• As Anthropic suspends access to new models, India debates its AI future• Meta reportedly moves to unwind $2B Manus deal after Beijing’s demand• KPMG pulls report on AI usage due to apparent hallucinations• Amazon CEO reportedly raised Anthropic model concerns before government crackdown• OpenAI faces investigation from state attorneys general• Andrew Yang thinks the next big startup opportunity is lowering the cost of living• Anthropic’s safety warnings may have just backfired — the government has pulled the plug on its most powerful AI• SpaceX IPO: Live updates on everything you need to know• Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it• Chinese cybercrime operation that used AI to scam ‘hundreds of thousands of victims’ sued by Google• Mistral is rumored to be raising €3B at €20B valuation• SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI’s hot IPO summer• It’s hot IPO summer, and the MANGOS are ripe• Cheaper, faster, and culturally aware, Avataar’s video AI is built for India’s scale• Theker just raised $85M to build the factory robot that doesn’t specialize in anything• Our new community investments in Virginia support local jobs and expand energy affordability.• The latest AI news we announced in May 2026• 5 ways Google Search can level up your thrift and vintage shopping• How we used Gemini to build Google I/O 2026• Take our I/O 2026 quiz, vibe coded in Google AI Studio.• 9 demos of Gemini Omni and Gemini 3.5 in action• Check out real-life AI prototypes from the Futures Lab.• Catch up on 12 major I/O 2026 moments• Catch up on the Dialogues stage at Google I/O 2026.• We’re announcing new community investments in Missouri.• 100 things we announced at I/O 2026• A new experiment brings better group meetings to Google Beam• How AI Mode is changing the way people search in the U.S.• New ways to create and get things done in Google Workspace• I/O 2026: Welcome to the agentic Gemini era• A GOP revolt over AI is taking shape - Politico• Derbyshire police officer investigated over AI-generated ‘evidential material’ - The Guardian• A year after Meta tapped Alexandr Wang to build a new AI model, Zuckerberg has to sell it - CNBC• Trump tried to block state AI regulations, but some states are forging ahead - AP News• State Attorneys General Are Investigating OpenAI - The New York Times• How frontier teams are reinventing AI-native development - Amazon Web Services (AWS)• ‘There’s a huge market demand’: University of Utah approves new bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence - The Salt Lake Tribune• Anthropic says it has taken its latest AI models offline to comply with U.S. directive - CBC• US’s Anthropic order exposes EU’s AI dependency - politico.eu• This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Appeared Destined for the $1 Trillion Club. Here's Why It Lost Momentum. - The Globe and Mail• Manning: My real concerns with artificial intelligence - The Island News• Sound Practices for Responsible Adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI): Consultation report - Financial Stability Board• These 4 Artificial Intelligence Stocks Have Room to Run Thanks to Anthropic's New Fable Model - The Motley Fool• Bridging three-dimensional molecular structures and artificial intelligence with a conformation description language - Nature• The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence in Oncology: Impact on Trials, Workflows, and Outcomes - CancerNetwork• New OpenAI Academy courses for the next era of work• How Preply combines AI and human tutors to personalize learning• OpenAI to acquire Ona• Supporting Europe’s work in ensuring a trustworthy AI ecosystem • How an astrophysicist uses Codex to help simulate black holes• BBVA puts AI at the core of banking with OpenAI• Access OpenAI models and Codex through your Oracle cloud commitment• PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the US• From data to decisions: how LSEG is scaling trusted AI• How engineers at Nextdoor use Codex to build without limits• What Codex unlocks for Notion• Industrial policy for the Intelligence Age• Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC• Built to benefit everyone: our plan• Introducing the OpenAI Economic Research Exchange• Save time and grow your business with new Gemini tools• Fluid, natural voice translation with Gemini 3.5 Live Translate• 4 ways soccer fans can catch every moment of the tournament• The latest AI news we announced in May 2026• How we used Gemini to build Google I/O 2026• 9 demos of Gemini Omni and Gemini 3.5 in action• Catch up on 12 major I/O 2026 moments• 100 things we announced at I/O 2026• Making it easier to understand how content was created and edited• I/O 2026• Introducing Gemini Omni• I/O 2026: Welcome to the agentic Gemini era• Gemini 3.5: frontier intelligence with action• Gemini for Science: AI experiments and tools for a new era of discovery• The Gemini app becomes more agentic, delivering proactive, 24/7 help• Google just redesigned the search box for the first time in 25 years — here’s why it matters more than you think.• Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-native cloud infrastructure• Claude Code costs up to $200 a month. Goose does the same thing for free.• Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale AI customer interviews• Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles Microsoft and Google in workplace AI• Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Desktop agent that works in your files — no coding required• Nous Research's NousCoder-14B is an open-source coding model landing right in the Claude Code moment• Best Universities To Study AI in 2026• 10 top women in AI in 2026• Pope Leo XIV Declares AI a Threat to Human Dignity and Workers’ Rights• ChatGPT Is Making People Think They’re Gods and Their Families Are Terrified• AI May Soon Help You Understand What Your Pet Is Trying to Say• Netflix Adds ChatGPT-Powered AI to Stop You From Scrolling Forever• Murder Victim Speaks from the Grave in Courtroom Through AI• China Unveils World’s First AI Hospital: 14 Virtual Doctors Ready to Treat Thousands Daily• Katy Perry Didn’t Attend the Met Gala, But AI Made Her the Star of the Night• Therapists Too Expensive? Why Thousands of Women Are Spilling Their Deepest Secrets to ChatGPT• Calendly vs. Google Calendar: Which should you choose? [2026]• The 4 best AI website builders• Claude 5: What you need to know about Anthropic's AI models and chatbot• The 6 best AI governance tools in 2026• What is generative AI?• What is Claude Mythos? And how to see it in action with Claude Fable 5• Google Sheets pivot table: A step-by-step guide• 5 ways to automate Meta's Conversions API tool with Zapier• How to automate Claude with Zapier• How Gourmet Ads uses Zapier MCP to turn Salesforce and Atlassian into a weekly growth report• How a two-person SEO shop is building an engine to run twelve clients in thirty minutes a month• Which AI models can you automate on Zapier? (Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and more)• The 17 best AI marketing tools in 2026• The best customer experience software in 2026 • The best Docusign alternatives in 2026
Murder Victim Speaks from the Grave in Courtroom Through AI
DailyAI

Murder Victim Speaks from the Grave in Courtroom Through AI

Chris Pelkey was shot and killed in a road rage incident. At his killer’s sentencing, he forgave the man via AI. In a historic first for Arizona, and possibly the U.S., artificial intelligence was used in court to let a murder victim deliver his own victim impact statement. What happened Pelkey, a 37-year-old Army veteran, was gunned down at a red light in 2021. This month, a realistic AI version of him appeared in court to address his killer, Gabriel Horcasitas. “In another life, we probably could’ve been friends,” said AI Pelkey in the video. “I believe in forgiveness, and The post Murder Victim Speaks from the Grave in Courtroom Through AI appeared first on DailyAI.

Mistral is rumored to be raising €3B at €20B valuation
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Mistral is rumored to be raising €3B at €20B valuation

The funding round would value the company at around €20 billion (about $23.15 billion), nearly double its Series C valuation of €11.7 billion.

Supporting Europe’s work in ensuring a trustworthy AI ecosystem
OpenAI News

Supporting Europe’s work in ensuring a trustworthy AI ecosystem

OpenAI supports the EU Code of Practice on AI content transparency, advancing provenance standards and tools to help people understand AI-generated content.

New ways to create and get things done in Google Workspace
AI

New ways to create and get things done in Google Workspace

Announcing new voice capabilities in Gmail, Docs and Keep, a new design tool called Google Pics and updates to AI Inbox.

A new experiment brings better group meetings to Google Beam
AI

A new experiment brings better group meetings to Google Beam

See and hear your colleagues in true-to-life size and sound, making hybrid meetings feel more inclusive and connected.

Derbyshire police officer investigated over AI-generated ‘evidential material’ - The Guardian
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Derbyshire police officer investigated over AI-generated ‘evidential material’ - The Guardian

Derbyshire police officer investigated over AI-generated ‘evidential material’  The Guardian

Andrew Yang thinks the next big startup opportunity is lowering the cost of living
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Andrew Yang thinks the next big startup opportunity is lowering the cost of living

Andrew Yang made a list of everything Americans overpay for — housing, food, wireless — and thinks the next startup gold rush is giving that money back.

We’re announcing new community investments in Missouri.
AI

We’re announcing new community investments in Missouri.

We’re helping build the state’s next-generation workforce and investing in energy programs.

Meta reportedly moves to unwind $2B Manus deal after Beijing’s demand
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Meta reportedly moves to unwind $2B Manus deal after Beijing’s demand

Meta starts dismantling its $2 billion Manus acquisition after Beijing ordered the deal reversed.

Chinese cybercrime operation that used AI to scam ‘hundreds of thousands of victims’ sued by Google
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Chinese cybercrime operation that used AI to scam ‘hundreds of thousands of victims’ sued by Google

The tech giant said a group called "Outsider Enterprise" used AI to scam hundreds of thousands of victims, sending 2.5 million text messages over a span of two weeks.

Introducing Gemini Omni
Gemini

Introducing Gemini Omni

Introducing Gemini Omni, which allows you to create anything from any input and edit naturally using conversational language.

How to automate Claude with Zapier
The Zapier Blog

How to automate Claude with Zapier

Claude has staked its claim in the AI landscape and keeps drawing in new users all the time with its standout writing, knack for coding, and now, a whole new model class: Mythos. There's power in a quick, off-the-cuff prompt to Claude (especially a good one). But you can accomplish a lot more when you use Zapier to connect Claude to the rest of your apps and let automation carry out entire workflows for you. Ready to try it? Then keep scrolling for easy automation ideas with one-click templates

Making it easier to understand how content was created and edited
Gemini

Making it easier to understand how content was created and edited

We're expanding our tools to help you understand how content was created and edited across the web.

Google just redesigned the search box for the first time in 25 years — here’s why it matters more than you think.
AI | VentureBeat

Google just redesigned the search box for the first time in 25 years — here’s why it matters more than you think.

For a quarter century, the Google search box has been one of the most recognizable interfaces in computing: a thin white rectangle, a blinking cursor, a few typed words, and a list of blue links. On Tuesday, Google will formally retire that paradigm. At its annual I/O developer conference, Google announced a sweeping redesign of the search box itself — the literal text field where billions of queries begin every day — transforming it from a simple keyword input into a dynamic, AI-driven conversation starter that can accept text, images, PDFs, videos, and even open Chrome tabs as inputs. The company is also merging its AI Overviews and AI Mode features into a single, seamless search flow, eliminating the friction that previously forced users to choose between a traditional results page and an AI-forward experience. Liz Reid, Google's vice president and head of Search, called it "the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box since its debut over 25 years ago" during a press briefing on Monday. The announcement arrived alongside a blizzard of other news — new Gemini models, a personal AI agent called Spark, an intelligent shopping cart, a reimagined developer platform — but the search box redesign may prove to be the most consequential. It is the clearest signal yet that Google views the future of its flagship product not as a place where users type fragmented keywords, but as an interface where they hold open-ended, multimodal conversations with an AI system backed by the entire web. The new search box expands, accepts files, and coaches you on what to ask The changes show a fundamental shift in how Google expects people to interact with the product that generates the vast majority of Alphabet's revenue. The box itself now dynamically expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries. Where the old interface subtly encouraged brevity — a narrow field suited to two- or three-word keyword strings — the new design invites users to fully articulate complex questions in granular detail. It also now supports multimodal inputs directly. Users can upload images, PDFs, files, and videos, or drag in content from Chrome tabs, right from the main search interface. Previously, some of these capabilities existed in AI Mode, but reaching them required extra steps. Now they sit at the primary entry point. Google is also deploying what it describes as an AI-powered query suggestion system that "goes beyond autocomplete." Rather than simply predicting the next word a user might type based on popular searches, the system helps users formulate complex, nuanced queries — essentially coaching them toward the kind of detailed questions that AI Mode handles best. The new search box is starting to roll out immediately in all countries and languages where AI Mode is available. Google is merging AI overviews and AI mode into one seamless experience Perhaps more significant than the box itself is the architectural change happening behind it. Google is unifying AI Overviews — the AI-generated summary panels that appear atop traditional search results — with AI Mode, the more immersive conversational search experience the company launched at I/O one year ago. Starting Tuesday, this merged experience will be live across mobile and desktop worldwide. A user can type a question, receive an AI Overview alongside traditional results, and then continue directly into a back-and-forth AI Mode conversation to ask follow-up questions — all without navigating to a separate interface. Reid explained the logic during the press briefing: the new AI search box is "an upgrade of our traditional search box, and so the results take you directly to main search rather than AI mode." She noted that while some power users actively sought out AI Mode, "for most users, they don't actually want to have to think about, do they want more of a traditional page or an AI-forward search experience." The goal, she said, was to ensure that "for most users, they don't have to think about where to go, they can just go to the search box they're familiar with, and it feels like they get the best experience afterwards." One billion users and doubling queries reveal how fast search behavior is shifting Google's decision to redesign the foundational interface of its most important product did not happen in a vacuum. The company shared a set of usage statistics during the briefing that reveal just how rapidly user behavior is already changing. AI Mode, which launched in the United States at I/O 2025, has surpassed one billion monthly users in its first year. AI Mode queries have been doubling every quarter since launch. AI Overviews, the lighter-weight AI summaries, now reach more than 2.5 billion monthly users. And overall search query volume hit an all-time high last quarter — a data point the company had previously disclosed on its earnings call. Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, framed these figures as evidence that AI features are additive, not cannibalistic, to search usage. "When people use our AI-powered features in search, they use search more," he said. He added that he loves "how search has become less about individual queries and feels more like an ongoing conversation, giving users deeper insights and connecting you with the vastness of the web." Reid reinforced the point: "It's not just that people are searching more, it's that they're searching differently. They're fully expressing their questions in granular detail, asking those follow-up questions and searching across modalities." Gemini 3.5 Flash gives Google's AI search the speed it needs to work at scale Under the hood, the new search experience runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google's newest AI model, which the company also introduced at I/O. Google upgraded AI Mode's underlying model to 3.5 Flash to deliver what Reid described as "an even more powerful AI search experience." Gemini 3.5 Flash is the workhorse of this year's announcements. Google claims it outperforms its previous frontier model, Gemini 3.1 Pro, on nearly all benchmarks while running four times faster in output tokens per second than comparable frontier models. Pichai described it as being "in a league of its own in the top right quadrant" of the Artificial Analysis index, which plots intelligence against speed — meaning it delivers near-frontier quality at dramatically lower latency. That speed matters enormously for search. A conversational AI search experience that feels sluggish would be dead on arrival for a product that serves billions of queries daily. By coupling the redesigned interface with a model optimized for both quality and throughput, Google is attempting to make AI-powered search feel as instantaneous as the old keyword experience — while being dramatically more capable. Search can now build interactive visuals and custom mini apps on the fly The redesigned search box is also the gateway to a set of new capabilities that push search far beyond text-based answers. Google announced what it calls "generative UI" — the ability for search to dynamically build custom widgets, interactive visualizations, and even mini applications in real time, tailored to a user's specific question. Reid offered a concrete example during the briefing: a user could ask "How do black holes affect space time?" and receive an interactive visual in an AI Overview that brings the concept to life. Follow-up questions would trigger the system to dynamically generate entirely new visuals in real time. This is possible, she explained, because of "a novel real-time code generation system we built in partnership with the Google DeepMind team" that runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash. Generative UI capabilities will roll out to everyone this summer, free of charge. But Google is going further still. For ongoing tasks — planning a wedding, organizing a move, tracking a fitness routine — users will be able to build what the company describes as customizable, stateful experiences within search, powered by its Antigravity development platform. These require no coding expertise. Users simply describe what they want in natural language, and search builds it. Those experiences will be available in coming months, starting with Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the United States. AI agents that monitor the web around the clock are coming to search results The redesign also opens the door to what Google calls "information agents" — AI agents that users can configure directly within search to monitor the web 24/7 for specific conditions and deliver synthesized updates when those conditions are met. A user could, for example, set up an agent to track market movements in a particular sector with specific parameters. The agent would create a monitoring plan, tap into real-time finance data, and proactively notify the user when conditions are met — complete with links and context for further research. Other use cases include apartment hunting, tracking sneaker drops, or monitoring any topic a user cares about. Information agents will launch first for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer. These agents sit within a much larger strategic pivot that Google articulated throughout the briefing: the company is going all-in on AI systems that don't just answer questions but proactively take actions on users' behalf. Beyond search, Google introduced Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal AI agent that runs on dedicated virtual machines in Google Cloud. It unveiled the Universal Cart, an intelligent cross-merchant shopping cart. It announced the Agent Payments Protocol for agents to make secure purchases. And it expanded its Antigravity developer platform into a full ecosystem for building autonomous AI agents. Publishers, advertisers, and SEO professionals face a new reality The redesign raises profound questions for the sprawling ecosystem — publishers, advertisers, SEO professionals — that has been built around the old model of keyword search and blue links. If users increasingly express their needs as full, conversational sentences rather than fragmented keywords, the entire discipline of search engine optimization will need to evolve. Keyword-density strategies become less relevant when the AI is parsing natural language intent rather than matching strings. Content that answers deep, nuanced questions in authoritative ways becomes more valuable; content engineered to rank for two-word keyword fragments becomes less so. For publishers, the stakes are existential. AI Overviews already synthesize information from across the web and present it directly in search results, reducing the need for users to click through to source material. The new seamless AI Mode integration deepens that dynamic: users can now get an AI-generated answer and ask multiple follow-up questions without ever leaving the search page. Google has consistently maintained that its AI features drive more traffic to publishers, but the redesign puts that claim under renewed scrutiny as the search results page becomes more self-contained. For advertisers — who fund the vast majority of Google's revenue — the shift from keywords to conversations changes the calculus of ad targeting. Conversational queries contain richer intent signals, which could make ad targeting more precise and valuable. But they also create new ambiguities: when a user is in the middle of a multi-turn conversation with AI Mode, where does an ad naturally fit? Google did not detail changes to its advertising model during the briefing, but the structural shift in the interface will inevitably reshape how ads are surfaced and measured. The search box was always more than a product — it was a habit for billions of people There is a reason Google chose to redesign the search box rather than simply adding new features behind it. The search box is not just a product element at this point; it is a cultural artifact — one of the few pieces of digital infrastructure used by essentially the entire internet-connected world. Changing it sends an unmistakable message about where the company believes computing is headed. For 25 years, the search box trained billions of people to think in keywords — to compress their curiosity into the shortest possible string of words. The new box invites them to do the opposite: to think out loud, to upload what they're looking at, to ask follow-up questions, to let an AI system handle the compression. Pichai tied the company's broader ambitions to a striking statistic: Google's surfaces now process over 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month, up seven-fold from a year ago. The company expects capital expenditures of approximately $180 to $190 billion in 2026 — roughly six times the $31 billion it spent four years ago — largely to support the infrastructure required for this AI transformation. When asked about the future of traditional search, he was direct. "Search is the most used AI product in the world," he said. The blinking cursor in Google's search box still invites you to type. But after 25 years of teaching the world to speak in keywords, Google is now asking it to speak in sentences — and betting roughly $190 billion that it will.

The best customer experience software in 2026
The Zapier Blog

The best customer experience software in 2026

I canceled a subscription recently because I started questioning my experience. I'd been loyal for months, but the customer-facing AI agents felt like they were regressing, it took forever to speak to a human support agent, and all of the branding started targeting a much younger audience. They probably logged it as general churn; that's fine, I'm sure "old man yells at cloud" isn't something they would put into a report. Every single touchpoint you have with a customer shapes their experience,

The Gemini app becomes more agentic, delivering proactive, 24/7 help
Gemini

The Gemini app becomes more agentic, delivering proactive, 24/7 help

A look at how the Gemini app is becoming more agentic, delivering proactive, 24/7 help.

Access OpenAI models and Codex through your Oracle cloud commitment
OpenAI News

Access OpenAI models and Codex through your Oracle cloud commitment

Access OpenAI models and Codex through Oracle Cloud, using existing commitments to build and deploy AI with enterprise security and governance.

5 ways Google Search can level up your thrift and vintage shopping
AI

5 ways Google Search can level up your thrift and vintage shopping

Uncover second-hand scores with AI tools in Google Search and Shopping.

Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-native cloud infrastructure
AI | VentureBeat

Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-native cloud infrastructure

Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, as surging demand for artificial intelligence applications exposes the limitations of legacy cloud infrastructure. TQ Ventures led the round, with participation from FPV Ventures, Redpoint, and Unusual Ventures. The investment values Railway as one of the most significant infrastructure startups to emerge during the AI boom, capitalizing on developer frustration with the complexity and cost of traditional platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. "As AI models get better at writing code, more and more people are asking the age-old question: where, and how, do I run my applications?" said Jake Cooper, Railway's 28-year-old founder and chief executive, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up." The funding is a dramatic acceleration for a company that has charted an unconventional path through the cloud computing industry. Railway raised just $24 million in total before this round, including a $20 million Series A from Redpoint in 2022. The company now processes more than 10 million deployments monthly and handles over one trillion requests through its edge network — metrics that rival far larger and better-funded competitors. Why three-minute deploy times have become unacceptable in the age of AI coding assistants Railway's pitch rests on a simple observation: the tools developers use to deploy and manage software were designed for a slower era. A standard build-and-deploy cycle using Terraform, the industry-standard infrastructure tool, takes two to three minutes. That delay, once tolerable, has become a critical bottleneck as AI coding assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor can generate working code in seconds. "When godly intelligence is on tap and can solve any problem in three seconds, those amalgamations of systems become bottlenecks," Cooper told VentureBeat. "What was really cool for humans to deploy in 10 seconds or less is now table stakes for agents." The company claims its platform delivers deployments in under one second — fast enough to keep pace with AI-generated code. Customers report a tenfold increase in developer velocity and up to 65 percent cost savings compared to traditional cloud providers. These numbers come directly from enterprise clients, not internal benchmarks. Daniel Lobaton, chief technology officer at G2X, a platform serving 100,000 federal contractors, measured deployment speed improvements of seven times faster and an 87 percent cost reduction after migrating to Railway. His infrastructure bill dropped from $15,000 per month to approximately $1,000. "The work that used to take me a week on our previous infrastructure, I can do in Railway in like a day," Lobaton said. "If I want to spin up a new service and test different architectures, it would take so long on our old setup. In Railway I can launch six services in two minutes." Inside the controversial decision to abandon Google Cloud and build data centers from scratch What distinguishes Railway from competitors like Render and Fly.io is the depth of its vertical integration. In 2024, the company made the unusual decision to abandon Google Cloud entirely and build its own data centers, a move that echoes the famous Alan Kay maxim: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." "We wanted to design hardware in a way where we could build a differentiated experience," Cooper said. "Having full control over the network, compute, and storage layers lets us do really fast build and deploy loops, the kind that allows us to move at 'agentic speed' while staying 100 percent the smoothest ride in town." The approach paid dividends during recent widespread outages that affected major cloud providers — Railway remained online throughout. This soup-to-nuts control enables pricing that undercuts the hyperscalers by roughly 50 percent and newer cloud startups by three to four times. Railway charges by the second for actual compute usage: $0.00000386 per gigabyte-second of memory, $0.00000772 per vCPU-second, and $0.00000006 per gigabyte-second of storage. There are no charges for idle virtual machines — a stark contrast to the traditional cloud model where customers pay for provisioned capacity whether they use it or not. "The conventional wisdom is that the big guys have economies of scale to offer better pricing," Cooper noted. "But when they're charging for VMs that usually sit idle in the cloud, and we've purpose-built everything to fit much more density on these machines, you have a big opportunity." How 30 employees built a platform generating tens of millions in annual revenue Railway has achieved its scale with a team of just 30 employees generating tens of millions in annual revenue — a ratio of revenue per employee that would be exceptional even for established software companies. The company grew revenue 3.5 times last year and continues to expand at 15 percent month-over-month. Cooper emphasized that the fundraise was strategic rather than necessary. "We're default alive; there's no reason for us to raise money," he said. "We raised because we see a massive opportunity to accelerate, not because we needed to survive." The company hired its first salesperson only last year and employs just two solutions engineers. Nearly all of Railway's two million users discovered the platform through word of mouth — developers telling other developers about a tool that actually works. "We basically did the standard engineering thing: if you build it, they will come," Cooper recalled. "And to some degree, they came." From side projects to Fortune 500 deployments: Railway's unlikely corporate expansion Despite its grassroots developer community, Railway has made significant inroads into large organizations. The company claims that 31 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use its platform, though deployments range from company-wide infrastructure to individual team projects. Notable customers include Bilt, the loyalty program company; Intuit's GoCo subsidiary; TripAdvisor's Cruise Critic; and MGM Resorts. Kernel, a Y Combinator-backed startup providing AI infrastructure to over 1,000 companies, runs its entire customer-facing system on Railway for $444 per month. "At my previous company Clever, which sold for $500 million, I had six full-time engineers just managing AWS," said Rafael Garcia, Kernel's chief technology officer. "Now I have six engineers total, and they all focus on product. Railway is exactly the tool I wish I had in 2012." For enterprise customers, Railway offers security certifications including SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and HIPAA readiness, with business associate agreements available upon request. The platform provides single sign-on authentication, comprehensive audit logs, and the option to deploy within a customer's existing cloud environment through a "bring your own cloud" configuration. Enterprise pricing starts at custom levels, with specific add-ons for extended log retention ($200 monthly), HIPAA BAAs ($1,000), enterprise support with SLOs ($2,000), and dedicated virtual machines ($10,000). The startup's bold strategy to take on Amazon, Google, and a new generation of cloud rivals Railway enters a crowded market that includes not only the hyperscale cloud providers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—but also a growing cohort of developer-focused platforms like Vercel, Render, Fly.io, and Heroku. Cooper argues that Railway's competitors fall into two camps, neither of which has fully committed to the new infrastructure model that AI demands. "The hyperscalers have two competing systems, and they haven't gone all-in on the new model because their legacy revenue stream is still printing money," he observed. "They have this mammoth pool of cash coming from people who provision a VM, use maybe 10 percent of it, and still pay for the whole thing. To what end are they actually interested in going all the way in on a new experience if they don't really need to?" Against startup competitors, Railway differentiates by covering the full infrastructure stack. "We're not just containers; we've got VM primitives, stateful storage, virtual private networking, automated load balancing," Cooper said. "And we wrap all of this in an absurdly easy-to-use UI, with agentic primitives so agents can move 1,000 times faster." The platform supports databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis; provides up to 256 terabytes of persistent storage with over 100,000 input/output operations per second; and enables deployment to four global regions spanning the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Enterprise customers can scale to 112 vCPUs and 2 terabytes of RAM per service. Why investors are betting that AI will create a thousand times more software than exists today Railway's fundraise reflects broader investor enthusiasm for companies positioned to benefit from the AI coding revolution. As tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude become standard fixtures in developer workflows, the volume of code being written — and the infrastructure needed to run it — is expanding dramatically. "The amount of software that's going to come online over the next five years is unfathomable compared to what existed before — we're talking a thousand times more software," Cooper predicted. "All of that has to run somewhere." The company has already integrated directly with AI systems, building what Cooper calls "loops where Claude can hook in, call deployments, and analyze infrastructure automatically." Railway released a Model Context Protocol server in August 2025 that allows AI coding agents to deploy applications and manage infrastructure directly from code editors. "The notion of a developer is melting before our eyes," Cooper said. "You don't have to be an engineer to engineer things anymore — you just need critical thinking and the ability to analyze things in a systems capacity." What Railway plans to do with $100 million and zero marketing experience Railway plans to use the new capital to expand its global data center footprint, grow its team beyond 30 employees, and build what Cooper described as a proper go-to-market operation for the first time in the company's five-year history. "One of my mentors said you raise money when you can change the trajectory of the business," Cooper explained. "We've built all the required substrate to scale indefinitely; what's been holding us back is simply talking about it. 2026 is the year we play on the world stage." The company's investor roster reads like a who's who of developer infrastructure. Angel investors include Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub; Guillermo Rauch, chief executive of Vercel; Spencer Kimball, chief executive of Cockroach Labs; Olivier Pomel, chief executive of Datadog; and Jori Lallo, co-founder of Linear. The timing of Railway's expansion coincides with what many in Silicon Valley view as a fundamental shift in how software gets made. Coding assistants are no longer experimental curiosities — they have become essential tools that millions of developers rely on daily. Each line of AI-generated code needs somewhere to run, and the incumbents, by Cooper's telling, are too wedded to their existing business models to fully capitalize on the moment. Whether Railway can translate developer enthusiasm into sustained enterprise adoption remains an open question. The cloud infrastructure market is littered with promising startups that failed to break the grip of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. But Cooper, who previously worked as a software engineer at Wolfram Alpha, Bloomberg, and Uber before founding Railway in 2020, seems unfazed by the scale of his ambition. "In five years, Railway [will be] the place where software gets created and evolved, period," he said. "Deploy instantly, scale infinitely, with zero friction. That's the prize worth playing for, and there's no bigger one on offer." For a company that built a $100 million business by doing the opposite of what conventional startup wisdom dictates — no marketing, no sales team, no venture hype—the real test begins now. Railway spent five years proving that developers would find a better mousetrap on their own. The next five will determine whether the rest of the world is ready to get on board.

Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it

A new report suggests the unit, which employs 6,500 people, is on the verge of revolt.

Our new community investments in Virginia support local jobs and expand energy affordability.
AI

Our new community investments in Virginia support local jobs and expand energy affordability.

We’re helping build the state’s next-generation workforce and investing in energy programs.

Gemini 3.5: frontier intelligence with action
Gemini

Gemini 3.5: frontier intelligence with action

At Google I/O we released Gemini 3.5, our latest series of models combining frontier intelligence with action.

As Anthropic suspends access to new models, India debates its AI future
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

As Anthropic suspends access to new models, India debates its AI future

Tech leaders debate whether the Anthropic episode is a wake-up call for India’s AI ambitions.

Gemini for Science: AI experiments and tools for a new era of discovery
Gemini

Gemini for Science: AI experiments and tools for a new era of discovery

Gemini for Science is a new collection of science tools and experiments to expand the scale and precision of scientific exploration.

This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Appeared Destined for the $1 Trillion Club. Here's Why It Lost Momentum. - The Globe and Mail
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Appeared Destined for the $1 Trillion Club. Here's Why It Lost Momentum. - The Globe and Mail

This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Appeared Destined for the $1 Trillion Club. Here's Why It Lost Momentum.  The Globe and Mail

Trump tried to block state AI regulations, but some states are forging ahead - AP News
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Trump tried to block state AI regulations, but some states are forging ahead - AP News

Trump tried to block state AI regulations, but some states are forging ahead  AP News

Katy Perry Didn’t Attend the Met Gala, But AI Made Her the Star of the Night
DailyAI

Katy Perry Didn’t Attend the Met Gala, But AI Made Her the Star of the Night

Another year, another viral deepfake of Katy Perry at the Met Gala and once again, she wasn’t even there. Photos showing the pop star in a sleek black designer gown circulated widely on social media during Monday night’s event, matching the “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” theme. But the images were AI-generated. Perry quickly clarified she was not at the Met; she was on tour. Perry’s reaction “Couldn’t make it to the MET, I’m on The Lifetimes Tour (see you in Houston tomorrow IRL),” she posted to Instagram alongside the fake images. She added a jab at AI confusion: “P.s. this The post Katy Perry Didn’t Attend the Met Gala, But AI Made Her the Star of the Night appeared first on DailyAI.

A GOP revolt over AI is taking shape - Politico
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

A GOP revolt over AI is taking shape - Politico

A GOP revolt over AI is taking shape  Politico

4 ways soccer fans can catch every moment of the tournament
Gemini

4 ways soccer fans can catch every moment of the tournament

Google tools — like Maps, Gemini and AI Mode in Search — can help guide you from the first whistle to the final goal.

Cheaper, faster, and culturally aware, Avataar’s video AI is built for India’s scale
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Cheaper, faster, and culturally aware, Avataar’s video AI is built for India’s scale

Avataar AI's distilled video model is priced at $0.005 for every second of generation.

OpenAI to acquire Ona
OpenAI News

OpenAI to acquire Ona

OpenAI plans to acquire Ona to expand Codex with secure, persistent cloud environments, enabling long-running AI agents across enterprise workflows.

Industrial policy for the Intelligence Age
OpenAI News

Industrial policy for the Intelligence Age

Explore our ambitious, people-first industrial policy ideas for the AI era—focused on expanding opportunity, sharing prosperity, and building resilient institutions as advanced intelligence evolves.

‘There’s a huge market demand’: University of Utah approves new bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence - The Salt Lake Tribune
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

‘There’s a huge market demand’: University of Utah approves new bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence - The Salt Lake Tribune

‘There’s a huge market demand’: University of Utah approves new bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence  The Salt Lake Tribune

Theker just raised $85M to build the factory robot that doesn’t specialize in anything
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Theker just raised $85M to build the factory robot that doesn’t specialize in anything

Unlike humanoid robots designed around a fixed form — think Boston Dynamics — Theker's machines are built to be reconfigured.

Best Universities To Study AI in 2026
DailyAI

Best Universities To Study AI in 2026

Artificial intelligence has made enormous strides in the past few years – with the introduction of a wide range of AI tools changing the landscape of how we assess data and operate within online spaces forever.  This page ranks the 50 best universities to study AI around the world, based on scope, prestige, and the level of AI-related research each institution has released. Career prospects in AI There is a huge demand for individuals with a high degree of skills in artificial intelligence and machine learning, making AI a potential lucrative career prospect with countless opportunities as AI continues to The post Best Universities To Study AI in 2026 appeared first on DailyAI.

What is Claude Mythos? And how to see it in action with Claude Fable 5
The Zapier Blog

What is Claude Mythos? And how to see it in action with Claude Fable 5

On April 7, 2026, Claude Mythos Preview was officially announced, but it was apparently too dangerous to release. According to Anthropic, Claude Mythos represented a unique cybersecurity threat (they claimed that "the fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe.") Instead of releasing Mythos to the general public, they spun up Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative that also involved some big-name companies. The idea was that they'd be able to deploy Mythos

PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the US
OpenAI News

PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the US

A new report from OpenAI details PRC-linked influence operations using AI to target U.S. tech debates, data center narratives, tariffs, and false claims about ChatGPT.

Netflix Adds ChatGPT-Powered AI to Stop You From Scrolling Forever
DailyAI

Netflix Adds ChatGPT-Powered AI to Stop You From Scrolling Forever

In a bold move to tackle one of streaming’s biggest frustrations, endless scrolling, Netflix just unveiled a major redesign of its TV and mobile apps featuring a ChatGPT-powered AI chatbot and TikTok-style video reels. You’ll soon be able to ask Netflix in plain language what you’re in the mood for “funny and fast-paced” or “dark thrillers with strong female leads” and get instant, tailored recommendations. Netflix is partnering with OpenAI to power this feature, part of a broader overhaul aimed at making content discovery faster, more intuitive, and (finally) less painful. What’s changing Conversational AI Search: Powered by OpenAI, this The post Netflix Adds ChatGPT-Powered AI to Stop You From Scrolling Forever appeared first on DailyAI.

Catch up on 12 major I/O 2026 moments
AI

Catch up on 12 major I/O 2026 moments

Here are 12 of the biggest Google I/O 2026 keynote moments, including news about Gemini Omni, Gemini 3.5 Flash and more.

How a two-person SEO shop is building an engine to run twelve clients in thirty minutes a month
The Zapier Blog

How a two-person SEO shop is building an engine to run twelve clients in thirty minutes a month

Adrian Martinez runs a digital marketing agency in Toronto focused on Website Design, SEO, and answer engine optimization (AEO). He and his wife deliver for about twelve clients today. The constraint is time. Each account takes 10 to fifteen hours a month in hands-on work: research, drafts, technical SEO, and reporting. That math caps growth before it caps ambition. Adrian's bet isn't to hire a dozen account managers first. It is to build a delivery engine that maintains high quality while the t

A year after Meta tapped Alexandr Wang to build a new AI model, Zuckerberg has to sell it - CNBC
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

A year after Meta tapped Alexandr Wang to build a new AI model, Zuckerberg has to sell it - CNBC

A year after Meta tapped Alexandr Wang to build a new AI model, Zuckerberg has to sell it  CNBC

How AI Mode is changing the way people search in the U.S.
AI

How AI Mode is changing the way people search in the U.S.

One year after launch, see how AI Mode’s users are shifting from keywords to natural language queries.

New OpenAI Academy courses for the next era of work
OpenAI News

New OpenAI Academy courses for the next era of work

OpenAI introduces three Academy courses that help people build practical AI skills, create repeatable workflows, and apply agents in everyday work.

These 4 Artificial Intelligence Stocks Have Room to Run Thanks to Anthropic's New Fable Model - The Motley Fool
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

These 4 Artificial Intelligence Stocks Have Room to Run Thanks to Anthropic's New Fable Model - The Motley Fool

These 4 Artificial Intelligence Stocks Have Room to Run Thanks to Anthropic's New Fable Model  The Motley Fool

5 ways to automate Meta's Conversions API tool with Zapier
The Zapier Blog

5 ways to automate Meta's Conversions API tool with Zapier

You search for trail running shoes once, and suddenly they're everywhere—your feed, your apps, even your email. Spooky? Maybe. But for marketers, that's just smart data at work. But the real magic happens when you close the loop between customer actions and your ad strategy. Every purchase, sign-up, or webinar registration is a signal, and feeding those signals back into Meta helps you double down on what's working and cut what isn't. The catch? Doing this manually across tools is a nightmare. T

Google Sheets pivot table: A step-by-step guide
The Zapier Blog

Google Sheets pivot table: A step-by-step guide

Spreadsheets offer powerful analysis capabilities, but sometimes it feels like they're missing that extra layer of insight. When there's a massive amount of data, it's tough to summarize or draw conclusions from a basic spreadsheet view. That's where pivot tables come in. Most Excel power users use pivot tables as their bread and butter. But you can also use pivot tables in Google Sheets. Here, I'll walk you through how to create and use pivot tables in Google Sheets. Table of contents: What is

Catch up on the Dialogues stage at Google I/O 2026.
AI

Catch up on the Dialogues stage at Google I/O 2026.

A recap of the 2026 I/O Dialogues, where leaders discuss the future of AI, quantum computing, robotics and creativity.

Anthropic’s safety warnings may have just backfired — the government has pulled the plug on its most powerful AI
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Anthropic’s safety warnings may have just backfired — the government has pulled the plug on its most powerful AI

Anthropic isn't hiding its frustration. "We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people," the company wrote in a blog post.

Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles Microsoft and Google in workplace AI
AI | VentureBeat

Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles Microsoft and Google in workplace AI

Salesforce on Tuesday launched an entirely rebuilt version of Slackbot, the company's workplace assistant, transforming it from a simple notification tool into what executives describe as a fully powered AI agent capable of searching enterprise data, drafting documents, and taking action on behalf of employees. The new Slackbot, now generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, is Salesforce's most aggressive move yet to position Slack at the center of the emerging "agentic AI" movement — where software agents work alongside humans to complete complex tasks. The launch comes as Salesforce attempts to convince investors that artificial intelligence will bolster its products rather than render them obsolete. "Slackbot isn't just another copilot or AI assistant," said Parker Harris, Salesforce co-founder and Slack's chief technology officer, in an exclusive interview with Salesforce. "It's the front door to the agentic enterprise, powered by Salesforce." From tricycle to Porsche: Salesforce rebuilt Slackbot from the ground up Harris was blunt about what distinguishes the new Slackbot from its predecessor: "The old Slackbot was, you know, a little tricycle, and the new Slackbot is like, you know, a Porsche." The original Slackbot, which has existed since Slack's early days, performed basic algorithmic tasks — reminding users to add colleagues to documents, suggesting channel archives, and delivering simple notifications. The new version runs on an entirely different architecture built around a large language model and sophisticated search capabilities that can access Salesforce records, Google Drive files, calendar data, and years of Slack conversations. "It's two different things," Harris explained. "The old Slackbot was algorithmic and fairly simple. The new Slackbot is brand new — it's based around an LLM and a very robust search engine, and connections to third-party search engines, third-party enterprise data." Salesforce chose to retain the Slackbot brand despite the fundamental technical overhaul. "People know what Slackbot is, and so we wanted to carry that forward," Harris said. Why Anthropic's Claude powers the new Slackbot — and which AI models could come next The new Slackbot runs on Claude, Anthropic's large language model, a choice driven partly by compliance requirements. Slack's commercial service operates under FedRAMP Moderate certification to serve U.S. federal government customers, and Harris said Anthropic was "the only provider that could give us a compliant LLM" when Slack began building the new system. But that exclusivity won't last. "We are, this year, going to support additional providers," Harris said. "We have a great relationship with Google. Gemini is incredible — performance is great, cost is great. So we're going to use Gemini for some things." He added that OpenAI remains a possibility as well. Harris echoed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's view that large language models are becoming commoditized: "You've heard Marc talk about LLMs are commodities, that they're democratized. I call them CPUs." On the sensitive question of training data, Harris was unequivocal: Salesforce does not train any models on customer data. "Models don't have any sort of security," he explained. "If we trained it on some confidential conversation that you and I have, I don't want Carolyn to know — if I train it into the LLM, there is no way for me to say you get to see the answer, but Carolyn doesn't." Inside Salesforce's internal experiment: 80,000 employees tested Slackbot with striking results Salesforce has been testing the new Slackbot internally for months, rolling it out to all 80,000 employees. According to Ryan Gavin, Slack's chief marketing officer, the results have been striking: "It's the fastest adopted product in Salesforce history." Internal data shows that two-thirds of Salesforce employees have tried the new Slackbot, with 80% of those users continuing to use it regularly. Internal satisfaction rates reached 96% — the highest for any AI feature Slack has shipped. Employees report saving between two and 20 hours per week. The adoption happened largely organically. "I think it was about five days, and a Canvas was developed by our employees called 'The Most Stealable Slackbot Prompts,'" Gavin said. "People just started adding to it organically. I think it's up to 250-plus prompts that are in this Canvas right now." Kate Crotty, a principal UX researcher at Salesforce, found that 73% of internal adoption was driven by social sharing rather than top-down mandates. "Everybody is there to help each other learn and communicate hacks," she said. How Slackbot transforms scattered enterprise data into executive-ready insights During a product demonstration, Amy Bauer, Slack's product experience designer, showed how Slackbot can synthesize information across multiple sources. In one example, she asked Slackbot to analyze customer feedback from a pilot program, upload an image of a usage dashboard, and have Slackbot correlate the qualitative and quantitative data. "This is where Slackbot really earns its keep for me," Bauer explained. "What it's doing is not just simply reading the image — it's actually looking at the image and comparing it to the insight it just generated for me." Slackbot can then query Salesforce to find enterprise accounts with open deals that might be good candidates for early access, creating what Bauer called "a really great justification and plan to move forward." Finally, it can synthesize all that information into a Canvas — Slack's collaborative document format — and find calendar availability among stakeholders to schedule a review meeting. "Up until this point, we have been working in a one-to-one capacity with Slackbot," Bauer said. "But one of the benefits that I can do now is take this insight and have it generate this into a Canvas, a shared workspace where I can iterate on it, refine it with Slackbot, or share it out with my team." Rob Seaman, Slack's chief product officer, said the Canvas creation demonstrates where the product is heading: "This is making a tool call internally to Slack Canvas to actually write, effectively, a shared document. But it signals where we're going with Slackbot — we're eventually going to be adding in additional third-party tool calls." MrBeast's company became a Slackbot guinea pig—and employees say they're saving 90 minutes a day Among Salesforce's pilot customers is Beast Industries, the parent company of YouTube star MrBeast. Luis Madrigal, the company's chief information officer, joined the launch announcement to describe his experience. "As somebody who has rolled out enterprise technologies for over two decades now, this was practically one of the easiest," Madrigal said. "The plumbing is there. Slack as an implementation, Enterprise Tools — being able to turn on the Slackbot and the Slack AI functionality was as simple as having my team go in, review, do a quick security review." Madrigal said his security team signed off "rather quickly" — unusual for enterprise AI deployments — because Slackbot accesses only the information each individual user already has permission to view. "Given all the guardrails you guys have put into place for Slackbot to be unique and customized to only the information that each individual user has, only the conversations and the Slack rooms and Slack channels that they're part of—that made my security team sign off rather quickly." One Beast Industries employee, Sinan, the head of Beast Games marketing, reported saving "at bare minimum, 90 minutes a day." Another employee, Spencer, a creative supervisor, described it as "an assistant who's paying attention when I'm not." Other pilot customers include Slalom, reMarkable, Xero, Mercari, and Engine. Mollie Bodensteiner, SVP of Operations at Engine, called Slackbot "an absolute 'chaos tamer' for our team," estimating it saves her about 30 minutes daily "just by eliminating context switching." Slackbot vs. Microsoft Copilot vs. Google Gemini: The fight for enterprise AI dominance The launch puts Salesforce in direct competition with Microsoft's Copilot, which is integrated into Teams and the broader Microsoft 365 suite, as well as Google's Gemini integrations across Workspace. When asked what distinguishes Slackbot from these alternatives, Seaman pointed to context and convenience. "The thing that makes it most powerful for our customers and users is the proximity — it's just right there in your Slack," Seaman said. "There's a tremendous convenience affordance that's naturally built into it." The deeper advantage, executives argue, is that Slackbot already understands users' work without requiring setup or training. "Most AI tools sound the same no matter who is using them," the company's announcement stated. "They lack context, miss nuance, and force you to jump between tools to get anything done." Harris put it more directly: "If you've ever had that magic experience with AI — I think ChatGPT is a great example, it's a great experience from a consumer perspective — Slackbot is really what we're doing in the enterprise, to be this employee super agent that is loved, just like people love using Slack." Amy Bauer emphasized the frictionless nature of the experience. "Slackbot is inherently grounded in the context, in the data that you have in Slack," she said. "So as you continue working in Slack, Slackbot gets better because it's grounded in the work that you're doing there. There is no setup. There is no configuration for those end users." Salesforce's ambitious plan to make Slackbot the one 'super agent' that controls all the others Salesforce positions Slackbot as what Harris calls a "super agent" — a central hub that can eventually coordinate with other AI agents across an organization. "Every corporation is going to have an employee super agent," Harris said. "Slackbot is essentially taking the magic of what Slack does. We think that Slackbot, and we're really excited about it, is going to be that." The vision extends to third-party agents already launching in Slack. Last month, Anthropic released a preview of Claude Code for Slack, allowing developers to interact with Claude's coding capabilities directly in chat threads. OpenAI, Google, Vercel, and others have also built agents for the platform. "Most of the net-new apps that are being deployed to Slack are agents," Seaman noted during the press conference. "This is proof of the promise of humans and agents coexisting and working together in Slack to solve problems." Harris described a future where Slackbot becomes an MCP (Model Context Protocol) client, able to leverage tools from across the software ecosystem — similar to how the developer tool Cursor works. "Slack can be an MCP client, and Slackbot will be the hub of that, leveraging all these tools out in the world, some of which will be these amazing agents," he said. But Harris also cautioned against over-promising on multi-agent coordination. "I still think we're in the single agent world," he said. "FY26 is going to be the year where we started to see more coordination. But we're going to do it with customer success in mind, and not demonstrate and talk about, like, 'I've got 1,000 agents working together,' because I think that's unrealistic." Slackbot costs nothing extra, but Salesforce's data access fees could squeeze some customers Slackbot is included at no additional cost for customers on Business+ and Enterprise+ plans. "There's no additional fees customers have to do," Gavin confirmed. "If they're on one of those plans, they're going to get Slackbot." However, some enterprise customers may face other cost pressures related to Salesforce's broader data strategy. CIOs may see price increases for third-party applications that work with Salesforce data, as effects of higher charges for API access ripple through the software supply chain. Fivetran CEO George Fraser has warned that Salesforce's shift in pricing policy for API access could have tangible consequences for enterprises relying on Salesforce as a system of record. "They might not be able to use Fivetran to replicate their data to Snowflake and instead have to use Salesforce Data Cloud. Or they might find that they are not able to interact with their data via ChatGPT, and instead have to use Agentforce," Fraser said in a recent CIO report. Salesforce has framed the pricing change as standard industry practice. What Slackbot can do today, what's coming in weeks, and what's still on the roadmap The new Slackbot begins rolling out today and will reach all eligible customers by the end of February. Mobile availability will complete by March 3, Bauer confirmed during her interview with VentureBeat. Some capabilities remain works in progress. Calendar reading and availability checking are available at launch, but the ability to actually book meetings is "coming a few weeks after," according to Seaman. Image generation is not currently supported, though Bauer said it's "something that we are looking at in the future." When asked about integration with competing CRM systems like HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce representatives declined to provide specifics during the interview, though they acknowledged the question touched on key competitive differentiators. Salesforce is betting the future of work looks like a chat window—and it's not alone The Slackbot launch is Salesforce's bet that the future of enterprise work is conversational — that employees will increasingly prefer to interact with AI through natural language rather than navigating traditional software interfaces. Harris described Slack's product philosophy using principles like "don't make me think" and "be a great host." The goal, he said, is for Slackbot to surface information proactively rather than requiring users to hunt for it. "One of the revelations for me is LLMs applied to unstructured information are incredible," Harris said. "And the amount of value you have if you're a Slack user, if your corporation uses Slack — the amount of value in Slack is unbelievable. Because you're talking about work, you're sharing documents, you're making decisions, but you can't as a human go through that and really get the same value that an LLM can do." Looking ahead, Harris expects the interfaces themselves to evolve beyond pure conversation. "We're kind of saturating what we can do with purely conversational UIs," he said. "I think we'll start to see agents building an interface that best suits your intent, as opposed to trying to surface something within a conversational interface that matches your intent." Microsoft, Google, and a growing roster of AI startups are placing similar bets — that the winning enterprise AI will be the one embedded in the tools workers already use, not another application to learn. The race to become that invisible layer of workplace intelligence is now fully underway. For Salesforce, the stakes extend beyond a single product launch. After a bruising year on Wall Street and persistent questions about whether AI threatens its core business, the company is wagering that Slackbot can prove the opposite — that the tens of millions of people already chatting in Slack every day is not a vulnerability, but an unassailable advantage. Haley Gault, the Salesforce account executive in Pittsburgh who stumbled upon the new Slackbot on a snowy morning, captured the shift in a single sentence: "I honestly can't imagine working for another company not having access to these types of tools. This is just how I work now." That's precisely what Salesforce is counting on.

State Attorneys General Are Investigating OpenAI - The New York Times
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

State Attorneys General Are Investigating OpenAI - The New York Times

State Attorneys General Are Investigating OpenAI  The New York Times