SAP says a council moved 8,500 staff to new payroll in 13 months, on budget. Nobody said what the budget was.

Also in 30 seconds: Oracle reportedly dropping a $7 billion chip deal with Tencent, and an AI-detection firm counting 31 fake citations in three Accenture publications.

1. Somerset Council in England moved about 8,500 employees from what its ICT director called "a highly customised SAP system that had been in place for 17 years" to SAP SuccessFactors, SAP and the council said on 4 November. HR specialist EPI-USE delivered it, taking SAP's standard processes wherever it could instead of rebuilding the old custom setup. The release gives no cost, no budget and no contract value. On 2 November we reported Erasmus University's move from SAP to Oracle running 70% over budget.

2. Oracle dropped a five-year contract to rent up to 100,000 AI chips to China's Tencent in Southeast Asian data centres, Handelsblatt reported, citing the Financial Times, which valued the deal at $7 billion. According to the report, US officials had raised concerns with Oracle. Oracle and Tencent had not answered the FT.

3. GPTZero said it found 31 hallucinated citations among 245 in three Accenture publications, and that one fake link led to a GitHub repository holding real malware. GPTZero said its tools "do not definitively prove" an AI model wrote the papers. Its report carries no response from Accenture.

On your last HR or payroll replacement, how far did the final cost land from the approved budget?

🎥 Narration: AI voice · Photos via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA): alex.ch, Shkuru Afshar, JiriMatejicek.