SAS held its Innovate conference and outlined a series of updates. Here’s the roundup of announcements.

• SAS AI Navigator to bring order to AI chaos
• SAS expands SAS Viya with governed AI assistants and agentic AI capabilities
• SAS aims AI agents at industry’s toughest challenges
• SAS survey: Industry leaders on the quantum AI cusp
• Liverpool FC and SAS will deliver more personalized, real-time digital fan experiences with AI
• SAS at 50 years: Built on trust, shaping the future of AI
• SAS advances its AI-ready data management foundation for industry agents and automation, with governance built-in
• Expanded agentic AI capabilities coming to SAS Customer Intelligence 360

Oracle said in a post on X that "we’re seeing firsthand how quickly adoption of their technology is accelerating, driven by the strength of their latest models. Judging by the comments, Oracle's post went over like a lead balloon. Oracle was responding to a WSJ story saying OpenAI is missing internal expectations. OpenAI reportedly called the story clickbait, according to Bloomberg.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made a video appearance at an AWS event. He said: "I wish I could be there with you in person today. My schedule got taken away from me today."

General Motors reported strong first quarter results and said that its digital services efforts are starting to pay off. The company said OnStar ended the first quarter with recognized revenue topping $750 million, up 20% from a year ago. Super Cruise is tracking to deliver revenue of about $400 million in 2026.

We've chronicled GM's digital efforts as well as what Ford has been doing with AI. Rivian too.

• GM to integrate Google Gemini, delivered unified software defined vehicle architecture
• Ford launches Ford Pro AI
• Rivian’s AI strategy: Four takeaways

Adobe said it has closed the Semrush purchase as it looks to meld SEO, generative engine optimization (GEO) and agentic search optimization (AEO) as part of the broader customer experience platform via Adobe CX Enterprise, which was the headliner at Adobe Summit.

• Adobe acquires Semrush in $1.9 billion deal
• Adobe Scoops Up Semrush to Expand Brand Visibility Play
• AEO, GEO, and What Happens as AEM Enters the Chat

I still have a laundry list of followups from Google Cloud Next 2026, but here's the link stack from last week.

News and news analysis

• Google Cloud Next 2026: A look at the big themes
• Google Cloud presses full-stack AI edge with new TPUs, Agentic Data Cloud, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform
• Google Cloud CEO Kurian on AI model evolution, CPUs importance and being open

Customer stories

• How Verizon manages AI agent sprawl
• Citigroup's wealth unit launches Citi Sky, a Google-powered wealth advisor
• The big picture behind Ask Macy’s, a Gemini powered AI agent
• Merck inks Google Cloud agentic AI deal worth up to $1 billion

IBM said IBM Bob, an AI-first software development platform, is generally available. IBM said Bob goes beyond writing code to managing the entire software development lifecycle from planning and coding to testing, deployment and governance. By offering a structured framework, IBM argues that Bob can scale transformation. The platform includes orchestration, modernization, security controls, audits and coordination of multiple models. IBM Bob also has a package for Z mainframe systems.

OpenAI open sourced Symphony, an orchestrator that shifts software development entirely to agent-driven workflows. That's the news. The more interesting part of the post is how the process of software development changed and how going agent-only had upside, but also created new problems. The bottleneck moved away from coding itself to task definition, coordination and system-level design.

OpenAI is missing its internal projections and its CFO Sarah Friar has questioned its spending habits and whether it's ready for an IPO, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Typically, this story would be merely interesting, but given that much of the AI sector, notably Nvidia and Oracle, depends on OpenAI meeting its AI data center commitments through 2030 or so the article is going to get play. It's also worth noting that Microsoft and OpenAI amended their deal in part because the AI lab needs to grow and expand its distribution to other clouds.

UiPath and Databricks announced a partnership that integrates their respective platforms. Under the deal, UiPath agents and automations can access and query data from Databricks, orchestrate Databricks agents with UiPath Maestro and offer unified governance.

OpenAI outlined its five principles to AGI and said "power in the future can either be held by a small handful of companies using and controlling superintelligence, or it can be held in a decentralized way by people."

The company said it favors democratization, empowerment, universal prosperity, resilience and adaptability. You can find the flowery prose, daily dose of irony and probably a chuckle or two here.

China has reportedly blocked Meta's acquisition of Manus, which is registered in Singapore, but operates in China. The South China Morning Post reported that China's National Development and Reform Commission asked the parties to cancel the deal. The paper noted "that Beijing feared the Manus case could set an uncomfortable precedent for other AI companies, leading more to move their operations abroad."

• Meta hopes to accelerate its AI agent plans with Manus acquisition
• Meta releases Muse Spark model, aims to get back into LLM race

DeepSeek released its latest flagship models--V4 Pro and V4 Flash. The open-source models are garnering attention because they are closing the gap on closed models.