Enterprise stalwarts get serious about AI agents – News

Established enterprise tech providers that aren’t cloud giants are getting serious about AI agents too.

IBM, for one, unveiled a raft of AI agent capabilities and ServiceNow invaded Salesforce’s core customer relationship management market using agents and debuted more agents to provide better security.

Anthropic jumped into search with an application programming interface to call out to the web, further threatening Google’s cash cow. And it already got jolted Wednesday when Apple SVP of Services Eddy Cue told a court that AI is starting to replace Google search — though the search giant quickly provided stats saying that’s not so.

Elsewhere on the agent front, several startups are angling to position AI agents as, for all intents and purposes, employees. I wonder if they’re jumping the gun a bit, given all the work still needed to make sure agents can function correctly in enterprises. But that court battle, plus likely appeals, are likely to go on for years. So even if Google faces both competitive and regulatory battles, they’re both likely to have less impact anytime soon, if ever, than investors who knocked Google’s stock down 7% this week.

OpenAI hired a CEO-under-CEO Sam Altman. Fidji Simo, who was already the sole CEO of a successful company, Instacart, is a highly regarded former Facebook exec who will be heading Applications, which surely means coming up with more revenue opportunities — such as advertising, something she knows a little about from Facebook.

Cloud providers have a big monkey on their back, notes Dave Vellante: the seemingly never-ending need for more power to run all those data centers providing AI services. But at the same time, it’s becoming increasingly unclear to what extent even the cloud giants can afford to keep building so much.

Most mainstream enterprise tech suppliers so far seem to be avoiding the worst impacts of tariffs, but not all of them. And some are providing guidance that indicates the impacts will worsen unless Trump backtracks fast. There’s little indication that will happen.

CrowdStrike laid off about 500 employees — only 5% of its staff, but perhaps a warning sign that despite the ever-growing need for better security, the business of providing it remains extremely competitive even for the industry leaders.

Cisco Systems is the major company reporting its earnings next week. And theCUBE has another busy week of events, including Boomi World and Qlik Connect.

Here’s all the news this week from News and beyond:

AI and data: Hiring AI ‘employees’

New models and services

IBM unveils capabilities meant to accelerate AI agent adoption And check out Dave Vellante’s and John Furrier’s takes on IBM’s AI strategy.

Anthropic jumps into internet search, increasing pressure on Google

Mistral AI adds Medium 3 to its family of models, claiming low cost and high performance

ServiceNow debuts customer relationship management platform, new AI tools

Amazon announces Q Developer preview in GitHub for AI-powered code generation and review

Google enhances coding capabilities in Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview before I/O dev conference

Microsoft will support Google’s Agent2Agent open protocol that enables AI agents to talk to each other 

Lots of startups are chasing an opportunity to manage “AI employees”:

Signals launches cloud-based ‘AI employees’ to rethink customer engagement and 

RelevanceAI and Stack AI get millions in funding to bring AI agents into the workforce

Salesforce brings AI agents to employee support with Agentforce for HR Service

SAS ups AI development and governance capabilities

AI startup Zencoder launches coding agent platform

OpenSearch revs up AI workloads with GPU-accelerated vector search

10Web’s generative AI website builder is now accessible via an API

Lightricks shakes up AI video creation with powerful open-source model

Policy

After backlash, US scraps Biden administration’s curb on AI chip exports

Family uses AI video in court to allow victim to give impact statement

Money matters

OpenAI abandons plan to spin off for-profit arm But Elon Musk isn’t having any of it.

Databricks reportedly could acquire serverless database startup Neon for $1B+

Weeks after IPO, CoreWeave reportedly seeking $1.5B in debt financing

AI code editor startup Anysphere reportedly closes $900M funding round

Snowflake challenger ClickHouse targets $6B valuation (per The Information)

Parloa raises $120M at $1B valuation to expand enterprise AI agent platform

Andrew Ng’s AI Fund closes oversubscribed $190M Fund II to co-found AI startups

AI data provider Toloka raises $72M in funding

WisdomAI launches with $23M to bring agentic AI insights to business

Construction tech startup Field Materials raises $10.5M to automate materials procurement

There’s even more AI and big data news on News

Around the enterprise: Power to run AI costs cloud providers

Analysis and opinion

Breaking Analysis: Power-hungry clouds: Inside tech’s most expensive quarter

Why tech vendor conferences are a must-attend for the modern innovator

Money matters

Enterprise and emerging tech earnings: More tariff fallout, but not for everyone — at least not yet.

Chipmakers AMD, GlobalFoundries and Cirrus Logic post solid earnings and guidance, easing tariff fears

Arm tops $1B quarterly sales milestone, but its stock falls on soft guidance

Robust chip demand boosts profit at Chinese chipmaker SMIC.

Supermicro cuts outlook after earnings results disappoint

DigitalOcean shares drop despite strong first quarter

Rackspace’s operational turnaround accelerates, despite more revenue declines

Big-data company Informatica’s stock falls on mixed results and soft guidance

Kyndryl beats quarterly revenue estimates on AI push, stock rises 2%

Palantir shares dip despite Q1 revenue beat and raised full-year outlook

Cyber roundup: Cloudflare, NetScout and AvePoint shares rise on steady earnings and solid guidance

Fortinet stock slips as soft outlook overshadows earnings beat

Datadog lifts annual revenue forecast on AI-driven cloud security demand

Arista Networks beats expectations in its latest results, but stock moves lower

Qualys beats Q1 estimates with double-digit revenue growth and higher earnings

Appian shares rise on better-than-expected first quarter

JFrog earnings and revenue top estimates, stock edges up after-hours

Dropbox earnings beat but revenue falls short, stock stays flat

D-Wave delivers surprise adjusted profit after quantum computer sale

Rivian tops earnings forecast, cuts delivery target amid Trump tariffs

Uber shares decline on mixed earnings results

Amplitude shares tick up after earnings results slightly beat estimates

Fastly shares up over 3% as Q1 earnings exceed expectations, outlook raised

Backblaze shares fall 7% despite earnings and revenue beats

Coinbase reports Q1 revenue below expectations with 19% drop in transaction revenue

Lyft stock jumps as adjusted earnings top estimates and ride volumes surge

RingCentral earnings and revenue top estimates but stock edges down

Hubspot beats on earnings, but stock falls 8%

And in other money matters:

Fintech company AvidXchange acquired for $2.2B by TPG and Corpay

Workforce management startup Rippling raises $450M at $16.8B valuation

Amazon to invest $4B in Chile data center region

BrowserStack acquires Requestly to expand developer testing capabilities

Twist Bioscience spins out Atlas Data Storage, a DNA storage company, as independent company with $155M in seed financing

Statsig secures $100M for its software testing platform

App monitoring startup AppSignal targets US after raising $22M and hiring a new CEO

RightRev lands $13M to meet growing demand for intelligent revenue recognition

New products and services

Nutanix targets cloud-native and AI workloads and offers migration enticements to VMware customers And theCUBE talked with Nutanix’s CEO at the company’s .NEXT conference: Nutanix eyes AI future with growing ecosystem and platform shift: CEO Rajiv Ramaswami talks with theCUBE

Juniper expands Mist AI platform with client-to-cloud digital twins and self-driving network tools

Safe Software adds data virtualization and augmented reality to FME Platform to boost enterprise integration

Google is getting into the filmmaking business to promote a more positive view of tech

We have lots more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: Trump wants to cut CISA’s budget

Analysis

A wrap on last week’s RSAC Conference from Intellyx’s Jason English: AI agents may battle AI attackers, but it’s still about improving security workflow at RSAC 2025

Policy

Trump administration proposes $491M cut to CISA in 2026 budget plan

Signal app clone used by Trump officials was hacked in less than 30 mins

Meta and NSO court battle over WhatsApp hack ends with Meta winning $167 million in damages

New services

ServiceNow debuts AI agents for security and risk to support autonomous enterprise defense

Barracuda adds multimodal AI to boost threat detection accuracy and speed

Nozomi Networks adds support for Nvidia BlueField DPUs to enhance OT and IoT security

SonicWall debuts new firewalls and managed cybersecurity service

Coralogix adds ‘Continuous Profiling’ for low-impact real-time performance monitoring

Coro expands cybersecurity platform with integrated user training to reduce human error

Money matters

CrowdStrike cuts 500 jobs as AI reshapes company operations

Microsoft backs $60M round for application security startup OX Security

Valarian raises $7M to isolate and compartmentalize mission-critical computing environments

Tesseral launches with $3.3M to simplify B2B authentication for software developers

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere around tech: Cisco aims at quantum computing

Democrats block stablecoin bill as they raise concerns about Trump’s crypto ventures Well, maybe just come back with a bill that doesn’t allow a sitting president to profit from his own crypto platform. And it wasn’t just Democrats who didn’t like how this smells.

Cisco debuts prototype quantum networking chip to accelerate future – and existing – applications

Amazon introduces Vulcan: an AI-powered warehouse robot with a sense of touch

Coinbase to acquire major crypto derivatives platform Deribit for $2.9B

Waymo will double robotaxi production at new plant in Arizona

And check out more news on emerging tech, blockchain and crypto and policy

Comings and goings

OpenAI appoints former Instacart, Meta executive Fidji Simo CEO of Applications

Robert Fergus will lead Meta’s Fundamental AI Research lab he co-founded, succeeding Joelle Pineau (per Bloomberg). Fergus was with Google’s DeepMind AI unit.

Former T-Mobile exec Clint Patterson joined Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite internet unit as chief marketing officer (per GeekWire).

AI startup 11x’s CEO Hasan Sukkar stepped down, replaced by Chief Technology Officer Prabhav Jain (per News).

Teradata appointed John Ederer, former chief financial officer of Model N, as CFO.

Content management firm Hyland Software appointed Tim McIntire CTO.

What’s next

Events

May 12-15: Boomi World, Dallas: TheCUBE will be onsite May 13-15 and News will have the news.

May 13-15: Qlik Connect, Orlando: TheCUBE will be onsite May 14 and News will have the news.

May 13-15: SaaStra AI, San Mateo, California. Potent lineup of speakers.

May 15: AWS Financial Services Symposium, New York City: TheCUBE will be onsite.

Earnings … just a few

Monday, May 12: Rapid7

Tuesday, May 13: CyberArk

Wednesday, May 14: Cisco

Thursday, May 15: Teradata

Image: News/Ideogram