The private preview plague

Technology vendors are wooing the customers and outlining their agentic AI roadmaps and product direction at annual conferences. But two words should give you pause: Private preview.

Enterprise AI is developing so fast with new models, new architectures and advances that vendors need to keep announcing something agentic. As a result, we're getting a barrage of announcements for products that aren't going to be generally available for months.

You started seeing this private preview plague leading up to Google Cloud Next. As we all know, vendors try to ensure they are in the news cycle when a rival holds its flagship conference. Enter the previews.

A few examples:

• Stripe recently held its Sessions 2026 conference and announced 288 new products and enhancements to its platform. The company's blog post with all the launches has "private preview" mentioned 84 times.
• Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Code launched in previews as the company aimed to stake a claim in agentic governance and combining workflow automation with a data control plane.
• Google Cloud Agent Sandbox, Agent Memory Bank, Agent Simulator and Evaluation and other additions are in preview.
• AWS outlined its agentic software move with Amazon Quick Desktop, OpenAI models and Codex on Bedrock and AgentCore Managed Harness are in some form of preview.
• ServiceNow at Knowledge 2026 outlined a new fleet of AI specialists with many in preview until June. ServiceNow AI Control Tower and Microsoft Agent 365 integration is in preview and so is Project Arc. To ServiceNow's credit, there were plenty of announcements for products generally available. See: ServiceNow, AWS integrate AI Control Tower, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore | ServiceNow Knowledge 2026: AI Control Tower, Action Fabric, Autonomous Workforce and more
• IBM made a splash at Think 2026 with IBM watsonx Orchestrate, context in watsonx.data and IBM Z Database Assistant in private preview. See: IBM CEO Krishna touts quantum computing use cases, quantum-AI continuum

And it's not like the companies being chased aren't preview happy too. OpenAI Workspace Agents, a series of application agents for business teams, is in preview. Anthropic's Mythos model is now in private preview.

What's an enterprise buyer to do about this preview plague? Filter announcements by private preview vs generally available. Or just pay attention to products actually available. Anything without an availability date in the next eight weeks should be filed away.

If I wanted to make my life much easier, I could also exclude any product in preview, but then there wouldn't be much to write about.