Author: Mike
SAP and Google Cloud have expanded their strategic partnership to introduce a new agentic commerce architecture designed to automate marketing, customer engagement, and retail operations at enterprise scale. The initiative aims to help businesses move beyond fragmented customer experiences by connecting data, AI, commerce, and marketing systems through autonomous AI agents. The announcement comes as SAP research reveals that 78% of businesses consider AI essential for customer retention in 2026. However, fewer than 40% of organizations currently share customer data effectively across customer experience and CRM platforms, creating operational silos that limit the effectiveness of AI-driven initiatives. To address this…
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in business operations, Indian enterprises are ramping up investments in workforce training to prepare employees for the next phase of AI-driven transformation. According to the latest edForce Enterprise Learning Report FY2025-26, Agentic AI has emerged as the fastest-growing learning category, reflecting a shift from AI experimentation to enterprise-scale deployment. The report reveals that enrollments in Agentic AI training programs nearly doubled during the year, reaching 57,536 learners. The surge highlights growing demand for skills related to developing, deploying, and managing autonomous AI systems capable of executing tasks and making decisions with minimal human intervention.…
The Rise of Agentic AI Brings New Security Challenges Agentic AI is rapidly transforming how businesses operate. Unlike traditional AI systems that simply generate responses or insights, AI agents can make decisions, execute tasks, interact with software systems, and collaborate with other agents autonomously. From customer service and cybersecurity to banking and healthcare, organizations are deploying autonomous AI agents to increase efficiency and accelerate innovation. However, as businesses embrace agentic AI, a critical concern is emerging: AI agent security. The more autonomy AI agents gain, the more attractive they become as targets for cybercriminals. Organizations can no longer treat AI…
Lloyds Banking Group has announced plans to significantly expand its artificial intelligence workforce, reinforcing its commitment to becoming one of the UK’s leading AI-powered financial institutions. The banking giant intends to hire approximately 300 AI and technology specialists as part of its broader strategy to integrate agentic AI across key business operations. The recruitment drive reflects the growing role of autonomous AI systems in the banking sector, where financial institutions are increasingly adopting advanced technologies to improve customer experiences, streamline operations, and strengthen fraud prevention capabilities. According to Lloyds Banking Group, the new hires will support the development and deployment…
Gradial, a fast-growing startup specializing in agentic AI solutions for enterprise marketing, has secured $65 million in Series C funding, underscoring growing investor confidence in autonomous AI systems that can streamline complex business workflows. The funding round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors including VMG Partners, Madrona, and PruVen Capital. The latest investment values Gradial at approximately $675 million and brings the company’s total funding to more than $110 million raised over the past 16 months. The funding will be used to expand product development, scale operations, and accelerate the adoption of AI-powered marketing automation across…
Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has announced the development of a new agentic AI-powered advertising platform in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), marking a significant step in the evolution of AI-driven marketing and advertising technologies. The platform is designed to help advertisers leverage autonomous AI agents capable of optimizing campaigns, improving audience targeting, and delivering more personalized advertising experiences across WBD’s media and streaming ecosystem. The initiative comes as media companies increasingly explore the potential of agentic AI—artificial intelligence systems that can independently analyze data, make decisions, and execute tasks with minimal human intervention. According to the company, the new…
India is rapidly emerging as a global AI powerhouse, and according to Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, the country’s unique combination of scale, language diversity, and growing focus on AI sovereignty makes it a prime market for the next generation of artificial intelligence models. Speaking at the Databricks Data + AI Summit, Ghodsi highlighted the company’s ongoing collaboration with Reliance Industries as part of broader efforts to strengthen India’s AI ecosystem. As both private enterprises and government agencies increasingly prioritize sovereign AI capabilities, demand is growing for locally hosted infrastructure and region-specific AI solutions. Reliance’s AI Infrastructure Vision Databricks is actively…
Infobip’s CTO on Moving From Demo to Production Most enterprises have already deployed AI tools. Far fewer have built the systems, workflows, and governance needed to run them as part of daily operations. That gap — between adoption and real operational scale — is the focus of a recent Q&A with Izabel Jelenić, Chief Technology Officer at Infobip, on what it actually takes to move agentic AI from pilot to production. The Problem Isn’t Adoption — It’s Scale Enterprise investment in agentic AI keeps growing because the underlying business pressure hasn’t gone away: organisations still need to serve customers faster,…
Every enterprise technology wave produces a familiar pattern: excitement outruns infrastructure. Cloud computing had it. Big data had it. Now agentic AI is having its turn — and the gap this time is unusually wide. A recent CIO.com feature by senior writer Grant Gross captured the problem precisely: enterprises are busy deploying agents, but few understand the building blocks and blueprints necessary to engineer effective agent-enhanced business workflows. IDC predicts a tenfold increase in agent use by large enterprises by the end of this year. Yet many CIOs haven’t focused on the architecture needed to run a large fleet of…
That changed on June 16, 2026, when Databricks took the stage at its annual Data + AI Summit in San Francisco and unveiled Genie One — a new generation of general AI agents built specifically for business teams. It is not a chat assistant bolted onto a dashboard. It is an agentic coworker that understands finance, sales, marketing, and operations from the ground up, powered by a self-improving context layer called Genie Ontology. The Wall Street Journal was among the first to call it: Databricks is pushing further into AI applications for general work. This blog unpacks what Databricks actually…