 30 million product portfolio, delivered cost savings by eliminating the need to manually tag attributes like color and style, and improved conversion rates by increasing the accuracy of product attributes and improving the coverage of attribute tags in the retailer’s catalog, according to the release.
The technology also automatically catches errors in product dimensions and flags inappropriate materials, per the release.
Wayfair is also using Gemini for Google Workspace to boost employees’ productivity, according to the release.
The retailer is using AI features in this suite of productivity apps to draft and respond to emails, summarize and proofread documents, build presentation templates and gain expertise in new areas, per the release.
“By harnessing the power of Gemini and Google Workspace, Wayfair is not only automating complex tasks and boosting employee collaboration, but also creating more personalized and engaging experiences for every shopper,” Matt Renner, president, global revenue at Google Cloud, said in the release.
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has thrust generative AI into the driver’s seat of retail technologies, prompting brands to reassess their strategies, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and AI-ID collaboration, “What Generative AI Has in Store for the Retail Industry.”
The report found that 92% of companies are using AI-driven personalization to drive growth and that 77% of business leaders rank generative AI as the most impactful emerging technology.
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