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
Customer stories
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."
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.
Reuters reports that Thoma Bravo is nearing an agreement to hand over software company Medallia to its lenders. The move will wipe out $5.1 billion in equity for Thoma Bravo and its co-investors.
Thoma Bravo acquired Medallia for $6.4 billion in 2021. At the time, Thoma Bravo said: "Through this transaction, Medallia will become a private company with additional resources and greater flexibility to build on its innovation leadership and expand its customer impact."
It's safe to say things have changed.
Microsoft said Copilot's agentic features in Word, Excel and PowerPoint are generally available and enabled by default for 365 Copilot and 365 Premium.
CrowdStrike launched Project QuiltWorks, a coalition aimed at continuously fixing vulnerabilities being discovered by frontier models. The effort includes Accenture, EY, IBM Cybersecurity Services, Kroll, OpenAI and CrowdStrike.
Elastic said Google Distributed Cloud will embed the company's agentic security operations platform with analytics, automation and XDR for air-gapped environments.
