Salesforce shares have fallen 33% over the past twelve months to around $171, pushing its free cash flow yield to 9.9% versus the S&P 500 median of 4.1%. The company generated $42.83 billion in revenue over the last twelve months, up 11.0% year-over-year, with an operating margin of 22%. Management lowered GAAP operating margin guidance for fiscal 2027 to 20.6% and free cash flow growth guidance to 4.0%–5.0%, while pointing to AI momentum including 28.6 trillion tokens processed and an Agentforce annual recurring revenue run-rate greater than $1 billion. The market remains skeptical as overall bookings trends lag, with softness in Tableau and Commerce Cloud offsetting AI gains, and the growth thesis hinges on management's promise of organic revenue re-acceleration in the second half of fiscal 2027.
Cisco Unveils Agentic Collaboration Push Across Webex, Workplace and Customer Experience
Cisco introduced a broad set of agentic collaboration innovations at WebexOne 2026, spanning how people work, how the workplace adapts, and how businesses engage customers. On the Webex side, the company said Claude Managed Agents will soon let teams turn shared context into deeper analysis and coordinated multi-step action, while collaborative AI agents can be invited directly into spaces, meetings and calls, and an OpenAI dots integration brings Webex context into dots with dots later available inside Webex as an always-on personal agent. For the workplace, Cisco is unifying secure networking, collaboration devices, digital experience assurance and physical spaces into a single architecture managed through Cisco Cloud Control, adding Workplace Designer visual planning, Experience Metrics extended into the workplace, and Workplace Insights for space and capacity planning. Cisco also announced RoomOS 27, available in November, which adds native support for fully featured Google Meet through a new partnership with Google alongside Webex, Microsoft Teams and Zoom, an AI Assistant on Collaboration Devices that can engage in 32 languages, and new management tools including Workspace Advisor, Smart Room Assurance, Divisible Rooms, and Splunk and agent integrations. For customer experience, Cisco introduced Dialog, an all-new agentic harness for the Webex AI Agent platform that supports long-horizon execution, persistent relationship context, self-learning with every interaction and rapid onboarding, with Webex AI Agents operating within safety guardrails from Cisco AI Defense and observability powered by Splunk. Cisco also launched Ceiling Speaker Pro, an IP-connected meeting room speaker that replaces multi-vendor audio setups with a single Ethernet cable.
Artificial Intelligence › Agentic AI & Autonomous Workflows ▲Technology
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CSCO · Technology · Positive Cisco unveiled a broad set of agentic collaboration innovations across Webex, Workplace and Customer Experience, including Claude Managed Agents, OpenAI dots integration, RoomOS 27, Dialog and Ceiling Speaker Pro.
Cequence Finds Meta's Muse AI Agent Hit Over Half of Studied Customers in Two Weeks
Cequence Security said it detected traffic matching Meta's Muse personal AI agent at more than half of the customers it studied within two weeks of the agent's September 8 launch, and most of those businesses would not have known because Muse presents itself as an ordinary Chrome browser rather than identifying as an AI agent. Cequence analyzed traffic across customers in financial services, retail, travel, software and other sectors from September 1 to September 24, 2026, and found that at the median customer, Muse traffic grew nearly sixfold within about two weeks of first appearing. At financial institutions, Muse logged in to customer accounts and completed multi-factor authentication on users' behalf with confirmed successful sign-ins, while a small share of its sessions ended in a completed purchase. In late September, a travel and hospitality customer's security team began blocking nearly one in five Muse requests, targeting only the ones that looked abnormal, while Muse itself remained allowed. Cequence launched Agent Trust, a new capability in Cequence Application and API Protection available today, which verifies agents that present an identity and catches the ones that don't, pairing identity verification with behavioral detection. Agent Trust is immediately available to Cequence customers as part of Application and API Protection.
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Cequence Security · Technology · Positive Cequence launched Agent Trust, a new capability in its Application and API Protection suite, directly tied to the Muse agent detection findings.
META · Technology · Neutral Meta's Muse AI agent launched Sept 8 and was detected across over half of studied customers, but the article frames it as a security/visibility concern rather than a clear positive or negative for Meta.
IBM Launches Self-Hosted Deployment Option for Its Bob Agentic AI Platform
International Business Machines Corporation introduced a self-hosted deployment option for IBM Bob, its agentic software development platform, letting enterprises adopt AI-powered software development and modernization tools while retaining greater control over sensitive data, source code and development environments. The offering can be deployed across on-premises, private-cloud, sovereign-cloud and air-gapped infrastructure, making it particularly relevant for organizations with stringent security, regulatory and data-residency requirements. IBM is seeking to address growing enterprise demand for secure and governed AI adoption by enabling customers to run supported AI models within controlled environments or connect to external models through hybrid configurations. The enhancement complements IBM's broader hybrid cloud and AI strategy, alongside its watsonx platform and the HashiCorp buyout that augmented its hybrid multi-cloud capabilities. IBM has plummeted 23.6% over the past year against the industry's growth of 155.8%, while earnings estimates for 2026 have moved up 2.5% to $12.33 and for 2027 have increased 3% to $13.19. The company faces stiff competition from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and a potent threat from Anthropic, whose Claude Code tool can modernize legacy COBOL systems embedded in IBM's mainframe ecosystem.
Artificial Intelligence › AI Applications & Copilots ▲Technology
Artificial Intelligence › Agentic AI & Autonomous Workflows ▲Technology
IBM · Technology · Positive IBM launched a self-hosted deployment option for its Bob agentic AI platform, expanding enterprise AI capabilities.
Anthropic · Competition · Neutral Anthropic's Claude Code is cited as a potent threat to IBM's mainframe ecosystem, but no new development for Anthropic itself.
FICO Study Finds Only 5.2% of Tech Leaders Confident Explaining AI Decisions
FICO released its 2026 State of Responsible AI study, conducted with Corinium Global Intelligence, finding that only 5.2% of surveyed technology leaders are very confident explaining their AI-driven decisions. The survey of 1,004 senior technology, risk, and data leaders found that 71.5% of customer-impacting decisions are still made without AI, and that 37.3% of respondents are neutral or not confident at all in explaining AI decisions. Respondents most often cited AI model development standards, at 71.9%, as the responsible AI practice that would make the biggest difference, followed by interpretable model architectures at 67.9%. While 85.1% said AI has met or exceeded their ROI expectations, only 8.2% of organizations have a single shared AI deployment platform fully in place, and just 2.4% of tech leaders have broadly deployed agentic AI across customer-facing use cases, with 71.5% still in early exploration or pilot phases. FICO chief analytics officer Scott Zoldi said most organizations can tell you where and what their AI decided but far fewer can tell you why, adding that auditability and explainability are nonnegotiable as regulators and customers scrutinize AI use in decision-making.
Artificial Intelligence › AI Applications & Copilots Technology
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FICO · · Neutral FICO released its own 2026 State of Responsible AI study; the survey findings are about the industry, not a company-specific financial or product development.
Corinium Global Intelligence · · Neutral Corinium Global Intelligence is named only as FICO's research partner for the study, with no independent development affecting it.
Google Cloud and Mysten Labs to jointly develop VAA, a proof-of-behavior platform for AI agents
Mysten Labs, the developer of Sui, announced on October 6 a joint development plan with Google Cloud. The two will build Verifiable Agent Arbiter, or VAA, a platform that uses blockchain to prove that AI agents acted within the scope of the authority granted to them. VAA links the operations an agent is permitted to perform, its actual actions, and their outcomes into a record, so that counterparties and auditors can verify the record independently of the system that ran the agent. Instructions given to the AI, its outputs, its use of external tools, and decisions based on internal rules are stored privately in customer-managed Google Cloud storage, while cryptographic proofs corresponding to the records are stored on Walrus, a data storage platform, with Sui handling the management and linkage of those proofs. In addition to handling disputes in business-to-business transactions and investigating the causes of suspicious operations, the plan also includes integration with Sui's mechanism for AI agents to pay usage fees for external services under the x402 payment standard.
ThinkingAI Opens Agentic Growth Platform to Game Studios With Plans From $0
ThinkingAI, which builds autonomous growth software for consumer and gaming companies, has opened its analytics, engagement and agent stack to game studios that buy software with a card instead of a procurement cycle, offering four self-serve plans priced from $0 to $999 a month. The Free tier costs $0 and includes 2 million events a month, 1 project, 1 seat, 12 months of data retention and $10 in Agent Credits for the first month, with no credit card required. Starter costs $199 a month for 5 million events, 2 projects, 5 seats, 24 months of retention and $25 a month in Agent Credits, while Pro costs $399 a month for 10 million events, 2 projects, 10 seats, 48 months of retention and $50 a month in Agent Credits. Team costs $999 a month for 30 million events, 3 projects, 15 seats, 60 months of retention and $100 a month in Agent Credits, and an Enterprise tier is sold by agreement with sales for larger studios with compliance or data residency requirements. Annual billing saves 20%, paid plans are billed through Stripe and can be cancelled at any time, and a studio that outgrows its event allowance moves up a plan inside the product with no re-instrumentation and no migration. The plans follow ThinkingAI's Sept. 16 launch of the Agentic Engine and draw on 10 years of behavioral data across more than 1,500 enterprises and 8,000 applications, including Sega, Krafton, Habby, Century Games, Xiaomi, Yostar, TCL and FunPlus, and are being announced at the ThinkingAI Agentic Game Growth Summit in Istanbul, co-hosted with Mobidictum.
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Cloud & Digital Infrastructure › Data Platforms & Analytics Technology
ThinkingAI · Demand · Positive ThinkingAI opened its agentic growth platform to game studios with self-serve plans from $0 to $999/month, expanding adoption of its product.