Larry Dignan

WordPress said AI agents can now draft and publish blog posts, build and update pages, manage comments, organize content and update media metadata.

Mehdi Paryavi, CEO of the International data Center Authority, said the following at Constellation Research's AI Forum in Silicon Valley. IDCA is a global digital economy think tank based in Maryland.

• "We need to find partnerships and alliances. We cannot be creating wars for enemies and then expect our economy to grow. The digital economy requires peace. People put their data where there is peace and peace dividend as a standard, very important. It's very important to create bonds."
• "AI is a good instrument for scientific advancement and growth, but it is not something your kids should be playing with day in, day out. There has to be some moral guardrails. There has to be some national guardrails. There has to be some frameworks of thought put around all of this. Otherwise, we're just headed towards a slippery road and the fact that nobody has wrapped their head around what it really means to be AI driven. I mean, people can't write anymore. People can't analyze anymore."
• "We can really optimize. I can take you to 35,000 federal data centers of this country that are obsolete. They're burning energy like nothing. Nobody knows where they are, who's the owner, who's the stakeholder. Unless you unplug them, nobody would know who's the owner. We have issues here, and nobody planning long term."

Cursor said Composer 2 is generally available and is "frontier-level at coding" and outperforms models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Key points:

• Composer 2 is 10x cheaper than Opus 4.6 and 5x cheaper than GPT-5.4.
• Cursor decided to build its own coding models and built Composer 2 in 9 months.
• Cursor will keep model neutrality and 80% of users leverage at least two model families. Composer is No. 2 most popular model on Cursor and it's likely Composer 2's price and performance will be at least equally as popular.

OpenAI said it will acquire Astral to build out its Codex platform. Astral is a well-known open source Python tool and credited to enabling developers to move faster with modern tooling.

In a post, OpenAI said "by bringing Astral's tooling and engineering expertise to OpenAI, we will accelerate our work on Codex and expand what AI can do across the software development lifecycle."

The upshot here is OpenAI is playing catchup with Anthropic's Claude Code, which has also spawned Claude Cowork.

Uber said it will invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian through 2031 as part of a partnership on autonomous robotaxis. Uber or its fleet partners will acquire 10,000 Rivian R2 robotaxis with the option to buy up to 40,000 more in 2030. Deployments are planned for San Francisco and Miami in 2028 and 25 cities through 2031.

Uber said it will launch L4 robotaxis on Uber with multiple partners.

• Uber launches Uber Autonomous Solutions, makes pitch to be AV commercialization, data layer

Quantinuum said it has named Nitesh Sharan CFO. Sharan had been CFO at SoundHound. The addition of Sharan comes as Quantinuum is prepping an IPO.

Sharan was CFO at SoundHound in 2022 when the company went public. Before SoundHound, Sharan was CFO of Nike's Global Operations and Technology unit as had senior roles at HP.

• Quantinuum Helios seeing strong interest, says Honeywell CEO
• Quantinuum preps IPO
• Quantinuum launches Helios quantum computer, touts fidelity, enterprise customers

Memory is a money-making machine in the AI age. Micron Technology crushed Wall Street estimates for the second quarter and raised its third quarter outlook. The company reported second quarter non-GAAP earnings of $12.20 a share on revenue of $23.86 billion.

Wall Street was looking for second quarter non-GAAP earnings of $8.73 a share on revenue of $19.51 billion.

• Memory price surge may crimp on-premise AI, data center deployments

For the third quarter, Micron projected non-GAAP earnings of $19.15 a share on revenue of $33.5 billion. Wall Street was expecting third quarter non-GAAP earnings of $10.77 a share on revenue of $23.27 billion.

Simply put, shortages are great for Micron's bottom line. Everything you buy including consumer electronics, servers, laptops etc. are going to be a lot more expensive. Thanks AI spending boom.

Here's the deck.

“The step-up in our results and outlook are the outcome of an increase in memory demand driven by AI, structural supply constraints and Micron’s strong execution across the board,” said Micron CEO Satya Kumar in what may be the understatement of 2026.

More:

Qualtrics launched synthetic panels for US consumers driven by an LLM designed for market research. Qualtrics also outlined the following addition to its EX and CX platforms:

• Research Hub and AI Summary and Recommendations: The feature turns an enterprise's existing research into a conversational answer engine.
• CX out-of-the-box connectors for Genesys, NICE, and Salesforce. Qualtrics also added Experience Agents, which act autonomously in post-service surveys to resolve issues.
• For employee experience, Qualtrics added conversational feedback, guided engagement programs and employee retention analytics.

JD Power's 2026 US Telecom Digital Experience Study finds that there's a big gap between customer satisfaction on telecom mobile apps and web sites. Overall customer satisfaction with the telecom digital experience this year is 659 (on a 1,000-point scale) among internet service providers and 654 among wireless carriers. T-Mobile ranked highest for Internet service providers and Mint Mobile was No. 1 on customer satisfaction for wireless carriers.

Here’s a look at the article stack from the Constellation Research Futures Forum:

• Workday CEO Bhusri on two-sided coin of agentic AI
• Boomi CEO on data movement, wrangling AI agents and SaaS
• ServiceNow's Tzitzon on AI's pace, teams and being multi-dimensional
• Cisco's Patel on space data centers, AI infrastructure and hiring young workers
• AI doesn't replace engineering rigor, says Altimetrik CEO

OpenAI launched GPT-5.4 mini and nano, two models that are aimed at AI agents, coding and multi-modal workflows.

DocuSign reported better-than-expected fourth quarter results and upped its outlook for the first quarter and fiscal 2027. The company reported earnings of 44 cents a share on revenue of $836.86 million, up 8% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings of $1.01 a share topped expectations.

Wall Street was expecting DocuSign to report fourth quarter non-GAAP earnings of 95 cents a share on revenue of $828.22 million.

For the first quarter, DocuSign projected first quarter revenue of $822 million to $826 million. For fiscal 2027, DocuSign projected revenue of $3.48 million to $3.5 million. Those results were ahead of expectations.