This list celebrates changemakers creating meaningful impact through leadership, innovation, fresh perspectives, transformative mindsets, and lessons that resonate far beyond the workplace.
Confluent announced additions to Confluent Cloud and Confluent Intelligence designed to add real-time data and context into AI applications.
The news builds on a series of Confluent integrations with various IBM offerings announced at IBM Think. See: IBM buys Confluent for $11 billion: Here's what Big Blue gets
Modernization of ERP Moves Beyond Just Agents
While all the buzz in AI is focused on agentic ERP, one can’t just slap on an agent to the core system and expect it to smoothly deliver an AI-enabled ERP without glitches as many AI evangelists and startups would love to tout. Modernization requires both the continuous investment in the core while applying the benefits of agentic AI. Early business and technology leaders have shown that expertise in AI is rapidly becoming a commodity. However, the hard work of connecting the dots, understanding the business logic, and delivering on the last mile requires deep experience.
Constellation Research VP & Principal Analyst Holger Mueller sat down with Miran Badzak, IBM's executive director of databases, at IBM Think for a timely conversation very relevant to enterprise computing. IBM is making a serious move in the database management space with Genius Hub, a new AI-powered product built specifically for Db2 DBAs, and the timing could not be more relevant.
In episode 21 of the Humanscope podcast, Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research gives us a front-row view of how AI is reshaping HR, enterprise software, and the future of leadership.
The topics cover:
Dell Technologies is pushing on-premises AI and finding interested enterprises as they struggle to keep token costs down. The company launched Dell Deskside Agentic AI, a set of workstations that offer a sandbox to securely test and optimize AI before blowing through tokens.
The company also launched Dell AI Factory with Nvidia updates along with AI infrastructure designed to improve agentic AI economics and the cost that goes with it.
AI inference costs are turning up on earnings calls as enterprises try to get a handle on token costs as they ramp AI agents. The bigger question is whether the context layer is the way to keep a lid on AI costs or you just kick it old school with budgeting.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) is more than a place to dump logos and campaign files; it’s the last mile of digital experience delivery. In this ShortList Spotlight, Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, breaks down how organizations mature their DAM strategy across three big ideas:
Figma's first quarter results and outlook indicate that the company's core customers are spending more with the design software company. The results counter the narrative that Figma, like other enterprise software vendors, is going to be roadkill for agentic AI.
Boomi customers are increasingly using the company's platform as more than a narrow integration platform and focusing on AI agent use cases.
Perhaps the biggest lesson from customers at Boomi World 2026 is that the enterprises that showed the most traction started with concrete operational pain points, built reliable data and integration foundations, and then used AI agents to remove repeatable work or improve customer-facing processes.
Smartsheet continues to bet that AI will shift organizations into a new era of work, where the insights, operations and data that exist across the organization can be aligned and set to work more effectively across teams. With its Q1 2026 update, we see the realization of promised functions outlined at Smartsheet Engage 2025 and the introduction of even more intentional conversational, generative and agentic AI capabilities intended to accelerate velocity and insight from planning through to impact.
Boomi's product keynote surfaced a bevy of high-level takeaways that enterprise buyers need to think about as they navigate rapidly evolving agentic AI trends.
Here's a look at the takeaways from Boomi CTO Ed Macosky and other executives on the stack and trends to know.
Constellation Research estimates $8.2 billion in revenue with a $183.7 billion market for cross-platform agentic AI by 2031, growing at a 67.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). This category spans what is known as bots, agents, and advisers. These agentic AI systems can independently make decisions and act without human guidance.
Cisco reported strong third quarter results and raised its fourth quarter outlook as it cashes in on the AI infrastructure boom.
In the third quarter, Cisco reported third quarter earnings of 85 cents a share on revenue of $15.8 billion, up 12% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings in the third quarter were $1.06 a share.
Wall Street was looking for non-GAAP earnings of $1.04 a share on revenue of $15.56 billion.
The Strait of Hormuz has devolved into the world's most expensive game of "Red Light, Green Light," where 20% of global petroleum transits a chokepoint that has disrupted the equivalent of Italy's GDP. From spoofed GPS signals to autonomous drone harassment testing maritime insurance algorithms, this isn't traditional warfare: it's "attrition by algorithm" that your cybersecurity framework wasn't designed to handle. Stop planning for "the most likely scenario" and start building scenario elasticity, because the next shuffle is coming and your supply chain is already in play.
Neurealm is the right-sized partner for Engineering, Modernization, and RunOps, helping global Healthcare enterprises across Provider, Payer, MedTech, and Life Sciences make smart progress through an AI-first approach.
At the core of our offerings is NeuGAIN, our enterprise AI platform designed to accelerate AI adoption across data, software engineering, process transformation, and IT operations.
Boomi said it will acquire Lunar.dev in a move that aims to bring intelligent model and prompt routing and governed agent connectivity to its platform.
Lunar.dev has a gateway that secures and governs all AI applications and agents. Lunar.dev offers rate limiting for LLM traffic, data sanitation for prompt and payload transformer as well as LLM model routing and custom AI metrics collection.
The purchase signals where Boomi is headed--intelligent model routing in addition to its broader AI platform.
Boomi fleshed out its governed data-to-agent platform anchored on data activation, a headless enterprise architecture, connectivity, context-driven data layer and hybrid agentic AI workflow orchestration.
Google Cloud’s partnership with Citigroup is starting to pay off as Citi Wealth, a unit of Citibank, launched an AI agent that utilizes Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and forward-deployed engineers (FDEs).
On Citibank’s most recent earnings call, the company noted that its technology modernization and AI initiatives are largely complete. Now Citi will deliver the next phase of its AI-enhanced overhaul.
Tom Siebel is back as CEO of C3.ai.
The company said Siebel will return as CEO and Stephen Ehikian, who had been CEO after Siebel stepped down due to health issues, will remain as president of the company.
Siebel said, "while my vision is impaired it is improving" and that the health issues he faced in 2025 "are largely resolved."
Under Ehikian, C3.ai restructured to lower the cost base.
Agentic AI is shifting from experimental to production in enterprises, and Google Cloud is touting its integrated AI stack, including next-gen Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), data platform, and agent layer. To go along with those moves, Google Cloud is building its ecosystem and ground game to target industries and use cases.
With the Google Cloud Next 2026 conference in the books, here’s a look at the big themes.
Merck will build an agentic AI platform on Google Cloud across its research and development, manufacturing, commercial operations, and corporate functions in a deal valued up to $1 billion.
Under the multiyear deal, Gemini Enterprise and Google Cloud’s other AI services will be deployed at the multinational pharmaceutical company to enhance its digital backbone. In addition, Google Cloud will provide engineers to work alongside Merck teams to deploy AI.