Today's AI Pulse
Salesforce to acquire AI‑agent platform Fin for $3.6B
Salesforce announced a $3.6 billion purchase of Fin, the AI‑agent platform formerly known as Intercom, to strengthen its Agentforce suite. The deal comes as Salesforce reported strong Q1 results and a $50 billion buyback program. Fin’s technology enables automated customer support across chat, email, WhatsApp, phone and Slack.
Also developing:
By the numbers: Waymo acquires Apple’s Arizona Proving Ground for $220M
ARL Unveils First AI Governance Guide for Build‑to‑Rent at London Tech Conference
The Association for Rental Living (ARL) launched its AI in Build‑to‑Rent – Practical Guide at the inaugural Rental Living Tech Conference in London, attended by over 100 industry delegates. The guide shifts focus from AI adoption to governance, citing new legal pressures from the Renters’ Rights Act, the EU AI Act and CMA enforcement. Operators that embed transparent AI oversight are positioned to gain a competitive edge.
LexisNexis Launches Lexis+ Protégé, AI Platform Aimed at Trusted Legal Drafting
LexisNexis introduced Lexis+ Protégé, an AI‑powered upgrade to its flagship Lexis+ research suite. The platform blends authoritative content, Shepard’s® intelligence and enterprise‑grade security to speed research and drafting while reducing citation risk. The rollout begins in the U.S. and will expand...
Oracle Integrates Eightfold AI to Boost HR Suite Capabilities
Oracle announced a strategic integration of Eightfold's AI talent platform into its Human Capital Management suite, a move analysts say could lift Oracle's valuation. The partnership deepens AI-driven hiring and workforce planning tools for enterprise customers.
Cerebras IPO and the Four Bottlenecks in Its Custom-Everything Architecture
Cerebras Systems went public this week with an IPO that was oversubscribed by roughly 20‑times, underscoring strong investor enthusiasm for its wafer‑scale AI chips. The company’s flagship Wafer Scale Engine 3 (WSE‑3) integrates 900,000 cores, 44 GB of SRAM and 21 PB/s of...
Apple Holds Back on AI Capex While Rivals Sprint Toward $700B Spend
Apple announced a restrained AI‑infrastructure budget at its latest earnings call, contrasting sharply with rivals Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta, which Bloomberg projects will spend more than $700 billion on AI‑related capital expenditures this year. Tim Cook emphasized hardware demand over...
Waymo’s London Driverless SUVs Stuck in Dead-End Street Three Times in One Week
Waymo’s driverless Jaguar SUV entered a narrow dead‑end street in Shoreditch, London, and became immobilized three times within a single week. The incidents, captured on video and shared by a local resident, highlight navigation gaps as Waymo expands its testing...
Palantir Posts Fastest‑Ever Revenue Growth, Q1 2026 Beats Forecast
Palantir Technologies reported an 85% year‑over‑year revenue increase to $1.63 billion in Q1 2026, the fastest growth in its public‑company history. The earnings call highlighted a 61% jump in total contract value and an upgraded full‑year revenue forecast of $7.66 billion, underscating...
Google Uncovers First Known AI-Built Cyberattack Tool
Google’s Threat Analysis Group has disclosed the first known cyberattack tool that was entirely generated by artificial intelligence. The tool, dubbed "AI‑Marauder," automates exploit development, payload obfuscation, and command‑and‑control setup without human code authorship. Researchers traced its code to a...
Mastercard Deploys Scorecard‑Driven AI Governance as AI Models Surge 60% YoY
Mastercard’s finance organization has rolled out a proactive, scorecard‑driven AI‑governance framework to control a 60% year‑over‑year increase in AI deployments. The new process, anchored by a pre‑contract scorecard and an agile AI Governance Council, aims to eliminate “shadow AI” and...
GM Cuts 10% of IT Workforce, Shifts to AI Engineers in Skills‑Swap
General Motors announced it will lay off roughly 500‑600 salaried IT employees, about 10% of its technology workforce, and simultaneously post dozens of openings for AI‑focused engineers. The move reflects GM’s strategy to retool its tech organization for autonomous‑driving, data‑driven...
Malaysia’s AI Hub Goal Stumbles on Fragmented Enterprise Data
Databricks’ ASEAN VP Cecily Ng says Malaysia’s ambition to be a regional AI hub by 2030 is undermined by enterprises still operating fragmented, multi‑cloud data estates. The data foundation gap makes scaling AI beyond pilots difficult, raising doubts about the...
Shoplazza Launches Athena AI Agent to Automate E‑Commerce Back‑Office Tasks
Shoplazza introduced Athena, an AI‑native admin agent that lets merchants execute back‑office e‑commerce tasks via natural language. Built on a platform serving over 650,000 global sellers, Athena aims to cut the time merchants spend navigating multiple dashboards and reduce operational...
Amazon Launches Dynamic TV Creative to Power AI‑Driven CTV Ad Optimization
Amazon Ads unveiled Dynamic TV Creative, an AI‑powered add‑on to its Interactive CTV suite that tailors interactive elements based on shopper data. The feature is live for U.S. advertisers now and will expand to live‑sports inventory in Q3, promising higher...
Index Ventures Leads $50 Million Series B in Frame Security to Tackle Human‑Factor Cyber Threats
Index Ventures spearheaded a $50 million Series B round for Frame Security, a New York‑Tel Aviv startup that uses AI to protect employees—the weakest link in cyber defenses. Backed by Team8, Picture Capital and angels such as Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport and...
A.I. and Humans Battle It Out in a Cybersecurity Showdown
The National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in Las Vegas featured a hybrid showdown where seasoned red‑team hackers used AI code generators such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex to accelerate attacks on a San Antonio network. One blue team consisted entirely of...
Alphabet's AI Bet Positions It to Eclipse Nvidia as Top AI‑Centric Firm
Alphabet's expanding AI portfolio, highlighted by a planned multi‑hundred‑billion‑yen bond issuance and a $180‑$190 billion capex outlook, is fueling earnings growth that may soon outpace Nvidia. Analysts see the shift reshaping market concentration and the hierarchy of tech giants.
Clutch Launches First B2B Services Marketplace App on ChatGPT
Clutch has launched a dedicated ChatGPT app that injects its verified B2B service provider data into AI conversations. The app lets buyers ask natural‑language queries to compare agencies, view reviews, pricing signals, and client feedback without leaving the chat. By...
Forever Healthy Releases AI4L 1.0 for Practical Longevity
Forever Healthy has launched AI4L 1.0, an open‑source, MIT‑licensed platform that lets anyone generate rigorous, evidence‑based reviews of longevity interventions using frontier AI models. The system introduces "Audit‑Driven Prompting," a self‑auditing loop that fetches live citations, verifies metadata, and enforces zero‑tolerance...
AI Doesn’t Create Bias, It Inherits It – How Do We Ensure Fairness when It Comes to Automated Decisions?
Artificial intelligence does not generate bias on its own; it inherits the prejudices embedded in historical data sets used for training. This reality complicates efforts to define and measure fairness across sectors such as hiring, credit, education, and criminal justice....
Making AI Work for Utilities Means Treating Technology as a Partner, Not a Replacement
AI promises grid reliability, but utilities find success only when AI is treated as a partner rather than a plug‑and‑play tool. Dominion Energy’s Sean Burri notes that modest models succeed when tied to enterprise strategy, robust data governance, and workforce...
Beyond the Hype: How AI Adoption Is Quietly Reshaping Corporate Efficiency
A new FTSE Russell and Lloyd’s List Intelligence study links corporate AI mentions to measurable efficiency gains, with the correlation turning sharply positive after 2015 and peaking in 2024. Researchers used NLP to count AI‑related terms in transcripts and filings,...
Anthropic Goes All-In on Legal, Releasing More Than 20 Connectors and 12 Practice-Area Plugins for Claude
Anthropic announced a major expansion into the legal market, releasing over twenty new MCP connectors that integrate its Claude AI model with the software law firms and corporate legal departments use. The rollout also includes twelve practice‑area plugins covering litigation,...
AI’s Supply Chain Problem
In December PJM Interconnection missed its summer 2027 reserve target by about 6,600 MW, a shortfall driven largely by AI data‑center growth that accounts for 94% of projected load. The shortage exposes the lagging pace of power‑infrastructure build‑out—large transformers take roughly...
White Circle Raises $11M to Help Companies Secure and Monitor AI Model Behavior
White Circle, the rebranded Pumpkin Intelligence, announced an $11 million seed round backed by AI heavyweights including OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind alumni, and DataDog co‑founder Olivier Pomel. Founder Denis Shilov went viral in 2024 after demonstrating a single‑prompt jailbreak that could bypass safety controls...
‘Will SAP Be a Software Company in the Future?’ Sapphire 2026 Keynote Maps SAP’s New ERP Stack
At SAP Sapphire 2026, CEO Christian Klein announced SAP’s shift from a traditional ERP software vendor to a business‑AI company, unveiling the Autonomous Suite built around data‑centric AI agents. The new Joule Studio 2.0 acts as an agent factory, letting...
AI Accelerates Cyberattacks, Demands Stronger Defenses
For our free newsletter this week, we discuss how AI-powered cyberattacks are a growing risk. And this morning a ton of hacks are being disclosed, as @emollick points out here. @IrenaCronin and I write this newsletter every week. AI-powered cyberattacks are a...
This Billionaire Investor in OpenAI and Instacart Says AI Will Be Able to Do 80% of Jobs in 5 Years....
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, says AI will be capable of performing 80% of jobs by 2030, turning coding, marketing and design into everyday tools. His firm recently led a $27 million Series A round for Nas.com, an AI platform that...
AI Advice Fades Fast: Most Tools Die in 90 Days
🚨 Karpathy was right. He warned that 90% of AI advice dies in 6 months. spoiler: most tools won't even survive 90 days. this guy is literally giving away the exact 2026 playbook for AI Agents. he covers exactly what to learn, build,...
Gemini Is Tone Deaf (And Other Adventures In Using AI For Television)
A writer tested four leading generative AIs—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok—by feeding them an email thread. While ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok correctly identified the underlying concerns and tone, Gemini repeatedly misinterpreted peripheral details, focusing on irrelevant cues like a snow...
JBS Dev: On Imperfect Data and the AI Last Mile – From Model Capability to Cost Sustainability
Joe Rose, president of JBS Dev, argues that enterprises don’t need perfectly clean data to launch generative‑AI projects. Modern LLMs and OCR tools can extract value from half‑written prompts and mixed‑format records, as demonstrated with a medical billing client that...
Structured Output Turns Video AI From Demo to Deployable
Most video AI pilots die the same death. And after trying Perceptron Mk1, I think I understand why. The model output usually stops at "here's what happened." Interesting for a demo, but difficult to operationalize. Teams struggle to query it reliably,...
Veeam CEO: We Have Defined A Missing ‘Data AI Trust Layer’
Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran announced a new “data AI trust layer” at VeeamON 2026, a unified fabric that sits between data/analytics and AI models to combine security, privacy, compliance, governance and resilience. The company also launched a Data and AI Trust...
AI Agents Will First Revolutionize Corporate Productivity, Not Shopping
We're going to see AI agents reshape corporations before they reshape consumer products. Everyone's talking about agents shopping for you, booking your flights, acting like a little personal assistant. That's not where the real shift is happening. The big revolution is on...
Startup That Aims to Widen Access to Compute Draws $1.3B
AI‑focused startup Amp announced a $1.3 billion funding round to create a shared compute platform, dubbed an “AI grid,” that will pool excess data‑center capacity for universities, small startups and other under‑funded players. Founded by former Andreessen Horowitz partner Anjney Midha,...
Red Hat Is Betting on AgentOps to Close the Gap Between AI Experiments and Production
Red Hat unveiled AI 3.4 at its Summit, introducing a Model‑as‑a‑Service layer and a new AgentOps suite to move AI agents from experiment to production. The update adds distributed inference with vLLM and llm‑d, speculative decoding that can double response speed,...
FDA Grants Clearance for Six Interventional Imaging Systems From Siemens Healthineers
Siemens Healthineers received FDA clearance for six new Artis interventional imaging systems, each equipped with the Optiq AI imaging chain. The portfolio spans floor, biplane, ceiling and robotic‑mounted configurations across the Vision, Icono.explore and Genio platforms. Optiq AI applies deep‑learning...
AI's Potential Outpaces Funding: Altman's For‑Profit Miss
One of the things Musk vs Altman shows is how much more promising AI is than anyone expected. Sam could have started it as a for-profit company. His life would be much simpler now if he had. But he didn't...
Run Entire Email Campaigns Using Only ChatGPT & Claude
I literally cannot wait to build emails and run my entire email channel all from within ChatGPT and Claude. Right now, my email creation process is: - Write/edit my emails inside Claude - Create images for my emails inside ChatGPT - Take the copy...
Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence for Carbon Emissions Monitoring and ForecastingA Systematic Review of Smart Environmental Accounting Systems
A systematic review of 100 peer‑reviewed studies finds that Internet of Things (IoT) sensor networks enable real‑time carbon emissions monitoring, while artificial intelligence (AI) models can reliably forecast emission trends. The analysis highlights strong performance in data collection and prediction...
AI Will Go Decentralized, Running on Cheap Edge Devices
I believe that over the next 10-20 years, AI will become ubiquitous at about the pace smart phones did. But I don't think the giant AI businesses will survive. Instead, I expect we'll see AI running standalone on inexpensive, low-energy...
Remember ChatGPT’s Early “App Store” Era?
Does anyone else remember when ChatGPT used to have like some kind of “app store” where you had to use dodgy looking third party services to do stuff like read a PDF? Somehow that era feels longer ago than the...
The Best Way To Build AI Agents That Customers Trust
Companies are shifting from personality‑flavored chatbots to character‑driven AI agents that act consistently with brand values. Salesforce senior UI/UX director Yvonne Gando explains that true character means durable decision systems, not just tone. Real‑world failures—like a delivery‑service bot that spewed...
CIOs Shift AI Funding to Production, Reallocate Budgets
New report with our newest CIO survey data: How CIOs and CTOs are funding AI, where deployment is moving into production, and which vendor categories are exposed as AI shifts from experimentation to budget reallocation https://t.co/q8I4QW5HCo
Symbolic Learning Replaces Gradient Descent as Scalable Substrate
Symbolic learning is not a replacement for coding agents, it's a replacement for gradient descent & NNs: a low-level, completely general, extremely scalable new learning substrate.
Hacking the Bomb? What Claude Mythos AI Reveals About the Gamble of Nuclear Deterrence
Anthropic unveiled Claude "Mythos," an AI model that reportedly discovers zero‑day vulnerabilities with a 72.4% success rate, including a 27‑year‑old flaw in OpenBSD. The model is being tested by a select group of major tech firms, highlighting a rapid rise...
AI Drives Massive Shifts in Commerce, Finance, and Tech
AI Revolution: Stripe ignites agentic commerce, GM axes IT jobs for AI talent, and NVIDIA bets $40B on AI founders. Read the signals shaping tomorrow’s retail, finance, and tech landscapes. https://t.co/YcBYMfOYzl
AI Robot Combines Vision, Touch, Depth, and Language
Multimodal AI #Robot Fuses Vision, Depth, Tactile Sensing, and Language Understanding via @ZappyZappy7 #Robotics #Engineering #ArtificialIntelligence #Innovation #Technology https://t.co/RAvFmdNxbC
Forcing AI Companies to Report Violent Threats Might Be a Mistake
The article examines the push to compel AI firms to report violent threats after OpenAI flagged the Tumbler Ridge shooter months before the attack, noting police already possessed extensive background information. It argues AI systems lack the personal context needed...
China Reveals AI-Powered Lunar Robot for 2029 Moon Mission
China’s Hong Kong University of Science and Technology team unveiled an AI‑powered lunar robot slated for the Chang’e‑8 mission in 2029. The 100‑kilogram, four‑wheeled rover combines a humanoid upper body with dual arms to transport payloads, install instruments and collect...
Kurzweil’s Timeline Hits, but His Tech Path Misses
So if we stipulate that Kurzweil had A) Stunningly good intuitions for the timeline of AI progress B) Generally wrong notions of the tech path that took us here How should we weight his predictions for the next 25 years?