Amazon said it has elected Kevin Mandia to its Board of Directors. Mandia is a cybersecurity expert who was founder and CEO of Mandiant, which was acquired by Google in 2022. Mandia is now CEO of Armadin, a cybersecurity company, and general partner of Ballistic Ventures, a VC firm focused on cybersecurity.
Adobe launched new AI features in Acrobat so it can transform documents into presentations, resumes, invoices reports and other documents. Acrobat will also be able to connect to enterprise document repositories. The new features are powered by the Adobe Productivity Agent.
Anthropic published research on economic scenarios for 2030, outlined a few options including a modest impact and extreme outcome and noted that the future isn't set. The short version is an in extreme scenario AI could result in a 17.9% unemployment rate for knowledge workers and a 11.5% decrease in wages. The modest scenario rhymes with the US economy today and substantial impact features a knowledge worker unemployment rate of 4.5%. In a nutshell, the economy will be much bigger due to AI but anyone who actually has to work for a living may be hosed. Trust fund babies unite!
HPE CFO Marie Myers said its Helios efforts with AMD are being evaluated and are likely to boost results later in 2027 and beyond. Speaking at an investment conference, Myers said:
"I'm personally super excited about Helios because it gives us an opportunity to really get out there and participate in a segment of the market that we potentially haven't been as competitive in. What's great about Helios, it incorporates a networking tray. And then obviously, we work with AMD on the server architecture.
But frankly, by having the networking tray in the stack, it obviously gives us a much better margin profile on these types of deals. So what I would say is where are we in terms of looking at these opportunities.
Right now, we are in POC stage with a number of different customers. And I'd say we've got some strong interest. Customers are obviously testing those workloads because they have to evaluate performance. It's a new stack. Many of them have been accustomed to working on their existing architecture, their existing stacks, so they're happy to gain confidence that they can see these workloads really performing at the levels that they want."
Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, quit over safety concerns that AI labs are building systems they won't be able to control. In a Wall Street Journal story, Coxon said: "We’re on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already." Coxon also posted a long thread on X about his decision.
Accenture said it expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to form an Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group, which will have a 1,000 FDE workforce.
Google DeepMind launched AlphaGenome Atlas, a 1-petabyte database that predicts the effects of every possible single nucleotide variant in the human genome.
Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent, and may have stumbled onto a monetization model. Muse, which is powered by Spark 1.3, is designed to handle tasks and runs in a secure Muse Secure VM, a dedicated secure computer with its own browser.
Muse has context, memory and integrations with various apps. Meta also said Muse can use checkout with Link from Stripe. Nothing Muse does reaches the internet unless a service call Sentinel approves it. The human has to approve any actions and Muse has an audit trail.
According to Meta, Muse will be on iOS and Android and will be free for most people with "subscription plans for people who want to do more."
It'll be interesting to see whether Meta can land subscriptions.
Google's DeepMind published a paper on how mutli-agent swarms need tools to communicate, coordinate and advance each other's work. These systems are also needed for policing.
The paper looks at how an AI agent swarm focused on solving math problems had participants that cheated and whistleblowers emerged. Other agents moved to counter the cheating with complaints, boycotts and patches. What's also notable about this paper is all of these behaviors emerged spontaneously.
According to Google DeepMind, 9% of the swarm were cheaters, 5% were converts, 24% were whistleblowers and 62% were unaware of the behavior and focused on solving the problems.
Here are a few quotes from earnings calls and themes worth pondering:
CEO Daniel Dines on UiPath's second quarter earnings call:
"We've talked a lot about how AI is changing software. The bigger question now is how enterprises turn AI into real business value. Customers aren't choosing between AI and deterministic automation. They are choosing the best way to achieve an outcome. AI is exceptional at reasoning, but it's probabilistic and can be expensive at scale.
Many enterprise processes don't need reasoning at every step. They need exactness, the same result every time securely, reliably and at the lowest possible cost. That's why we give customers the choice of deterministic or tokenless automation alongside AI. Our approach is simple. Use AI where intelligence creates value and deterministic automation where exactness matters that gives customers the benefits of AI without paying for AI reasoning at every step and ultimately better economics and better ROI at scale."
Asana CEO Daniel Rogers on the company's earnings call:
"Individuals have experienced significant productivity gains from AI, but most organizations haven't yet translated that into the productivity gains at the enterprise level. AI often sits outside the workflows that run the business, requiring people to find the right agent, provide the right context, and bring the output back into the work.
With Agentic Work Management (AWM), we closed that gap by putting people and agents and systems on the same plan. Historically, customers use Asana to coordinate work between people, to provide visibility into those tasks. With AWM, they can orchestrate execution across people and agents in the same context, same goals, and the same governance."
Apple on Sept. 9 is expected to announce a foldable iPhone, new iPhone Pros, a touch screen MacBook, new Apple Watches and other devices. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has the rundown and noted it's the debut of CEO John Ternus.
Zscaler reported a solid fourth quarter with revenue growth of 25%.
The company reported a fourth quarter net loss of $3.4 million, or 2 cents a share, on revenue of $898.2 million, up 25% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $1.19 a share.
Wall Street was expecting Zscaler to report non-GAAP earnings of $1.09 a share on revenue of $877.6 million.
Zscaler said first quarter revenue will be up about 19% from a year ago to $935 million to $939 million with non-GAAP earnings of $1.15 a share to $1.16 a share. For fiscal 2027, Zscaler expects revenue of $3.908 billion to $3.938 billion, up 16.6% to 17.5%. Non-GAAP earnings will be $4.86 a share to $4.90 a share.
The company also said it will cut 3% of its workforce.
