China vs. US AI war: Fact, fiction or missing the point?

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

Take four rather opinionated people about AI--and damn near everything else--toss in geopolitics and you get an AI debate that mimicked gorillas pounding their chests.

Welcome to a US vs. China AI debate at Constellation Research's AI Forum in Silicon Valley. Here's a recap.

Dr. David Bray, Principal/CEO & Distinguished Chair of the Accelerator LeadDoAdapt Ventures & Stimson Center, said the real war is about networks more than countries. People that value freedom will form networks regardless of countries. "Nations only came about 200 years after the printing press. It's a fairly new phenomenon. We may actually look back and look today, well, those nations that was a passing fad and then you have your preferences. I have my preferences," said Bray.

Esteban Kolsky, Advisor to Kings and Queens, ThinkJar, LLC, agreed countries were a false construct. "The whole role of a country or a nation is to deal with intractable problems and provide infrastructure to solve those intractable problems. That's it. That's the only role they have. It has no role whatsoever in investing in AI or technology. It has no role whatsoever in designing policy for AI or technology," he said. "Innovation doesn't have borders."

Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, said the AI war is just a derivative of competition over energy. China can get energy costs down close to zero. The real war is over the supply chain and robots. Wang said:

"We're in a global race for cheap and abundant energy. China can get to energy at zero cents a kilowatt hour in production. That means they're going to manufacture things cheaper than us. They're going to get to AI cheaper than us. They're fighting for the global supply chain on robots. They've got the rare earths, they've got the data, they've got the manufacturing capacity, and they've got cheap energy. They're going to be able to deliver robots at $10 per robot, while we're trying to do it at $1,000."

Mark Minevich, President and founding partner of Going Global Ventures, a digital cognitive AI strategist, a UN advisor, an investor and an artificial intelligence expert, said the US is tactical and China is strategic. "We have amazing stuff, but we don't have as much data as China has. We don't know what they're doing with agents. They are moving, they're robotizing, moving of agents everywhere. So they're doing things that we would not do in the US," said Minevich, who argued that the US has an advantage of private and public sector partnership.

Ultimately, the battle may be over centralized planning and control and decentralized networks. The answer may be both.

Wang said:

"We started out this conversation between China versus US but between the two, we talked about AI strategy. That's a central strategy, a centralization strategy, not necessarily centralization, which is the governance model we're talking about. It's more about governance. We all got into a heated debate intentionally for theatrics here.

But the main point here is we're confused about this need for centralization, decentralization and coordination. There's a balance in it right now. The challenge is we're trying to figure out what this is going to mean to society of humanity and we're confused. Do we need centralization to save ourselves? Do we need decentralized to escape?"

Naturally, I ran the transcript of this debate through AI sentiment analysis.

• OpenAI's ChatGPT found the discussion "to be a mix of concern, urgency, and strategic focus, with some optimistic and constructive undertones."
• Otter said the discussion reflected "a mix of concern, competitiveness, and cautious optimism regarding the technological and economic rivalry between the two nations."
• Google's Gemini said the sentiment was "primarily one of concern and urgency. There's also a sense of anxiety about the future of democracy and the impact of AI on society."

More from AI Forum:

• Boomi's product, technology chief on what's needed for AI agents to work together

Boomi's product, technology chief on what's needed for AI agents to work together

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

Agentic AI is developing at a rapid clip with cloud giants, software companies and enterprises racing to create autonomous agents. The catch is that there little integration across platforms, standard are lacking and orchestration and context is missing.

That's the gist AI agent state of union via Ed Macosky, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Boomi. Boomi plans on launching an AI agent control tower March 10 and aims to address some of the looming issues for enterprises.

At Constellation Research's AI Forum in Silicon Valley, Macosky said managing AI agents will be seen as an "integration problem" with a lot of moving parts with process and the symbiotic relationship between humans and AI.

Boomi, which has partnered with the likes of AWS and ServiceNow, has bet on AI agents and its role in herding them into something coherent to drive ROI for enterprises.

• Boomi acquires Rivery, adds data integration tools to iPaaS stack
• Boomi CEO Lucas: AI agents will outnumber your human employees soon
• Boomi's Transformation: From iPaaS to Intelligent Integration & Automation
• Why enterprise, process workflows are the new battleground

Here's a look at a few agentic AI issues that need to be resolved:

Agent overload and fragmentation. AI agents are being launched in a best-of-breed approach and the technology is accelerating. "I spent a lot of time thinking about how these agents will work together. We don't want to get in the way of how agents will communicate and work with each other, but every vendor is coming up with their own protocols, their own standards," said Macosky.

He added that most CIOs don't know how many agents they have running in the enterprise. "Do you have visibility? Nobody has that answer today. The number one concern in terms of agents and AI and business is security, compliance, governance and risk," said Macosky.

Orchestration. Agents will have to work together on tasks and automate across business processes, but orchestration layers need to be built. "We're all in on agents being the future," said Macosky. "But the orchestration layer needs to bring them together into something intelligent."

How enterprises are building agents. Given Boomi's platform, Macosky has a view into how customers are building AI agents. "When you talk to different customers, some have an affinity to a hyperscaler they're working with. Some are using application vendors. Or it's all of the above," said Macosky. "There are multiple levels and technical ways of doing it bringing agents together."

He added that agents are even being built by citizen developers with low code tools.

• AI agents bring consumption models to SaaS: Goldilocks or headache?
• Agentic AI: Three themes to watch for 2025
• Agentic AI without process optimization, orchestration will flop

Use cases. Macosky said that customer service is the use case most likely to be in production, but HR is going to be one of the leading use cases. Finance is also a key area as a way to optimize processes. "Agents in HR might be the most like the most important agents in a business in the future," he said.

The need for context. Macosky said situational awareness will be critical to orchestrating humans. He said:

"We can keep adding context, but when you start getting the situational awareness, that's where human decisions and human emotion and backgrounds of people come into play. Technology wise, we can be there quickly. But once the agents are in place they have to learn and understand human behaviors. It will be more about time than technology."

Standards. Macosky said standards will be critical. "We're defining and working with the likes of ServiceNow, AWS, Google and others. Most of the systems integrators out there are contributing with us. It's a mix of standards and some centralized governance where we're going to be announcing," he said.

The need for standards and a neutral control tower is necessary because vendors are building AI agent management consoles, but only in the context of their platform.

FarmaMondo futureproofs infrastructure to deliver medicine globally

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

When your company is responsible for delivering licensed and unlicensed medicines across five continents it's critical to have resilient infrastructure.

FarmaMondo is a Swiss pharmaceutical group that provides patients access to both licensed and unlicensed medicines across five continents via 14 subsidiaries. The company's extended supply chain is designed to "fulfill patients’ unmet medical needs globally."

The company's model revolves around being a trusted partner to the medical value chain that includes health professionals, international pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and patient advocacy groups. FarmaMondo named Yaron Spigel CEO in 2013, and the company launched its first international subsidiary in Brazil that year. New locations have been added nearly annually since.

Get this customer story as PDF.

FarmaMondo's services include marketing and distribution agreements, managed access and alleviating hospital shortages. FarmaMondo serves as an integrated partner for manufacturers and customers and handles payment as well as regulatory compliance so it can get the right medicines to the right place anywhere in the world.

Here’s a look at FarmaMondo’s global network.

With €100M in annual revenue, FarmaMondo has grown at a rapid clip, averaging about 30% a year and now has 150 users tapping into its SAP systems. Antonio Adorno, IT Manager for FarmaMondo, said that the pace of growth "was putting more demand on resources for broader services."

The project

Adorno said FarmaMondo upgraded its legacy storage infrastructure to Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) Block array with partner Netability. "We were looking to enable seamless scalability, improve user experience and deliver smooth application performance," said Adorno. "Our offices around the world must be able to connect to our central IT systems 24/7. To ensure near-100% availability, we depend on the highly reliable infrastructure and services provided by Hitachi Vantara and Netability."

FarmaMondo needed to modernize its storage and server landscape. Netability replaced four existing servers with two machines and swapped its Hitachi VSP G200 systems with a Hitachi VSP One Block array.

As part of the infrastructure swap, Adorno said FarmaMondo migrated its VMware, SAP applications and databases. FarmaMondo centralizes its mission critical apps such as its pharmacy and warehouse management systems in its Swiss data center and uses cloud applications for productivity.

Adorno said Netability migrated the data and installed the new storage system while creating a fibre channel network connection between the two arrays.

"Hitachi and Netability are credited with making it easy to move our data, without downtime or disruption to our business," said Adorno. The move to VSP One Block has allowed FarmaMondo to replace legacy SSDs with high-speed NVMe drives. Combined with the company's powerful new servers, this has transformed performance for both batch processing and interactive application workloads.

With the new systems in place, FarmaMondo plans to take immutable snapshots of data to protect the business from ransomware and other cyberattacks. FarmaMondo is also leveraging VSP One Block’s dynamic drive protection (DDP) groups to increase capacity one drive at a time. Adorno said this will make upgrades more seamless and affordable.

Following the move of VMware applications to VSP One, FarmaMondo decided to consolidate its SAP applications on the system. In combination with FarmaMondo’s new servers, the VSP One Block array has dramatically improved application response speeds. “Everything runs a lot more smoothly, especially our SAP applications,” Adorno says. “One SAP batch job that used to take 20 minutes to complete now runs in just six minutes, so it’s more than three times faster.”

Futureproofing

Adorno said the new Hitachi Vantara systems gives FarmaMondo the ability to scale operations in the future.

FarmaMondo's mission is to deliver unmet needs for specialty medicines around the world – especially in cases where physicians may not be able to source the pharmaceuticals their patients need. For example, a new medicine might not yet have been licensed in their country, or there may be a shortage of an essential drug that has no licensed alternative. In these circumstances, the only option is unlicensed medicines (ULMs). These are products that are not commercially available in the patient’s home market, but which healthcare professionals are permitted to source and prescribe when there is no alternative.

FarmaMondo can get those drugs to the right places through its extended supply chain and global network of partners.

“The storage we have purchased guarantees us performance and headroom for the future, at an affordable price. Moreover, it’s a much more sustainable solution," said Adorno. "To support the same level of growth with our old infrastructure, we would have needed three times more rack units and our electricity consumption would have tripled, so it’s a great energy and space saver.”

MongoDB Q4 shines, but outlook mixed

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

MongoDB reported better-than-expected fourth quarter results, but its outlook for the first quarter and fiscal 2026 was light.

It was hard to gripe about MongoDB's fourth quarter as the company easily topped revenue estimates and nearly doubled the 67 cents a share analysts expected for non-GAAP earnings.

MongoDB reported fourth quarter earnings of $15.8 million, or 20 cents a share, on revenue of $548.4 million, up 20% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for the fourth quarter were $108.4 million, or $1.28 a share.

For fiscal 2025, MongoDB reported a net loss of $129 million, or $1.73 a share, on revenue of $2.01 billion, up 19% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for fiscal 2025 checked in at $274.2 million, or $3.33 a share.

The company just announced the purchase of Voyage AI. See: MongoDB picks up Voyage AI, aims to integrate model reranking

Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB, said Atlas revenue growth was 24% and margins expanded with new workload wins. "In fiscal year 2026 we expect to see stable consumption growth in Atlas, our main growth driver," said Ittycheria. "Looking ahead, we remain incredibly excited about our long-term growth opportunity. Following the Voyage AI acquisition, we combine real-time data, sophisticated embedding and retrieval models and semantic search directly in the database, simplifying the development of trustworthy AI-powered apps."

So what's the problem? The outlook from MongoDB was mixed, but could also merely be conservative.

MongoDB expects first quarter fiscal 2026 revenue will be between $524 million to $529 million. The midpoint of that range is a bit below the $527.3 million estimate. Non-GAAP earnings in the first quarter are projected to be between 63 cents a share to 67 cents a share. Wall Street was expecting 62 cents a share.

Fiscal 2026 revenue is forecast to be between $2.24 billion to $2.28 billion, compared to the estimate of $2.33 billion. Non-GAAP earnings a share for the year will be between $2.44 to $2.62, well below $3.38 a share estimate.

Ittycheria said the following on MongoDB's earnings call:

• "As I look into fiscal '26, let me share with you what I see as the main drivers of our business. First, we expect another strong year of new workload acquisition. As we said many times in the past, in today's economy, companies build competitive advantage through custom built software. In fiscal '26, we expect that customers will continue to gravitate towards building their competitive differentiation on MongoDB."
• "We expect to see stable consumption growth for Atlas in fiscal '26 compared to fiscal '25. Usage growth to start fiscal '26 is consistent with the environment we have seen in recent quarters. This consistency, coupled with an improved fiscal '25 cohort of workloads gives us confidence that Atlas will continue to see robust growth as it approaches a $2 billion run rate this year."
• "We expect our non-Atlas business will represent a meaningful headwind to our growth in fiscal '26 because we expect fewer multiyear deals and because we see that historically non-Atlas customers are deploying more of the incremental workloads on Atlas."
• "In fiscal '26, we expect our customers will continue on their AI journey from experimenting with new technology stacks to building prototypes to deploying apps in production. We expect the progress to remain gradual as most enterprise customers are still developing in-house skills to leverage AI effectively. Consequently, we expect the benefits of AI to be only modestly incremental to revenue growth in fiscal '26."

Zscaler delivers strong Q2, says AI driving platform deals

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

Zscaler delivered better-than-expected second quarter results as the company platform is gaining due to its zero trust architecture and the need to secure AI applications.

The cybersecurity vendor reported a second quarter net loss of $7.7 million, or 5 cents a share, on revenue of $647.9 million, up 23% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 78 cents a share in the second quarter.

Wall Street was expecting Zscaler to report second quarter earnings of 69 cents a share on revenue of $635.35 million.

Jay Chaudhry, CEO of Zscaler, said the company was seeing strong demand for its platform. "By combining AI with Zero Trust, we are delivering several key innovations to secure our customers’ use of AI applications, creating new avenues of growth," said Chaudhry.

Zscaler is part of a trio of cybersecurity vendors looking to consolidate enterprises on their AI-driven platforms. CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks also reported strong results. SentinelOne is a smaller vendor with an AI-driven cybersecurity platform and Fortinet has expanded its reach too.

• Cybersecurity platformization: What you need to know
• CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks duel over platforms vs. bundles

As for the outlook, Zscaler's fiscal 2025 outlook for revenue and earnings were above estimates. The third quarter earnings outlook was above expectations with revenue a bit lighter than expected.

The company projected third quarter revenue between $665 million to $667 million with non-GAAP earnings of 75 cents a share to 76 cents a share. For fiscal 2025, Zscaler projected revenue of $2.64 billion to $2.65 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $3.04 a share to $3.09 a share.

Zscaler in the quarter launched its Zero Trust Network Access service natively integrated within RISE with SAP. it also launched a segmentation tool for branches and cloud environments.

By the numbers:

• Zscaler said it landed several 7-figure deals across its platform.
• More than 85% of more than $1 million deals in annual recurring revenue included two or more data protection modules.
• Data protection was included in more than 40% of new and upsell deals.

Here's what Chaudhury had to say on the Zscaler earnings call:

• "Our go-to-market investments are resulting in increased sales productivity, double-digit new and upsell business growth and lower sales attrition. I expect sales productivity to continue growth in the second half, driven by ongoing success of our go-to-market initiatives and growing number of ramped sales reps."
• "Our mission is to create a Zero Trust Everywhere world. With the upcoming hardware refresh cycle, CXOs are increasingly looking for ways to eliminate the legacy security stack including firewalls, VPNs, SD-WANs and more."
• "We are leaning into the opportunity presented by the refresh cycle with surgical field campaigns to educate our customers on how they can leapfrog to Zero Trust everywhere and free themselves from firewalls and other legacy appliances forever."
• "In Q2, many customers purchased data protection to securely adopt public AI, including a Global-2000 hospitality company, a Global-2000 technology company, a Global-2000 manufacturing company and more. In addition to securing the use of public AI apps, we are investing to deliver solutions to secure customers' private AI apps such as LLM and SLM models, chatbots and inference engines."
• "We are also leveraging AI in many other areas, including automated data classification, image classification, zero-day vulnerabilities detection and prevention, app segmentation, IoT, OT device discovery and more." 

Box's master plan: Be the unstructured data enabler of agentic AI

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

Will Box become the content and context enabler of the agentic AI food chain? Box CEO Aaron Levie is betting on it.

With an investor day on tap, Levie laid out Box's AI and genAI master plan, which has been advancing over the last 18 months or so. With the rise of agentic AI, Box's vision is playing out.

The company reported in line fourth quarter earnings with a light first quarter outlook--largely due to a currency exchange headwind due to operations in Japan. Box reported fourth quarter earnings of $1.12 a share, on revenue of $279.5 million, up 6%. Non-GAAP earnings were 42 cents a share. For fiscal 2025, Box earnings were $1.36 a share on revenue of $1.09 billion.

As for the outlook, Box projected first quarter revenue of $274 million to $275 million with non-GAAP earnings between 25 cents a share and 26 cents a share. For fiscal 2026, Box projected revenue between $1.15 billion to $1.16 billion with non-GAAP earnings between $1.13 a share and $1.17 a share.

Box recently launched an Enterprise Advanced version of its platform along with a credit system as customers consume AI agents going forward. Box is also benefiting as systems integrators and services providers include the company in AI implementations.

• Box launches new AI features, Box AI Units
• Box acquires Alphamoon Technology, aims to integrate LLMs, OCR into Box AI
• AI agents bring consumption models to SaaS: Goldilocks or headache?

"We are seeing companies start to adopt Enterprise Advanced to power intelligent metadata extraction from documents, automate workflows and dashboards with Box Apps, gain access to Forms, Doc Gen, and Archive, and create custom AI agents with the AI Studio," said Levie, who cited legal and public sector use cases in prepared remarks.

He added:

"AI Agents are entering the workforce and will augment and accelerate our work; our unstructured data is enabling intelligence that we can now use to gain new insights about business; and we can begin automating any workflow in the enterprise, especially the long tail of work that we couldn't automate before."

With Box adding context and insights to previously untapped unstructured data, it could become a cog in agentic AI workflows. Levie said that Box is using its own platform to boost productivity, give employees the ability to get HR and sales information, and use Box AI to write sales pitches, conduct code reviews and give the company more insights.

"Any employee can gain the same level of expertise as the most knowledgeable employee just by asking questions of the existing enterprise data that's already there; the hidden information inside of contracts, invoices, financial documents, and customer data turns into business critical insights that drive better execution; Agentic AI can automate workflows that were expensive and time consuming; and by understanding what's in our content, we can better secure and protect it at scale," said Levie.

Levie said that Box has multiple product announcements in fiscal 2026 focused on extracting data from documents, no-code Box Apps, workflow automation and AI platform advances for Box AI Agents. Levie said that Box will continue to add models to its platform.

• Agentic AI: Three themes to watch for 2025
• Agentic AI without process optimization, orchestration will flop

"We believe we're an asset in this environment. In dynamic times, you want to have more leverage from your technology, you want to be able to retire more legacy systems, and you want to automate more workflows," said Levie.

Indeed, Box appears to be landing more high-level CxO interest as part of broader enterprise transformation plans.

"We were usually in core infrastructure within the CIO organization. But the Chief Data Officer realizes now that once you have AI on unstructured data, they can treat that as another data type to pull business insights from," said Levie. "We're having more conversations with company CTOs that are trying to deliver better experiences, and they know that if they can get data from within their unstructured information, they could go and automate a better client-facing experience."

Salesforce expands ecosystem, courts developers and partners to Agentforce

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

Salesforce launched a developer edition of Agentforce and a marketplace for pre-built partner agents and actions.

The launch comes as Salesforce follows up with its next phases of its Agentforce rollout. The focus on developers, announced at Salesforce's TDX conference, is designed to build an ecosystem around Agentforce.

For Salesforce, it's critical that Agentforce courts developers as well as administrators. Salesforce is betting that generative AI as well as AI agents revamp how user access software.

• Salesforce landing Agentforce deals, but Q4 and outlook mixed
• Salesforce, Google Cloud expand partnership: Here's what it means
• Behind the Scenes: The Force Behind Agentforce
• Salesforce launches Agentforce 2.0 as it ramps its release cadence
• Salesforce Dreamforce 2024: Takeaways on agentic AI, platform, end of copilot era

The company has unified its various clouds and integrated them with Data Cloud, which enables Agentforce in many ways.

Agentforce Developer Edition, which will provide Agentforce, Data Cloud and Salesforce APIs in a free developer environment, will include features that enable enterprise builders to manage the life cycle of an AI agent including, planning, building, configuring and deploying them.

Other tools will include a metadata explorer and change tracker to assist with building agents.

Agentforce Developer Edition will also include tools for monitoring costs, analyzing performance and testing to ensure agent deployments are efficient.

Key items include:

• Batch testing of agent quality using AI-assisted test case generation.
• Zero copy data integration.
• Open ecosystem and model choices.
• Tools to convert bots into agents.

Salesforce will demo the steps in the Agentforce developer lifecycle. Those steps and features include:

• Plan with a bot to agent migration tool and developer edition for Agentforce and Data Cloud.
• Build agents with AI assistance, AppDev bar and configure Agentforce APIs.
• Test via Testing Center.
• Release and deploy via DevOps Center.
• Monitor costs with Digital Wallet, which tracks consumption, Agent Analytics and Agentforce Interaction Explorer.

The company at its developer conference also outlined Agentforce 2dx, a new version of Agentforce that adds low-code tools to deploy agents. 

Agentforce 2dx, available in April, includes:

• Agentforce API to integrate back-end processes, systems and applications. 
• Agentforce Invocable Actions, which enable Agentforce to be embedded into Salesforce business logic. 
• MuleSoft for Agentforce, which includes a topic center to use natural language to create Agentforce topics into MuleSoft APIs. Salesforce is using the MuleSoft API Catalog to simplify AI agent development. A MuleSoft Agentforce connector gives developers the ability to integrate AI agents into existing workflows and integrations. 
• Agentforce Steps in Slack Workflow Builder to create no-code automation within Slack. 
• Agentforce Employee Template.
• Agentforce Surfaces, which leverages AI agents across digital engagement channels, Agentforce Cards that put Lightning web components in agent actions, and Tableau Semantics to create data structures and semantic models. 

Salesforce also launched AgentExchange, which will allow developers to integrate new actions into agents. Enterprises will also be able to discover Agentforce agents from partners. AgentExchange builds on Salesforce's long-running AppExchange. 

AgentExchange will use Agentforce to instantly find apps and agents using natural language and recommend partner actions and topics in Agent Builder.

According to Salesforce, AgentExchange includes more than 200 partners including Google Cloud, DocuSign, Workday and Box.

Components available on AgentExchange include:

• Actions that can expand the job agents built with Agentforce can do with new integrations.
• Prompt templates including pre-written, reusable prompts.
• Topics to focus and refine agent behavior.
• Templates for agents across multiple topics and actions with metadata and instructions.

Microsoft launches AI Accelerator for Sales, AI agents near public previews

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

Microsoft launched a series of AI agents and an AI accelerator program for sales as it outlined a bevy of customer references implementing the software giant's copilots and agents.

The company's AI agent tools are being rolled out in Dynamics 365 and are natively integrated across Microsoft 365 productivity apps. The AI agents will connect to an enterprise's data platform (Azure and third parties) and use Microsoft's horizontal data across productivity apps and LinkedIn to include context.

Here's what's rolling out:

• AI Accelerator for Sales, a program that brings services and expertise to enterprises adopting agentic AI, which will be available in April.
• Sales Research Agent, which will be in public preview in April.
• Sales Agent, which brings agentic AI to salespeople in various environments such as Dynamics 365 and Outlook. Sales Agent will be in public preview in May and autonomously researches and prioritizes leads.
• Sales Chat, which allows you to interact with sales data in natural language, will public preview in May.

Sales Agent and Sales Chat agents can be accessed in Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, Dynamics 365 and Salesforce.

Microsoft also announced a variety of customer references for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Many of these customers were highlighted by CEO Satya Nadella on Microsoft's most recent earnings conference call.

• Microsoft launches Copilot Actions, Agents in SharePoint at Ignite
• Microsoft outlines Copilot agents for enterprises

The list of customers hits back at Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff who has argued repeatedly that Microsoft couldn't show what customers were doing with Copilot or AI agents. Microsoft said more than 160,000 organizations have used Copilot Studio to create more than 400,000 customer agents in the last three months.

• AI agents bring consumption models to SaaS: Goldilocks or headache?
• Agentic AI: Three themes to watch for 2025
• Agentic AI without process optimization, orchestration will flop

Enterprise customers leveraging AI agents and Copilot include Holland America Line, Vodafone, Novartis, Campari, Dow, ABN Amro, Accenture, and Estee Lauder to name a few.

Constellation Research got a demo of Sales Agent, Sales Chat and an AI canvas applications that enabled enterprises to delve into data and dashboards in natural language. A few takeaways:

• The ability for Sales Agent to interact with sales folks within various applications like Outlook with context in an autonomous way was notable. Tasks can be sped up dramatically.
• Sales Agent can carry out tasks and automatically update Dynamics 365.
• Performance tracking on engagements on metrics such as emails sent and open rates, meetings booked and opportunities created enable enterprises to gauge ROI of agents and optimized.
• A Sales Management AI workspace highlights the future of workflows as well as the ability to get specific data points and discover new insight. This "infinite canvas" approach can be helpful and enable enterprises to make better decisions.

Constellation Research analyst Martin Schneider outlined his thoughts in a post. He said:

"These advancements underscore an overarching theme occurring across front-office application development. Where we used to think of suites like CRM as a collections of applications with their own user interfaces….today we are seeing “Copilots” (and their relative cognates) as the new collective UI that can draw functionality and present insights from a wide swath of applications. Also, where we saw workflow as something that needed to be considered, built, and managed - now agents have streamlined workflow to the point where we can simply create complex and effective workflows with a single sentence added to a prompt. And where we looked at CRM systems as a data store, now we can finally start looking at them as a tool for access to knowledge beyond just the data we put into it. High composability, the simplicity of conversational interfaces and more fluid data integration capabilities are driving these rapid changes."

CrowdStrike delivers strong Q4, but earnings outlook light

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

Read more

CrowdStrike reported better-than-expected fourth quarter results as the company was seeing strong enterprise demand for its AI driven security platform

The company, which is competing with Palo Alto Networks as a "platformization" play, reported a fourth quarter net loss of $92.3 million, or 37 cents a share, on revenue of $1.06 billion, up 255 from a year ago. Non-GAAP fourth quarter earnings were $1.03 a share.

Wall Street was expecting CrowdStrike to report non-GAAP earnings of 86 cents a share on revenue of $1.04 billion.

For fiscal 2025, CrowdStrike reported a net loss of $19.3 million, or 8 cents a share, on revenue of $3.95 billion, up 29% from a year ago. The company appears to be fully recovered from its July outage. 

• Cybersecurity platformization: What you need to know
• CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks duel over platforms vs. bundles
• Palo Alto Networks delivers strong Q1, says industry on platformization bandwagon now
• How Platformization Applies to Cybersecurity

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the company is "on the flight path to our $10 billion ending ARR (annual recurring revenue) goal." Kurtz added the company was seeing strong demand for its Next-Gen SIEM, Cloud Security, and Identity Protection businesses. Falcon Flex, CrowdStrike's cybersecurity platform, added more than $1 billion in deal value in the fourth quarter.

As for the outlook, CrowdStrike projected first quarter revenue of $1.1 billion or so with non-GAAP earnings of 64 cents a share to 66 cents a share. Wall Street was expecting non-GAAP earnings for the first quarter of 96 cents a share. For fiscal 2026, CrowdStrike projected revenue of $4.74 billion to $4.8 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $3.33 a share to $3.45 a share. Analysts were expecting $4.43 a share for fiscal 2026. 

• CrowdStrike buys Adaptive Security
• CrowdStrike, AWS expand partnership revolving around CrowdStrike Falcon and Amazon Bedrock

Speaking on a conference call, Kurtz said:

• "CrowdStrike is the first cybersecurity ISV to cross $1 billion in deal value on AWS Marketplace in a single calendar year, setting a new standard for ecosystem execution."
• "We find ourselves placed at the epicenter of a rapidly evolving demand environment. A new administration, a new wave of technology, and a new threat landscape necessitate all businesses to evolve their cybersecurity programs. Consolidation, cost reduction and automation are now the accepted enterprise and federal priorities."
• "We're still in the early, but rapidly evolving innings of the AI revolution. Businesses and governments across the globe are looking for their AI investments to yield both improved efficiencies and novel outputs. At CrowdStrike, we're requiring every team and function to leverage the power of AI."
• "Businesses are equally grappling with how to secure their environments in this AI age. Here's my take on what this means. First, more AI everywhere means more data, more access, and more processes, services, and products requiring cybersecurity."
• "With tools such as DeepSeek making AI access easier and cheaper, the pace and prevalence of adversarial AI adoption is only accelerating."
• "More access to more third-party and in-house agentic applications and services requires rethinking identity and data protection. Who is accessing data and where is it traveling matters more now than ever before." 
• "Securing AI starts a broader enterprise data discussion. I'm seeing CISOs, CIOs, and CEOs going to the drawing board to reinvent their technology stack with AI-powered platforms of record for their next decade and beyond. And for security, it's even more pressing."