Salesforce tripled down on AI agents at Dreamforce this week, but it’s still not clear despite CEO Marc Benioff’s insistence that his own company is benefiting massively from them that most enterprises are ready for large-scale deployment.
That’s going to require many things, but one big one is to ensure the resilience of their data. Don’t miss theCUBE Research’s latest Breaking Analysis laying out Salesforce’s potential to define the coming agentic enterprise.
But boy, did Benioff (pictured) step in it with his comments calling for President Trump to deploy National Guard troops to San Francisco (for which he apologized Friday).
Speaking of data, does this week’s announcement that Fivetran and dbt Labs are merging an indication that all these disparate data tools are consolidating? Maybe, but it seems like there’s still a lot of innovation coming as the AI era races ahead, so I wouldn’t count on it.
Oracle also shored up its bet on AI in all its products at its AI World conference this week — margins be damned.
AI factories took center stage in a flurry of announcements at the Open Compute Project’s global summit this week from Arm, Nvidia, Intel and more weighed in with new chips, networking and other technologies.
Apple launched its new M5 chip that will power new MacBook Pros, iPad Pros and Vision Pros.
Sam Altman continued his penchant for hogging headlines with a promise that ChatGPT will get kinky with consenting adults, as if we need that.
Data centers keep getting hotter, as Broadcom did a big infrastructure deal with OpenAI, Bscale will build four huge AI data centers for Microsoft, and a Microsoft- and Nvidia-backed consortium will swallow Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion.
Next week third-quarter earnings start to kick off, led by SAP, IBM and Intel.
Here’s all the week’s enterprise and emerging tech news and views, from News and beyond:
AI and data: Salesforce triples down on AI agents
Analysis and food for thought
Dave Vellante and theCUBE Research analyst team lay out the critical importance of data resilience in the AI era: The zero-loss enterprise: Data resilience as an AI service layer
Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear A mild essay from Anthropic’s Jack Clark about the need to consider AI risks seriously elicited strident complaints from critics such as David Sacks about how Anthropic is “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering. It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.” You mean the AI startup ecosystem into which billions of dollars are flowing every week? The self-interested whining of these entitled billionaires gets more shrill every day. They’ve won everything but they’re still unhappy.
Meanwhile, AI companies may be committing the same age-old mistake of talking down to their best customers and, worse, not even recognizing whom their best customers are. Check out Quentin Hardy’s I Have Seen The Future, And It Dislikes Us
And in the same essay, Quentin nods to another cautionary piece by economist Noah Smith: America’s future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints
Coverage from Dreamforce
First, the big picture from Dave Vellante and theCUBE Research analysts: Salesforce’s next era: The agentic enterprise
Salesforce makes its case at Dreamforce for how Agentforce 360 can bridge the ‘Agentic Divide’
Salesforce bets big on agents with platform overhaul
Salesforce turns Slack into a platform for conversational AI agents
Salesforce debuts new OpenAI, Anthropic integrations
Agentic infrastructure reshapes the enterprise: theCUBE’s Dreamforce keynote analysis
Agentic orchestration takes center stage as Salesforce evolves beyond CRM
The one jarring note from the conference, but a big one: Ron Conway exits Salesforce Foundation board over CEO Marc Benioff’s call to deploy National Guard to SF But perhaps it is all about business. I hear many employees at Salesforce are livid, and not the ones who will get replaced by AI anyway. We’ll see if his apology makes a difference.
Coverage from Oracle AI World
Oracle details upcoming AI clusters powered by Nvidia, AMD chips
Oracle adds AI capabilities to core database and launches a lakehouse platform
Oracle’s AI Agent Studio gets enterprise controls, LLM flexibility and deterministic workflows
Informatica expands Oracle Cloud offerings to streamline AI development
Riverbed accelerates AI data movement
New models and services
Microsoft introduces new Copilot automation features for Windows 11
Sam Altman says ChatGPT will become friendly again with a touch of erotica for adult users
Anthropic debuts entry-level Claude Haiku 4.5 hybrid reasoning model
Anthropic’s Skills for Claude helps AI agents perform certain tasks better than before
Google’s DeepMind and CFS are building an AI plasma control system for nuclear fusion
Snowflake partners with Palantir to speed up customers’ AI projects
Red Hat AI 3 targets production inference and agents
NetApp’s new AI Data Engine extends its intelligent storage infrastructure to AI workloads
Microsoft rolls out its first AI model for image creation
AppliedAI’s Opus makes compliant and reliable agentic automation available to every company
Bubble launches AI agent to merge conversational coding with visual app building
Encord creates a new method for training powerful multimodal AI models on a single GPU
MCPTotal launches end-to-end platform for safe enterprise adoption of MCP
Ververica debuts Flink Agents to bring autonomous AI to real-time data streams
Archive360 teams with Microsoft to deliver AI-powered eDiscovery and compliance solutions
Research hub Wiley launches platform to enable scientific discovery with AI
Farmer Lifeline Technologies uses AI to fight extreme poverty
IBM TechXchange 2025 was all about navigating the AI revolution
Money matters
Data management startups Fivetran and dbt Labs to merge
Vantaca raises $300M+ to automate community management with agentic AI
Dexory secures $165M to transform warehouse intelligence with its towering AI robots
Spatial-temporal reasoning startup General Intuition closes $133.7M investment
Reducto raises $75M Series B for its AI document intelligence service
Liberate raises $50M to build reasoning AI agents for insurance
AI startup Viven raises $35M to create digital twins that fill in for absent team members
Encube launches with $23M to rethink hardware development and engineering
Second Nature raises $22M for its AI sales training platform
Jack & Jill raises $20M to fix job hunting with conversational AI
Planyear secures $12M to automate the manual drudgery of benefits consulting
Startup Woz raises $6M to build an ‘AI app factory’ that combines agentic and human expertise
Policy
California introduces new child safety law aimed at AI chatbots
There’s even more AI and big data news on News
Around the enterprise: Hardware is hot again
Coverage from OCP Global Summit
Nvidia unveils its vision for gigawatt ‘AI factories’ based on its Vera Rubin architecture
Nvidia to start shipping AI-optimized DGX Spark desktop computer
Analysis by John Furrier: Meta and Oracle embrace Nvidia’s Spectrum-X: Ethernet enters the mega AI factory era
Arm joins with Open Compute Project to unveil new chiplet standards for AI data centers
Meta to use Arm’s energy-efficient Neoverse GPUs for some AI workloads
Intel takes another crack at the AI chip market with its new Crescent Island GPUs
Flex unveils highly integrated data center reference designs to speed up AI infrastructure deployments
Money matters
Deel lands $300M investment at $17.3B valuation to scale borderless payroll platform
MIT spinoff Vertical Semiconductor gets $11M to build more power-efficient AI chips
HPE stock sinks 10% on weak guidance for fiscal 2026
New products and services
Apple debuts refreshed MacBook Pro, iPad Pro powered by new M5 chip
Nvidia starts volume production of Blackwell chips in TSMC’s Arizona fab
Kong debuts tools for metering and monetizing APIs and AI agents
Data centers remain hot:
OpenAI partners with Broadcom to deploy 10 gigawatts of AI hardware
Nscale inks 200,000-GPU data center contract with Microsoft
Microsoft and Nvidia-backed AI consortium buys Aligned Data Centers for $40B
We have lots more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps
Cyber beat: DOJ butchers pig-butchering scheme
Attack & response
Justice Department targets Cambodia pig butchering syndicate in $15B bitcoin seizure and sanctions sweep
F5 says nation-state actor breached internal systems, stole BIG-IP development files
Whisper 2FA kit steals Microsoft 365 credentials and MFA tokens in real time
New products and services
Cisco unveils Project CodeGuard, an open-source framework to secure AI-written software
Google expands security features and education programs to fight surge in online scams
HackerOne advances offensive security with agentic AI system, general availability of HackerOne Code
JumpCloud and Google unite to launch Work Transformation Set for modern enterprise IT
Aiden launches AidenRescue to automate Windows device recovery after ransomware attacks
Blumira debuts SOC Auto-Focus to enhance AI-driven threat investigations
NTT DATA and Fortanix partner on cryptography-as-a-service to tackle AI and post-quantum security risks
CYPFER unveils Cynturion Group to deliver real-world, operator-led cyber resilience
DeepTempo and Cribl team up to counter agentic AI threats with data-driven security
Silverfort brings unified visibility to all identities across cloud, on-prem and AI agents
Money matters
LevelBlue acquires Cybereason, Imprivata buys Verosint in twin cybersecurity deals
Ploy raises $3.33M to tackle rising identity-based cyberthreats with automation
More cybersecurity news here
Elsewhere in tech: JPMorgan steps up for tech
JPMorgan launches $10B tech, infrastructure investment initiative
Oura raises more than $900M for wearable health tech smart ring
Stripe-backed blockchain developer Tempo reportedly raises $500M at $5B valuation
And check out more news on emerging tech, blockchain and crypto and policy
Comings and goings
OpenAI hired black hole physicist Alex Lupsasca in broader science push (per Axios).
Rob Bruckner, a 25-year Intel veteran, is leaving to lead Dell‘s commercial PC business. Intel will merge its Silicon Engineering Group and Platform Engineering Group under SVP Mike Hurley (per CRN).
AWS hired former DataStax CEO, Google VP Chet Kapoor to boost AI security (per CRN).
Anaconda named former GitLab Chief Product Officer David DeSanto CEO.
HiveMQ appointed Barry Libert chairman and CEO, aiming to become the leading industrial AI platform.
CoreWeave hired former Amazon Global Head of Startups and Venture Capital Jon Jones as its first chief revenue officer.
What’s next
Events
Oct. 21-22: TEDAI, San Francisco: News will attend and provide coverage.
Earnings: Third-quarter season begins
Tuesday, Oct. 21: TI, Pegasystems
Wednesday, Oct. 22: SAP, IBM, Tesla
Thursday, Oct. 23: Intel, Mobileye
Photo: Salesforce/livestream
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