• Microsoft launches its first cybersecurity model, plus a new agentic cybersecurity system• OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach has reignited the debate over alignment and control• Threads users can now chat with Meta AI in their DMs• Google’s AI search is rapidly becoming the default, new data shows• Power up your AI infrastructure! A first look at the Smart Systems Stage agenda at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 • This $9 key physically locks your most addictive apps• Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence partners with Nvidia to scale its AI research• Enigma raises $71M to make controlling a robot as easy as adjusting the volume• Are brain waves the next unlock for physical AI?• Making sense of the panic over Chinese AI• Hugging Face CEO calls for ‘radical transparency’ after ‘unprecedented’ OpenAI hack• Monday.com is the latest tech company to blame AI for layoffs — here are 20 others• Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech• One fallen power line exposed a growing AI data center problem — here’s how to fix it• I tried out OpenAI’s new AI keypad — which will be fun for some coders and slightly mystifying to everyone else• 3 Google updates from Galaxy Unpacked 2026• Connect more of your apps to Search• Create, edit and star in videos with two Google Vids updates• Celebrating 25 years of visual search innovation• Expanding Managed Agents in Gemini API: background tasks, remote MCP and more• The latest AI news we announced in June 2026• New York City educators and industry leaders gathered at Google’s offices to shape the future of AI in classrooms.• Unlocking Britain’s next era of productivity: Building a nation of AI trailblazers• Ask an AI expert: What exactly is the full stack?• Our latest Google Finance upgrades, including a new app• New research shows how AMIE, our medical AI, could help manage health conditions.• We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support.• 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• AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain - Futurism• Money Won't Matter In 2036: Elon Musk - NDTV• SpaceX at $100 could mean investors see zero value in its AI - Los Angeles Times• Dell Technologies vs. Marvell Technology: Which Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Stock Is a Better Buy in 2026? - Yahoo Finance• Sam Altman to meet with Trump administration, senators this week. Here's what he plans to say - CNBC• Exclusive | Nvidia Bets on Ilya Sutskever’s New AI Lab to Expand Compute Reach - WSJ• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims AI singularity has arrived - ABC News - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos• Boss of startup hacked by rogue OpenAI agent urges ‘radical transparency’ in investigation - The Guardian• SpaceX stock falls for third day as $600 billion in market value vanishes - equiti.com• Robert Morris University infuses artificial intelligence into MBA curriculum - TribLIVE.com• Cornerstone Launches President's Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board to Lead the Future of Christian Higher Education - Cornerstone University• High school students explore artificial intelligence at Wright State summer camp - Wright State Newsroom• UNESCO strengthens digital and artificial intelligence competencies of Zanzibar correctional officers - UNESCO• Artificial Intelligence in Nuclear Medicine (2015-2025): Clinical Applications, Regulatory Governance, and Pharmacotherapeutic Implications - Cureus• Using Artificial Intelligence To Help Students Succeed - WWLTV.com• How AI is expanding what people do at work• Launching Health in ChatGPT • Building AI infrastructure with the Effingham County community• How news organizations are using AI to advance their vital missions• Advancing the next era of national science• Introducing OpenAI Presence• NTT DATA Group cuts incident analysis to 30 minutes with Codex• Introducing the ChatGPT for small business program• OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation• David Vélez and Robin Vince join the boards of the OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group PBC• Safety and alignment in an era of long-horizon models• A scorecard for the AI age• Why teens deserve access to safe AI• How Codex became a collaborator for OpenAI’s creative team• How Cars24 scales conversations and builds faster with OpenAI• Here’s how to ask Gemini Live for help with anything you see.• 3 Google updates from Galaxy Unpacked 2026• 13 Google tips for a fun, productive summer off from college• Introducing Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber• 5 ways to build a side hustle with Gemini• How Gemini is speaking the language of Southeast Asia• Here’s how to make study notebooks in the Gemini app.• 3 ways this coffee shop is growing with Gemini• The latest AI news we announced in June 2026• Gemini Spark updates: macOS launch, connected apps and more• Start building with Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash• The Gemini app is bringing personalized image creation to more users.• Gemini can now take notes in Google Meet for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.• Here's how Gemini can help you avoid jetlag.• Try these 3 Google AI tools to help find your next job.• 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• Which AI models can you automate on Zapier? (GPT-5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Opus 5, and more)• Prevent lock-in with AI model flexibility on Zapier• What is Google Gemini?• Zapier vs. MuleSoft comparison: Which is best for your enterprise? [2026]• AI by Zapier: Add agentic AI steps to your workflows• How Mach 1 uses Zapier MCP to run AI operations across 25 different companies• The 5 best photo editing apps for iPhone and Android (including free options) in 2026• Zapier for enterprise orchestration: Scaling automation on a trusted platform• MuleSoft integrations: Capabilities and limitations• I've tried every automation software: here are the 10 best in 2026• Relay.app is shutting down: How to export your workflows and move to Zapier• Web scraping: A comprehensive guide• The 6 best vibe coding tools in 2026• Turn off your slop cannon• OpenClaw vs. Zapier: What's the difference? [2026]
We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support.
AI

We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support.

Google has announced a $1.5 billion investment for 2026 and 2027 to expand its data center campus in Jackson County, Alabama. Operating since 2019 on a repurposed former…

Unlocking Britain’s next era of productivity: Building a nation of AI trailblazers
AI

Unlocking Britain’s next era of productivity: Building a nation of AI trailblazers

Google UK shares its latest Economic Impact Report and how to enable more people to unlock the benefits of AI-powered technologies.

MuleSoft integrations: Capabilities and limitations
The Zapier Blog

MuleSoft integrations: Capabilities and limitations

I have an engineering degree, which I once bravely attempted to use for its intended purpose. I tried connecting devices that absolutely didn't want to be connected. After all, where else was I supposed to use the IoT concepts I spent years pretending I fully understood? My smart setup included a light that needed one app, a plug that needed another app, and a speaker that refused to talk to either of them. That small adventure taught me that integrations sound simple until they meet real-world

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.

Building AI infrastructure with the Effingham County community
OpenAI News

Building AI infrastructure with the Effingham County community

OpenAI announces Project Camellia in Effingham County, Georgia, with commitments to responsible energy, community investment, jobs, and access to Codex.

Pope Leo XIV Declares AI a Threat to Human Dignity and Workers’ Rights
DailyAI

Pope Leo XIV Declares AI a Threat to Human Dignity and Workers’ Rights

Pope Leo XIV is taking a bold stance on artificial intelligence, calling it “a challenge to human dignity, justice and labour” in his first major address since being elected leader of the Catholic Church. The new pontiff is placing AI at the center of the Church’s moral agenda, warning that we’re entering a new industrial revolution with the same threats to workers and human rights seen over a century ago. “In our own day… developments in the field of artificial intelligence pose new challenges,” Leo said, addressing the College of Cardinals on Saturday in the New Synod Hall. He echoed The post Pope Leo XIV Declares AI a Threat to Human Dignity and Workers’ Rights appeared first on DailyAI.

Microsoft launches its first cybersecurity model, plus a new agentic cybersecurity system
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Microsoft launches its first cybersecurity model, plus a new agentic cybersecurity system

Microsoft bolstered its AI cybersecurity offerings this week with the launch of its first AI security model and a new security platform.

AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain - Futurism
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain - Futurism

AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain  Futurism

OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation
OpenAI News

OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation

OpenAI and Hugging Face share early findings from a security incident during AI model evaluation, highlighting advanced cyber capabilities and lessons for defenders.

Introducing OpenAI Presence
OpenAI News

Introducing OpenAI Presence

Introducing OpenAI Presence, a proven enterprise AI agent platform that helps organizations deploy trusted voice and chat agents for customer and internal workflows.

Launching Health in ChatGPT
OpenAI News

Launching Health in ChatGPT

Health in ChatGPT now lets eligible U.S. users securely connect medical records and Apple Health to get more personalized insights and better understand their health.

Our latest Google Finance upgrades, including a new app
AI

Our latest Google Finance upgrades, including a new app

The new Google Finance is coming out of beta and launching a new Android app.

Ask an AI expert: What exactly is the full stack?
AI

Ask an AI expert: What exactly is the full stack?

A Google expert explains what it means to take a full-stack approach to AI and why it’s been the foundation of our AI work for so long.

OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach has reignited the debate over alignment and control
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach has reignited the debate over alignment and control

OpenAI's Hugging Face breach has reignited debate over AI alignment and control, exposing competing views on whether increasingly capable AI should be better aligned, better contained, or both.

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.

Threads users can now chat with Meta AI in their DMs
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Threads users can now chat with Meta AI in their DMs

Meta on Monday said it is rolling out its Meta AI chatbot within Threads' DMs, giving users a way to chat with the AI assistant.

How AI is expanding what people do at work
OpenAI News

How AI is expanding what people do at work

New OpenAI research shows how AI is expanding what workers do, with ChatGPT users taking on tasks across roles and reshaping job boundaries.

AI May Soon Help You Understand What Your Pet Is Trying to Say
DailyAI

AI May Soon Help You Understand What Your Pet Is Trying to Say

Chinese tech powerhouse Baidu has filed a patent for a system that could use AI to decode animal sounds and behaviour then translate those signals into human language. For the millions of pet owners wondering what their animals are thinking, this could be the first real step toward bridging the communication gap between humans and animals. The tech Baidu’s system would collect animal vocalizations, body movements, and biological signals. It would merge that data and feed it into an AI model trained to identify emotional states. These emotional states could then be rendered in human language to boost “cross-species communication”. The post AI May Soon Help You Understand What Your Pet Is Trying to Say appeared first on DailyAI.

10 top women in AI in 2026
DailyAI

10 top women in AI in 2026

AI is changing our world, but the stories of who build it often get lost in the noise. Behind the headlines and hype, a group of women are solving AI’s fundamental challenges – despite working in an industry persisently impacted by gender inequality. Women make up just 22% of AI professionals worldwide and only 12% of AI researchers. In academic publishing, female researchers account for just 29% of first authors on AI papers, a number that hasn’t increased since the mid-2000s.  This is a story about ten leaders who have influenced AI despite the odds being stacked against them.  Their The post 10 top women in AI in 2026 appeared first on DailyAI.

Google’s AI search is rapidly becoming the default, new data shows
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Google’s AI search is rapidly becoming the default, new data shows

Google’s AI Overviews now appear in 43% of searches, underscoring how quickly AI-generated answers are becoming the default way people discover information online.

Why teens deserve access to safe AI
OpenAI News

Why teens deserve access to safe AI

Learn how OpenAI is making ChatGPT safer for teens with age-appropriate protections, learning tools, parental controls, and expert partnerships.

Power up your AI infrastructure! A first look at the Smart Systems Stage agenda at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Power up your AI infrastructure! A first look at the Smart Systems Stage agenda at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the Smart Systems Stage will be where energy, infrastructure, and technology collide, covering everything from fusion breakthroughs to the grid strain AI is putting on the entire economy.

I've tried every automation software: here are the 10 best in 2026
The Zapier Blog

I've tried every automation software: here are the 10 best in 2026

Automation software seems like a straightforward enough concept until you start shopping for it. Suddenly, you're staring down a list of tools that range from no-code automation builders to enterprise API platforms that require a six-month implementation and a dedicated IT team. They all say they automate things, but that's pretty much where the similarity ends. I've been writing about automation tools for Zapier for years, which means I've tested a lot of these myself. And the opinions I've for

Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech

At libraries around the country, "Avoiding AI" workshops have elicited unprecedented demand.

Turn off your slop cannon
The Zapier Blog

Turn off your slop cannon

Good writing is a gift to everyone around you. Clear, concise communication means your readers spend less time decoding your words and more time acting on them. Here's how to write in a way that respects your reader's time and keeps us all from drowning in walls of text. Why this matters AI slop is real, and we can do better. The internet is full of bloated, padded writing generated (or at least inspired) by AI that optimizes for length over clarity. Don't add to it. When you write vague or word

This $9 key physically locks your most addictive apps
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

This $9 key physically locks your most addictive apps

This $9 NFC key requires you to physically scan it to unlock distracting apps on your phone.

Boss of startup hacked by rogue OpenAI agent urges ‘radical transparency’ in investigation - The Guardian
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Boss of startup hacked by rogue OpenAI agent urges ‘radical transparency’ in investigation - The Guardian

Boss of startup hacked by rogue OpenAI agent urges ‘radical transparency’ in investigation  The Guardian

The latest AI news we announced in June 2026
AI

The latest AI news we announced in June 2026

Here are Google’s latest AI updates from June 2026.

Which AI models can you automate on Zapier? (GPT-5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Opus 5, and more)
The Zapier Blog

Which AI models can you automate on Zapier? (GPT-5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Opus 5, and more)

New AI models launch practically every week, and keeping up with which ones to use for specific workflows is a job in itself. Consider this article your living reference. At Zapier, we run every model through AutomationBench. It's our benchmark for testing how well models carry out multi-step workflows, not just static prompts. Below, I'll walk through every major AI provider available on Zapier, the models you can plug into your Zap workflows today, and what each one is best for based on Zapier

The Gemini app is bringing personalized image creation to more users.
Gemini

The Gemini app is bringing personalized image creation to more users.

Personal Intelligence makes the Gemini app feel tailored to you. With your permission, it pulls from Google tools like Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube and Search to provid…

Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence partners with Nvidia to scale its AI research
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence partners with Nvidia to scale its AI research

After two years in stealth, Safe Superintelligence has announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia as it prepares to scale to its next phase.

Create, edit and star in videos with two Google Vids updates
AI

Create, edit and star in videos with two Google Vids updates

Gemini Omni and personal avatars in Google Vids make video creation easier than ever.

SpaceX at $100 could mean investors see zero value in its AI - Los Angeles Times
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

SpaceX at $100 could mean investors see zero value in its AI - Los Angeles Times

SpaceX at $100 could mean investors see zero value in its AI  Los Angeles Times

Sam Altman to meet with Trump administration, senators this week. Here's what he plans to say - CNBC
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Sam Altman to meet with Trump administration, senators this week. Here's what he plans to say - CNBC

Sam Altman to meet with Trump administration, senators this week. Here's what he plans to say  CNBC

How Codex became a collaborator for OpenAI’s creative team
OpenAI News

How Codex became a collaborator for OpenAI’s creative team

How OpenAI’s creative team uses Codex to build custom creative tools, accelerate ideation, and prototype faster with context-aware AI.

Cornerstone Launches President's Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board to Lead the Future of Christian Higher Education - Cornerstone University
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Cornerstone Launches President's Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board to Lead the Future of Christian Higher Education - Cornerstone University

Cornerstone Launches President's Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board to Lead the Future of Christian Higher Education  Cornerstone University

Zapier vs. MuleSoft comparison: Which is best for your enterprise? [2026]
The Zapier Blog

Zapier vs. MuleSoft comparison: Which is best for your enterprise? [2026]

In The Office, bumbling boss Michael Scott famously tries to declare bankruptcy by yelling, "I declare bankruptcy!" Some enterprises take a similar approach to getting people to use AI—"I declare that AI is an organizational priority!"—while leaving all the details for later. But as fun as the move-fast-and-break-things approach is, the inevitable result is agent sprawl, shadow AI, and credentials scattered across a dozen different tools. Zapier is built with these challenges in mind. It offers

Gemini Spark updates: macOS launch, connected apps and more
Gemini

Gemini Spark updates: macOS launch, connected apps and more

The latest Gemini Spark updates brings Spark to the macOS app, connects with your favorite apps and tracks topics in real time.

5 ways to build a side hustle with Gemini
Gemini

5 ways to build a side hustle with Gemini

Launching a side business? Use Gemini to design your side hustle, conduct market research and automate logistics.

3 Google updates from Galaxy Unpacked 2026
AI

3 Google updates from Galaxy Unpacked 2026

We shared how Samsung users can boost productivity and get time back on new foldables, watches, and glasses coming soon.

Artificial Intelligence in Nuclear Medicine (2015-2025): Clinical Applications, Regulatory Governance, and Pharmacotherapeutic Implications - Cureus
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Artificial Intelligence in Nuclear Medicine (2015-2025): Clinical Applications, Regulatory Governance, and Pharmacotherapeutic Implications - Cureus

Artificial Intelligence in Nuclear Medicine (2015-2025): Clinical Applications, Regulatory Governance, and Pharmacotherapeutic Implications  Cureus

The 6 best vibe coding tools in 2026
The Zapier Blog

The 6 best vibe coding tools in 2026

Decades ago, building the Facebooks of the world was reserved for a small elite clad in technical skills. Today, with a sequence of good prompts, endless curiosity, and good testing practices, you too can stand next to the big names and launch your own app—and no, you don't need to know how to write a function. That's what vibe coding is all about: as coined by Andrej Karpathy, you build an app using natural language, and forget that the code is even there. While the hype is mostly gone—the firs

The 5 best photo editing apps for iPhone and Android (including free options) in 2026
The Zapier Blog

The 5 best photo editing apps for iPhone and Android (including free options) in 2026

"The best camera is the one you have with you" is an old adage in photography, and there's a lot of truth to it. Even as someone who has at least five cameras at home, I capture more photos with my smartphone than I do anything else. Smartphone cameras have been so good for so long now that it really doesn't feel like a tradeoff. My DSLR definitely doesn't have a wide-angle and an 8x telephoto lens built in. But capturing photos is just the first half of creating a good image. To really make gre

How Gemini is speaking the language of Southeast Asia
Gemini

How Gemini is speaking the language of Southeast Asia

Gemini is taking off across Southeast Asia, thanks to its local language fluency and the region’s mobile-first population.

SpaceX stock falls for third day as $600 billion in market value vanishes - equiti.com
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

SpaceX stock falls for third day as $600 billion in market value vanishes - equiti.com

SpaceX stock falls for third day as $600 billion in market value vanishes  equiti.com

Advancing the next era of national science
OpenAI News

Advancing the next era of national science

OpenAI outlines its commitment to advancing American science working with the U.S. Department of Energy and national labs to use frontier AI to accelerate discovery.

Gemini can now take notes in Google Meet for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.
Gemini

Gemini can now take notes in Google Meet for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.

Google Meet's "Take notes for me" feature is available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in select languages.

Relay.app is shutting down: How to export your workflows and move to Zapier
The Zapier Blog

Relay.app is shutting down: How to export your workflows and move to Zapier

Relay is shutting down on August 15, 2026, for free users, and on September 14 for paid plans. Either way, if you built workflows, agents, or tables in Relay, the end is near. The good news is that Relay has made it as easy as possible to transition your workflows to a new tool. Here's how to export your Relay.app data and rebuild those workflows in Zapier, plus what to expect from Zapier as a former Relay user. We'll also cover why Zapier is your best option compared to other Relay alternatives

Robert Morris University infuses artificial intelligence into MBA curriculum - TribLIVE.com
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Robert Morris University infuses artificial intelligence into MBA curriculum - TribLIVE.com

Robert Morris University infuses artificial intelligence into MBA curriculum  TribLIVE.com

NTT DATA Group cuts incident analysis to 30 minutes with Codex
OpenAI News

NTT DATA Group cuts incident analysis to 30 minutes with Codex

NTT DATA Group uses ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to help 9,000 employees automate work, cut incident analysis to 30 minutes, and scale secure AI adoption.