SYDNEY, Sept. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Two remote communities in Tonga’s Vava’u island group have gained a reliable source of safe drinking water following the installation of Elemental Water Makers solar-powered desalination systems on Hunga and Matamaka.

Delivered by Australian water-solutions company Bluemont Pty Ltd in partnership with Dutch technology provider Elemental Water Makers, the project converts seawater into fresh water using reverse osmosis powered entirely by the sun. Each unit can produce up to 4,300 litres of WHO-standard drinking water a day, giving the two communities a combined capacity of up to 8,600 litres.

For residents traditionally depending on rainwater harvesting, the installations provide vital protection against drought and unpredictable rainfall. When tanks run dry, remote island communities can face water rationing or the high cost and logistical difficulty of bringing bottled water in by boat. Local production helps keep money within the communities while supporting better health, sanitation, education and everyday wellbeing.

“It was life changing for me as well as the villagers who now have a reliable source of clean drinking water for the first time ever. With the declaration of the ‘Super El Nino’ this work could not be more important,” Paul Hart, Director of Bluemont Pty. Ltd.

Emphasizing local ownership, the project trained ten community members per island—with at least five participants from each community being women—alongside a Tonga Water Board representative to operate and maintain the systems. Designed for 15 years of service, these low-maintenance, solar-powered installations strengthen climate resilience in isolated communities without fossil fuels.

Bluemont led the planning, transport, installation and commissioning effort, working with Elemental Water Makers, Pacific Technologies New Zealand, Tonga Water Board Poate Vai ‘O Tonga and the people of Hunga and Matamaka. The project also received grant support through Powering Renewable Energy Opportunities (PREO).

Bluemont is now discussing a proposal with the Tongan Government that could seek Asian Development Bank support for solar desalination across a further 23 remote communities. While that expansion is not yet confirmed, Hunga and Matamaka already offer a model for locally operated, inclusive and sustainable water security across the Pacific.

For more on solar water desalination, visit:

• https://www.bluemont.com.au/water-desalination/
• https://www.bluemont.nz/water-desalination/

About Bluemont

Bluemont delivers sustainable solutions for managing water, erosion, fire, and flood risks in remote and emergency situations. Contact info@bluemont.com.au for details.

Co-funded offer will provide eligible agencies with complimentary access to an expanded suite of property management technology, along with onboarding and enablement support.

SYDNEY, Sept. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — MRI Software today announced a targeted offer giving a select cohort of eligible CommBank and MRI Property Tree clients in Australia the chance to receive access to an expanded Pro AI bundle subscription designed to optimise day‑to‑day property management, improve productivity and support business growth. The offer is available for a limited time and at no additional cost, and remains open until 30 June 2027, subject to funding availability.

The offer combines financial investment from CommBank with subscription waivers and onboarding, enablement and activation support from MRI to provide participating agencies with a complimentary 12-month upgrade to the Property Tree Pro AI Bundle.

Built around MRI Property Tree, MRI’s property management software for residential agencies in Australia, the bundle brings together tools spanning maintenance, invoicing, inspections, business insights and tenant support. Participating agencies will have access to:

• MRI Maintenance Plus: Streamlines maintenance management by bringing requests, communications and property information together with AI-powered automated maintenance workflows, helping property managers coordinate work efficiently with tenants, owners and service providers.
• MRI Key Automate and MRI Invoice Automate: Simplify two common administrative processes by providing greater visibility and control over key management while reducing manual work through AI invoice processing.
• MRI Inspection Manager: Digitises property inspections with mobile, paperless condition reports, AI-driven comment automation and image recognition, advanced 360 inspection tools and tenant-assisted inspections, helping teams simplify the inspection process.
• MRI AI Assistant for Tenants: Provides always-on support for routine tenant questions and maintenance enquiries, helping agencies respond faster while reducing the volume of repetitive enquiries handled by property managers.
• MRI Business Insights and Analytics: Brings agency data together through ready-to-use reports, benchmarking and custom dashboards, giving property managers greater visibility into business performance and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Together, these capabilities can help agencies reduce administrative work across core property management processes, improve visibility into their operations and give their teams more time to focus on clients, tenants and business growth.

“We know that adopting new technology can be challenging for businesses, particularly in a rapidly evolving space like AI,” said Kerryn Saward, CommBank Executive General Manager, Specialist Sales and Client Solutions.

“By focusing this investment on a targeted group of property management agencies, we’re helping demonstrate how AI can deliver immediate and practical benefits, from reducing manual work to improving business performance.”

David Bowie, Executive Managing Director APAC, MRI Software, said the initiative reflects a shared commitment to helping property management agencies get more from the technology they use every day.

“Property managers have an enormous number of responsibilities competing for their time, from maintenance and inspections to invoicing, communication and business performance,” said Bowie. “Together with CommBank, we’re giving participating agencies access to a broader set of AI-powered tools that can take some of that administrative work off their teams and help them operate more efficiently. Ultimately, it’s about giving property managers more time to focus on their customers, tenants and growing their businesses.”

Participating clients will also receive onboarding, enablement and activation support throughout the 12-month offer to help them integrate the technology into their day-to-day operations and realise tangible business and productivity benefits.

The initiative builds on the strategic relationship between CommBank and MRI Software, including the Smart Real Estate Payments solution, which integrates digital payment capabilities directly into property management workflows to help agencies streamline operations and improve accuracy.

About MRI Software

MRI Software is a leading provider of real estate solutions and industry data that transform the way communities live, work and play. MRI’s connected, intelligent platform empowers owners, operators, agents and occupiers in commercial and residential property organisations to stay ahead in rapidly changing markets. A trailblazer in the Proptech industry, MRI serves more than six million users worldwide, including the social and affordable housing sector. Through innovative solutions and a rich partner ecosystem, MRI gives real estate companies the freedom to realise their vision of building thriving communities and stronger businesses. For more information, please visit https://www.mrisoftware.com.

Offer T&Cs

 This offer is available to select eligible CommBank and MRI Software clients who hold an active MRI Property Tree subscription during the offer period. Eligible clients will receive a complimentary upgrade to the MRI Property Tree Pro AI bundle for a 12-month period from the date MRI confirms the upgrade. The offer covers the difference between the client’s current MRI Property Tree subscription fee and the Pro AI bundle upgrade fee only; it does not cover the client’s existing subscription fees to MRI Property Tree or other MRI subscriptions. MRI will also waive any applicable onboarding and activation fees associated with the upgrade during the 12 months. Subscriptions will be automatically renewed at the end of the 12-month period at the full cost of the MRI Property Tree Pro AI bundle applicable fees. Clients are able to opt-out of automatic renewal with written request as outlined in the client’s current terms and conditions.

The client’s existing MRI Property Tree subscription will continue in accordance with their existing agreement.

Accessing the Offer

MRI sales representatives may contact eligible clients regarding access to this limited-time offer, available until 30 June 2027 subject to funding availability.

CommBank does not issue, manage or administer the MRI platform or MRI subscriptions. This offer is subject to eligibility, availability, change or withdrawal, and MRI’s terms and conditions, available at https://www.mrisoftware.com/au/

Media Contact

Ryan Short
Director of Marketing, MRI Software (APAC)
Ryan.short@mrisoftware.com

An industry first governance layer that unifies cost, delivery and output for contingent teams

SYDNEY, Sept. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — ProHance, the AI-led Productivity Control Room platform for enterprises, today announced the launch of a unified platform for measuring and improving performance for outsourced and contingent teams.

Enterprises now will get a governance layer that provides independent unified proof of what their contingent workforce actually delivers, providing a single source of truth to finance, delivery and vendor management teams.

Now Enterprises can reallocate idle capacity, validate invoices, negotiate renewals based on evidence, flag delivery risk before it materializes, and provide audit teams with a defensible record.

Contingent workforce management has evolved from a function focused on vendor onboarding, contracts and compliance into a strategic capability contributing to over 20% of the workforce. However the technology to manage performance of this workforce has not been able to control cost leakage as it can only provide evidence that work occurred.

ProHance built the platform around three measures that determine contingent workforce performance:

• CostLeakage— Clear governance of what is being spent against what is delivered
• SLA Adherence — Improving predictability of delivery within time-and-materials engagements
• Output — optimizing the value the workforce creates, in addition to utilization

The platform tracks all three in one place, giving Finance, Delivery and Vendor Management the same data instead of each team working from its own tool moving from fragmented ownership to joint governance.

ProHance is launching this after deploying it across Fortune 100 companies, where it has been tested and validated to give the right insights.

“Every system an enterprise runs today can tell it what it bought. None of them can tell it what it got,” said Ankur Dhingra, CEO, ProHance. “With this platform, we’re building a single source of truth for contingent teams — the same defensible number for Finance, Delivery and Vendor Management to act on, measured from the work itself instead of what the vendor reports. That’s the gap we built this to close, starting with outsourced and contingent teams, where existing tools go blind.”

About ProHance

ProHance is an AI-led Productivity Control Room platform giving enterprises real-time visibility into productivity, operations and workforce performance. Trusted by more than 450,000 users across 55+ countries, ProHance was named Star Performer in the Everest Group PEAK Matrix® 2026. Visit www.prohance.ai.

New regional findings highlight market-specific implications for Japanese companies planning ASEAN expansion and Japanese professionals across the region

TOKYO, Sept. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — As Japanese companies continue looking to Southeast Asia for growth and Japanese professionals increasingly consider careers across the region, new data shows that a one-size-fits-all strategy cannot be applied across the ASEAN region.

The Great Restructuring: ASEAN Consumer & Business Pulse Survey 2026, published by Reeracoen Group, a leading Asia-based recruitment and HR solutions group, in partnership with Rakuten Insight, surveyed 3,630 consumers and business leaders across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam in June 2026. The findings show leadership across several of the region’s key workforce and business indicators split between different markets: Vietnam leads on consumer optimism, Indonesia on business confidence and career mobility, Thailand on business investment growth, and Singapore on AI and technology investment — with no single market leading on every measure.

• Indonesia: Highest business confidence at 66% and highest career mobility, with 29% considering a career change.
• Malaysia: Strongest domestic-market orientation, with 75% of businesses identifying their home market as their top growth opportunity.
• The Philippines: Strong business confidence at 65%, highlighting continued business optimism and opportunities in a resilient market.
• Singapore: Leads the six markets in AI and technology investment intent at 33%.
• Thailand: Leads the six markets in business investment growth, with 28% of businesses increasing investment.
• Vietnam: Leads on consumer optimism at 48%, while 16% of businesses are expanding headcount and 46% report improving revenue.

Hiring strategies evolve across ASEAN

Across the six markets, businesses are taking a more targeted approach to workforce growth, with selective hiring cited by 32% to 47% of businesses, while 7% to 16% are actively expanding headcount. Vietnam records the highest hiring-expansion rate at 16%.

Beyond hiring, operational efficiency is the most cited growth opportunity across all six markets, ranging from 35% to 43%, while technology and AI rank among the top three at 24% to 33%.

For Japanese businesses operating or expanding across ASEAN, these differences highlight opportunities across markets while reinforcing the importance of market-specific hiring strategies and a strong understanding of local talent needs.

Technology and income priorities shape talent decisions

In Vietnam, 39% of consumers considering a career change cite AI and automation as their primary motivator, ahead of income growth and work-life balance. It is the only market surveyed where AI and automation rank first among career-change drivers. AI also features prominently among career-change motivations in Singapore at 32% and Indonesia at 30%.

Income diversification is another notable trend, with 71% of consumers in Indonesia and 70% in the Philippines actively seeking additional income—the leading financial response to economic pressure in both markets.

Kosuke Soejima, Managing Director, Reeracoen Japan, said:

“For Japanese companies expanding into Southeast Asia, the biggest risk is treating ASEAN as a single market. This data shows six markets evolving in very different ways—on hiring, on investment, on what workers want from an employer. Understanding those differences market by market is exactly the kind of intelligence we aim to bring to our clients and candidates as they build careers and businesses across the region.”

Cheryl Ng, Country Director, Singapore, Rakuten Insight, said:

“The findings highlight how differently consumers and businesses are responding across ASEAN. For Japanese companies and professionals looking at the region, understanding these market-level differences is increasingly important when assessing opportunities, workforce needs and future growth.”

For the full six-market findings, including country-by-country profiles and a Leadership Playbook of eight strategic priorities for regional expansion, download The Great Restructuring: ASEAN Consumer & Business Pulse Survey 2026.

• Download the report at:

https://www.reeracoen.co.jp/en/events/ra-asean-not-one-market-2026-japanese-companies-need-to-know?utm_source=jp_pr&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=asean_whitepaper_2026_japan

About Reeracoen Group

Reeracoen is a leading Asia-based recruitment and HR solutions group, connecting talent with forward-thinking organisations across the region. With 9 offices across 6 major Asian markets, Reeracoen combines deep local market expertise with cross-border recruitment capabilities to support sustainable business growth.

Beyond recruitment, Reeracoen provides market intelligence, workforce insights, salary research, and employer advisory services, helping organisations make informed talent and business decisions in an evolving regional economy.

Reeracoen’s commitment to service excellence has been recognised through multiple industry awards, including Best Recruitment & Talent Acquisition Agency (2025, 2026), Client Service Excellence Award (2026), Best International Recruitment & Talent Acquisition Agency (2024), and Best Executive Recruitment Agency (2024).

For more information, visit https://www.reeracoen.co.jp/.

About Rakuten Insight Singapore

Rakuten Insight Singapore is the Southeast Asia hub of Rakuten Insight, Inc., a wholly-owned online market research subsidiary of Rakuten Group, Inc. Established in 1997 as AIP Corporation and integrated into the Rakuten Group in 2014, Rakuten Insight operates a research panel focused on 12 major Asian markets, with a panel network spanning 60 countries and regions.

With offices in 11 countries and regions, the company provides market research for more than 500 leading companies worldwide. Rakuten Insight Singapore serves as a regional hub providing multi-lingual and multi-functional operational support for clients across Southeast Asia.

For more information, visit https://insight.rakuten.com.

Trained in about 9.2 hours on one NVIDIA B200, JEV-27B adds fast, calibrated System 1 decisions to a frozen Qwen3.8-27B backbone while preserving its System 2 generation path.

SINGAPORE, Sept. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — AutoTrust AI today released JEV-27B, an Apache-2.0 open-weights model designed to handle frequent, structured decisions inside AI agent workflows while retaining the underlying model’s full generation and reasoning path.

JEV-27B answers yes/no, multiple-choice and 0–5 rating questions in a single forward pass and returns a calibrated probability for every option. It runs on one NVIDIA B200 inside a customer’s own infrastructure and serves both fast System 1 decisions and deliberate System 2 generation from a single set of weights.

The model trains a 108.9-million-parameter decision block—about 0.4% of the full model—on top of a frozen Qwen3.8-27B backbone. AutoTrust reports that training took approximately 9.2 B200-hours. With the decision block switched off, all 164 HumanEval completions were byte-identical to those produced by the base model.

“Jev proved there is real demand for models that decide rather than write,” said Daniel Tang, AutoTrust AI’s chief executive and co-founder. “JEV-27B shows that this capability can run on one GPU inside a customer’s own infrastructure, next to a reasoning model. For companies that cannot send every decision to a third-party API, that changes both the cost and the risk.”

Evaluation and evidence

AutoTrust AI evaluated JEV-27B across six public text-decision benchmark groups. It reported scores of 88.70% on JevBench, 83.75% on Kev, 73.89% on OpenJev text, 92.91% on Nimble, 77.46% on VitaminC and 87.71% on MASSIVE-en, for an equal-weight six-group mean of 84.07%.

For additional context, AutoTrust AI also ran the hosted TypeSafe Jev 1.13 API on the same benchmark groups and reported a six-group mean of 83.85%, with JEV-27B scoring higher on four groups and lower on two. Because AutoTrust conducted this comparison itself, the figures should be read as internal comparative evidence—not as an independent third-party validation or a claim of across-the-board superiority.

For public baseline context, AutoTrust reproduced the scores published by TokenRhythm for NeoHorse-Jev, Open-Jev, Kev and Laya English. AutoTrust did not rerun those four external baselines. The pinned source table is available at https://huggingface.co/TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-Jev-4B/blob/b50e043e22e0e41e7fc0c244e4daa707b8124930/README.md. These figures are included as published benchmark context rather than as a new same-environment comparison by AutoTrust.

JEV-27B was also evaluated for fidelity to its distillation target. On 25,376 held-out questions labeled with Jev 1.13 probability distributions, JEV-27B reported a mean KL divergence of 0.017, where zero means identical distributions. On decision-models-under-pressure, an independent benchmark scored against human labels, JEV-27B reached 96% of Jev 1.13’s accuracy with 16 answer options. In that independent test, JEV-27B approached—but did not exceed—Jev 1.13.

AutoTrust AI measured a median decision latency of 137 milliseconds and sustained throughput of about 130 decisions per second on one B200. The model card also cites third-party measurements of 238 to 301 milliseconds and 23 decisions per second for Jev’s hosted API. These are not controlled, like-for-like results: the hosted API measurements include network time, while AutoTrust AI’s local measurements do not, and the hardware, serving and concurrency conditions differ.

How it works

AutoTrust AI uses the terms System 1 for fast, typed decisions and System 2 for deliberate generation and reasoning. JEV-27B serves both from one set of weights. It follows JEV-9B as the company’s second integrated System 1 and System 2 open model.

The model is built with AutoTrust AI’s Blocks of Experts recipe. A strong pretrained model, Alibaba’s open-weights Qwen3.8-27B, stays frozen as one expert block. A small, detachable block is trained for a single skill, and a router sends each request either to the fast decision block or to the deliberate generation block.

The decision block holds 108.9 million trained parameters, 0.4% of the model, and took about 9.2 hours to train on one NVIDIA B200. The reasoning path was left untouched. With the decision block switched off, JEV-27B scores 78.0% on the HumanEval coding test, and all 164 of its completions are byte-identical to the base model’s.

In a demonstration reel released with the model, a self-hosted JEV-27B served as the decision engine for 10 tasks. It played Doom, making 64 decisions in a target-practice scenario, and steered a simulated drone through a MuJoCo obstacle course. It ran a live Google Flights search from Zurich to London and verified 21 results, navigated Wikipedia to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, flagged four regression risks in a sample change to authorization code and routed a billing-refund ticket to support.

“Every AI agent is really a long chain of small decisions—which button to press, which file to open, which queue a ticket belongs in,” said Josh Liu, AutoTrust AI’s chairman and co-founder. “Make each one fast, private and cheap, and you change the economics of the whole chain.”

AutoTrust AI said JEV-27B inherits Jev 1.13’s blind spots, including multi-hop reasoning, arithmetic, dates and adversarial inputs, and that its training data is English-centric. The company says the model is not meant for high-stakes decisions and recommends gating its answers on confidence.

Benchmark context and source notes

Scores are in percent. JEV-27B and the hosted TypeSafe Jev 1.13 API were measured by AutoTrust AI; this is not third-party validation. NeoHorse-Jev, Open-Jev, Kev and Laya English are published baselines reproduced from TokenRhythm and were not rerun by AutoTrust. TokenRhythm source (pinned revision): https://huggingface.co/TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-Jev-4B/blob/b50e043e22e0e41e7fc0c244e4daa707b8124930/README.md. Full AutoTrust methodology and source notes: https://huggingface.co/autotrust/JEV-27B.

Availability

JEV-27B is available under the Apache-2.0 license at huggingface.co/autotrust/JEV-27B. The release includes the weights, decision adapter, training and serving code, vLLM support and full evaluation reports. A demonstration reel is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/autotrust/JEV-27B-Demo.

AutoTrust AI plans to build the JEV decision block into future models in its Guru family, which powers the ScienceGuru research platform. ScienceGuru is available for Windows and macOS at https://scienceguru.ai/. AutoTrust AI also offers customized sovereign deployments for enterprises.

JEV-27B was trained on SargeDev/jev-distill-corpus-v3, a public, Apache-2.0-licensed corpus of Jev 1.13’s outputs. It shares no weights or code with, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by, TypeSafe AI. Jev and TypeSafe are trademarks of their respective owners.

About AutoTrust AI

AutoTrust AI Pte. Ltd. is a Singapore-incorporated AI research company building the Guru family of foundation models and ScienceGuru, an AI research platform for scientists and research teams. Its Blocks of Experts architecture combines pretrained expert blocks with small trained adapters to build frontier-capable and sovereign models efficiently. Learn more at autotrust.ai.