Larry Dignan

Block CEO Jack Dorsey outlined how AI is changing his company, which owns Square. Dorsey's shareholder letter landed after the company delivered a strong second quarter outlook. First quarter non-GAAP earnings were 85 cents a share, well ahead of Wall Street estimates of 68 cents a share.

Here's what Dorsey said:

• "In early 2024, we began developing goose, which was the first agentic harness to enable foundation models to execute work across an enterprise. That work is now changing how Block runs. Velocity continues to increase. As of mid-April, production code changes per engineer are up over 2.5x compared to January."
• "In the two months since our organizational change, incident rates have continued to improve compared to the beginning of the first quarter."
• "Most AI products today are assistants or advisors: a human asks, AI answers. We think the next step is AI that is proactive. A protector watches for patterns, identifies risks or opportunities, and prompts customers or sellers to act before small issues become bigger ones."

Here’s what Dorsey said recently about how AI is changing org charts.

HubSpot handily topped estimates for the first quarter and upped its second quarter outlook. Shares still fell 13% after hours. That's life in the SaaS business.

The company reported first quarter net income of $32.6 million, or 62 cents a share, on revenue of $881 million, up 23% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $2.72 a share, which was 26 cents a share ahead of Wall Street estimates.

For the second quarter, HubSpot projected revenue of $897 million to $898 million, up 18% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings are expected to be $3 a share and $3.02 a share. HubSpot said 2026 revenue will be between $3.7 billion and $3.708 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $13.04 to $13.12 a share.

• HubSpot adds Answer Engine Optimization, contextual updates to platform
• HubSpot to price Breeze Customer Agent, Breeze Prospecting Agent on outcomes

Ok, tech leaders it's time for an intervention. Enough with the ___maxxing talk during earnings calls and presentations.

My ears perked up last week when Microsoft reporting earnings and CEO Satya Nadella said:

"First, we are building the world's leading cloud and AI infrastructure for agentic computing era. Second, we are building high-value agentic systems across core domains such as productivity, coding and security. These 2 layers reinforce each other, and we are focused on driving competitive value and differentiation for customers across each so that they can eval-max their outcomes."

No idea what eval-max means specifically, but it was just a start.

ServiceNow's investor day at Knowledge 2026 featured the following slide:

Bhavin Shah, Senior VP and GM of Moveworks & AI at ServiceNow, went maxxing even though it was couched as something the kids say.

"Now we've been busy. My kids call it integration maxing at home. But we've rolled out Moveworks to every ServiceNow employee. We've launched the Front Door to called ServiceNow Employee Works, and we've integrated that Front Door into our new commercial model in just four months. So lots of activity, lots of work going on there. And we're moving fast because there's actually a gap in the market."

Let's be clear. We can't let this maxxing thing spin out of control. No grown ass tech company should be sounding like Clavicular.

A Deutsche Bank Research Institute report opines on the launch of Anthropic's AI agents for financial services and concludes that the technology is well ahead of adoption. Barriers to adoption include integration with legacy systems, governance, people and whether customers and clients will hand over their financial affairs to AI. Here's the replay of Anthropic's launch event that featured Goldman, JPMorgan Chase and Wall Street heavy hitters (who are all lining up to underwrite Anthropic's IPO).

Nvidia and Corning announced a partnership where Corning will increase its US optical connectivity manufacturing capacity by 10x and expand fiber production by more than 50% to meet AI factory demand. Corning will also build three new manufacturing facilities. Nvidia will invest $500 million in Corning.

Corning said separately the it will build a new $10 billion revenue stream by 2030 focused on photonics for AI data centers.

Uber reported a mixed first quarter, but gross bookings were ahead of expectations. Uber One passed the 50 million member mark.

The company reported first quarter net income of $263 million, or 13 cents a share, on revenue of $13.2 billion. The net income figure was boosted by equity investments. Non-GAAP earnings were 72 cents a share. Revenue missed estimates and earnings were ahead.

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, said the company was investing with conviction on AI and AVs. The second quarter outlook was solid with gross bookings expected to be up 18% to 22%.

I'll follow up later since the most interesting things about Uber aren't the actual ride business. Uber wants to be a super app and is expanding into multiple new markets. Here's what gives me pause when it comes to Uber. The ride experience isn't great, the prices are high and Lyft is more economical in most of my comparisons.

Can Uber be an everything app when its core business has a crappy experience?

• Uber launches Uber Autonomous Solutions, makes pitch to be AV commercialization, data layer
• A look at the intersection of AI and customer experience
• Uber AI Solutions expands, targets enterprises

Anthropic published a financial services deployment guide for Claude that includes use cases, scenarios and playbooks. The doc is worth a read.

The deployment guide was a fast follow to the release of more connectors and agents for financial services Claude use cases.

Adobe launched a productivity agent designed for Acrobat and included in Adobe Express. The agent orchestrates tools and models to generate images, text and content including presentations, podcasts and social posts. The productivity agent also provides natural language PDF editing in Acrobat and powers a workspace called PDF Spaces.

OpenAI has launched GPT-5.5 Instant and said ChatGPT's default model delivers tighter answers that are more accurate. "GPT‑5.5 Instant produced 52.5% fewer hallucinated claims than GPT‑5.3 Instant on high-stakes prompts covering areas like medicine, law, and finance," said OpenAI.

Teradata reported first quarter earnings of $335 million on revenue of $444 million, up 6% from a year ago, courtesy of a $480 million payment from SAP to settle a long-running lawsuit. After accounting for legal fees and litigation expenses, Teradata netted $359 million.

On a per-share basis, Teradata's first quarter earnings were $3.47 a share with non-GAAP earnings, which exclude the SAP payment, of 88 cents a share. CEO Steve McMillan said the company is on track and its context, governance and industry knowledge for enterprises is critical to deploy agentic AI.

As for the outlook, Teradata projected second quarter revenue growth of negative 2% to 4%. Non-GAAP earnings will be 53 cents a share to 57 cents a share.

PayPal reported its first quarter results, but most of the attention on the earnings call will revolve around new CEO Enrique Lores’ plans. In a nutshell, PayPal is looking to leverage AI to save money and use the savings to fund transformation. PayPal also reorganized to separate Venmo into its own unit. Two key slides.

IBM is kicking off its Think 2026 conference in Boston. I’ll be following up later and our analysts are there. In the meantime, here’s what IBM announced. The announcements revolve around creating an AI operating model.

• Watsonx Orchestrate.
• IBM Data Gate for Confluent.
• IBM Sovereign Core.
• IBM zSecure Secret Manager.
• Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM Model a 12,635-Atom Protein.