Two years ago, AI was only good at answering. You'd ask, it would type a reply, done. But the new wave — called "agentic AI" — doesn't just answer. It plans on its own, picks up tools on its own, and runs a multi-step job to completion by itself. Put simply, it's gone from "a smooth-talking consultant" to "an employee who actually does the work." And that's the hottest money story in enterprise AI in 2026.
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News & notes movingAgentic AI & Autonomous Workflows
Agentic AI & Autonomous Workflows▲
UBS Flags AI Science Shift as Investment Theme After OpenAI Proof
UBS Wealth Management says artificial intelligence is moving beyond text generation into scientific research, opening investment opportunities across AI infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, nuclear fusion, industrial materials and utilities. The shift was highlighted by OpenAI's recent mathematical proof related to the Navier-Stokes equations, a centuries-old fluid dynamics problem and one of seven Millennium Prize Problems, which OpenAI tackled using 10,000 autonomous AI agents working in parallel for 88 hours before formalizing the proof with Lean, a system for machine-checked mathematical validation. In pharmaceuticals, multi-agent AI systems can simulate millions of protein variations in the cloud, and more than 170 AI-designed programs are already in development or clinical evaluation, including Phase III trials. In nuclear fusion, reinforcement-learning systems can predict plasma disruptions around 200 milliseconds before they occur and adjust magnetic coils thousands of times per second, while AI models in materials science can test millions of elemental combinations daily in search of properties for lighter, higher-density batteries, lower-heat computing hardware and potential room-temperature superconductors. The broader investment case centers on AI becoming a tool for automating scientific research rather than simply generating content, with companies exposed to AI infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, industrial materials and utilities positioned to benefit as these technologies move toward commercial applications.
Europe Runs Live Agent Payments Across 30+ Banks as US Stalls on Liability
Europe has moved agentic payments into live production while the United States remains stalled over who bears the loss when an AI agent errs. Live end-to-end payments have been executed by Santander, Mastercard, ING, and Worldline, and on July 2, 2026, ING, Worldline, and Visa completed an agentic payment in Germany using Visa Payment Passkeys for biometric authentication. Mastercard has enabled all issuers in Europe at the network level for Agent Pay, backed by a new Lisbon Centre of Excellence for Innovation, with Mastercard Europe President Kelly Devine calling agentic payments a profound shift in how commerce is initiated and executed. In the US, the Treasury OIG has flagged ambiguity in Regulation E on agent authorization, and the AI AGENT Act introduced in July 2026 addresses fiduciary duties rather than liability allocation for agent misexecution, prompting the Consumer Bankers Association to recommend the industry write its own private network rules. Hypertrade data shows a 4,700% year-over-year increase in AI-generated traffic to retail sites, yet agentic commerce is less than 1% of US e-commerce, with only 23% of US consumers trusting generative AI to handle payment transactions and 93% of merchants saying the AI provider should bear the financial loss for incorrect purchases.
Mastercard, Visa race to set standards for AI agent shopping payments
Mastercard rolled out a payment option Thursday that lets cardholders give an AI agent a virtual card to buy things online without checking in before each purchase, with limits on spending, retailers, or required approval before checkout. Rival Visa partnered with Alchemy earlier this year and has announced its own AI shopping and payment product, Visa Intelligent Commerce, which the company says is still being deployed, while Meta's Muse can search for products and navigate checkout but presents the purchase for the user's final approval. Phil Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at payments company ACI Worldwide, called it "a land grab for infrastructure standards," saying that if card companies set the standards for agentic commerce they can keep the commerce in their environments for decades to come. Consumer appetite lags the infrastructure push: just 7% of U.S. and U.K. consumers surveyed who buy fashion items said they would allow an AI assistant to make purchases without approval under predefined conditions, according to research commissioned by ACI Worldwide, and more than half said they were uncomfortable allowing AI to purchase on their behalf. Mastercard has developed a digital paper trail called Verifiable Intent to record who authorized the agent to shop and what it was authorized to buy, but when asked who would be responsible if an agent made an incorrect, fraudulent, or unauthorized purchase, Mastercard pointed back to Verifiable Intent and did not specify who would ultimately be responsible if an agent bought something outside those instructions.
Tigress Analyst Raises Alphabet Price Target to Street-High $485
Tigress Financial Partners analyst Ivan Feinseth reiterated a Strong Buy rating on Alphabet and raised his price target to a Street-high $485 from $415, implying roughly 39.6% upside. The bullish thesis centers on Alphabet turning its massive AI investments into growth across Search, Cloud and Gemini, with Feinseth arguing AI Overviews and AI Mode can make Google more useful for complex, high-intent queries. Recent results support that argument: Alphabet's second-quarter revenue rose 24% from a year earlier to $119.8 billion, Search and Other revenue increased 17%, YouTube advertising grew 13%, and operating income climbed 30% to $40.77 billion. Google Cloud revenue surged 82% to $24.8 billion, operating income more than tripled to $8.8 billion, margins reached 35.6%, and its $514 billion backlog gives visibility into future enterprise demand. Gemini has reached 950 million monthly active users, more than 9 million monthly developers and roughly 22 billion API tokens processed per minute, and Feinseth sees monetization opportunities across subscriptions, APIs, enterprise software, agents and productivity products, though the risk remains that Alphabet must prove its enormous AI spending generates sufficient returns.
Mastercard, Alchemy Launch AgentCard for AI Agent Payments
Alchemy has turned its agent-payment framework into a live developer product called AgentCard, giving AI software agents single-use Mastercard credentials tied to a customer's existing account rather than permanent access to a payment card. Developers can set spending caps, limit eligible merchants and restrict transactions geographically, while users keep their existing rewards and credit arrangements. Alchemy says the service is already available, letting autonomous agents buy goods anywhere Mastercard is accepted online. Mastercard shares were nearly flat at $566.285 Friday morning, and the chart puts the stock 17.09% below a GF Value estimate of $683. Neither company has disclosed pricing, transaction volumes or committed customers yet.
Palantir Commercial Revenue Jumps 110% to $945 Million in Q2 2026
Palantir Technologies' commercial revenue surged 110% to $945 million in the second quarter of 2026, more than doubling the $451 million recorded a year earlier. The commercial segment added $494 million year over year, expanding by more than its entire year-earlier base, while government revenue rose 79% to $990 million from $553 million. Combined, the two businesses generated $1.94 billion in second-quarter 2026 revenue, up from roughly $1 billion a year earlier, with commercial operations contributing more than half of the combined year-over-year increase and narrowing the gap with government revenue to just $45 million. Among peers, C3.ai reported fiscal fourth-quarter 2026 revenue of $51.6 million, down substantially year over year, and forecast fiscal 2027 revenue of $210-$240 million, while Datadog's second-quarter 2026 revenue rose 36% to $1.12 billion, with customers contributing at least $100,000 in ARR up 23% to roughly 4,720 and free cash flow of $279 million. Palantir shares have gained 37% over the past three months against 19% industry growth, and the stock trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 39.96X versus an industry average of 4.2X, carrying a Value Score of F and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).
Manus Seeks $500 Million Round as Asia's AI Agent Market Splinters
Manus is in advanced discussions for a $500 million funding round at a $4 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg, following Beijing's NDRC blocking of Meta's $2 billion acquisition of the firm in April 2026. Co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao were summoned and barred from leaving China, forcing the company to pivot from a potential US acquisition target into a cornerstone of the domestic Chinese AI ecosystem, though the round is not yet closed and terms remain subject to change. In Seoul, Enhans, which raised a $38 million Series C confirmed in a September 17, 2026 press release, is embedding its AgentOS into Korean manufacturing and finance, with the round co-led by TIMEFOLIO Asset Management and Stonebridge Ventures and strategic participation from POSCO Investment, LG CNS, and Lotte Ventures, whose chaebol groups already run the technology in live production. Huawei, meanwhile, launched its AI Cluster Service and agent-specific tools including Agentic MaaS and the AgentArts platform at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, with Dr. Peter Zhou emphasizing that infrastructure must evolve to support secure, reliable agent workloads in production; the Agentic Infra paradigm already serves over 3,500 customers, and while AICS is available in China starting September 30, global availability is not slated until November 30. Together these moves signal that the agent market is splitting along regional lines of data structuring, compute hosting, and regulatory oversight, leaving open whether these silos will converge through open standards or harden into permanent, incompatible zones.
Salesforce launches AIforce at Dreamforce 2026 as Benioff takes aim at Microsoft Copilot
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff unveiled AIforce, an AI connectivity layer that lets employees access Salesforce data and run complex workflows inside third-party AI tools such as Anthropic's Claude and Slack, at Dreamforce 2026, using the stage to directly criticize Microsoft. AIforce launched with three integrations: Claudeforce, built in partnership with Anthropic, brings Salesforce data directly into Claude; Slackforce connects that same data to conversations in Slack; and AgentforceCoworker operates inside Salesforce's own Lightning interface. Benioff framed AIforce as the answer to what he calls the "Fantasyland" problem, arguing that rival AI tools like Microsoft's Copilot lack the reliable business data layer required to safely power a business, extending a public rivalry that dates to Dreamforce 2024, when he compared Copilot to "Clippy." Salesforce generated $11.35 billion in revenue during its most recent quarter, beating Wall Street's expectations on both earnings and revenue, and CRM stock has rallied about 34% over the past month after falling as much as 37% earlier in 2026, closing at $255.65 on Sept. 15. On the same day as the Dreamforce announcement, Salesforce suffered a global service disruption that locked some customers out of their systems, and investors are watching Agentforce and Data 360 adoption numbers in the next quarterly report, where combined annual recurring revenue already exceeds $2.9 billion, more than 200% growth from a year ago.
Meta's Muse Tops App Store as Analysts See Path to $1,000
Meta Platforms' new AI assistant Muse hit number one in the App Store within one week of launch, driving a 60% jump in Meta AI daily interactions before any international rollout. Wall Street carries 55 Buy or Strong Buy ratings and zero Sells on the stock, with a consensus 12-month price target of $755.28, and analysts model $305.9 billion in 2027 revenue and $33.94 in 2027 EPS. Shares trade near $676, roughly 20x forward earnings against the S&P 500's ~22x, and reaching $1,000 would require about a 48% gain and a forward multiple near 29x on 2027 consensus. More than 1 million businesses use Meta AI agents weekly, with early customer Movida reporting a 44% increase in daily bookings, while new ranking models drove an 8.3% increase in ad clicks and a 15.7% uplift in conversions on Facebook. Meta reported 27.96% year-over-year revenue growth in Q2 with ad pricing up 12%, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is fielding offers for compute at a significant premium over what it paid.
Nokia Expands Microsoft Partnership for AI-Driven Network Automation
Nokia Corporation is expanding its partnership with Microsoft Corporation to build an agentic, unified data foundation aimed at helping telecom providers scale artificial intelligence-driven operations. Under the agreement, Nokia Data Suite integrates with Microsoft Fabric, combining telco-specific data products with unified analytics, governance and AI capabilities across cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments. The company is initially applying these capabilities to autonomous Voice over New Radio assurance, where AI agents detect network anomalies, analyze service issues and recommend corrective actions. Nokia faces competition from Ericsson, which expanded its Intelligent Automation Platform to support automation across radio and core networks, and from Cisco Systems, which is integrating AI agents into its networking portfolio. Nokia shares have soared 123.6% over the past year compared with the industry's 20.6% growth, and the stock trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 2.42 versus the industry tally of 4.93.
Cloudflare Says AI Agent Traffic Tops 50% as Q2 Revenue Jumps 36%
Cloudflare said more than 50% of the traffic flowing across its network was nonhuman in the second quarter of 2026, reflecting rapid growth in AI agents and machine-to-machine traffic. The company ended the quarter with more than 7.4 million developers on its Workers platform, adding nearly two million in the quarter alone, and management said Workers remains one of the fastest-growing parts of its business. Cloudflare also introduced Monetization Gateway, Wallets and cloudflare.pay during the quarter to support transactions between AI agents, businesses and content providers. Second-quarter revenues increased 36% year over year, while dollar-based net retention reached 120%, and management said its total addressable market has expanded to more than $300 billion from $30 billion at the time of its IPO. The Zacks Consensus Estimate points to Cloudflare revenue growth of 32.5% in 2026 and 28.6% in 2027, with 2026 earnings estimated at $1.26 per share, up 35.5% from the prior year.
UiPath Earns Zacks Rank #2 as Earnings Estimates Rise
UiPath has been rated Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), with the consensus estimate for the current quarter rising 15.2% over the last 30 days to $0.18 per share, a year-over-year change of +12.5%. For the current fiscal year, the consensus earnings estimate of $0.79 points to a change of +9.7% from the prior year and has moved +19.1% over the past 30 days, while the next fiscal year's estimate of $0.91 indicates a change of +14.1% and has changed +0.4% over the past month. The consensus sales estimate of $442.63 million for the current quarter points to a year-over-year change of +7.7%, with the $1.79 billion and $1.94 billion estimates for the current and next fiscal years indicating changes of +11.1% and +8.1%, respectively. In the last reported quarter, UiPath reported revenues of $410.26 million, a year-over-year change of +13.4%, and EPS of $0.15, matching the year-ago figure, with a revenue surprise of +3.19% against the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $397.59 million and an EPS surprise of 0%. The stock has returned -13.6% over the past month versus the Zacks S&P 500 composite's -1.3% change, while the Zacks Internet - Software industry has gained 7.8% over this period, and UiPath carries a Zacks Value Style Score of C.
Palantir CEO Karp Says AI Labs May Need Nationalizing to Escape Lawsuits
Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp told CNBC that leading AI labs may need to be nationalized, because without it his clients would sue them over the technology's unlimited risks. On regulation, Karp said, "You have to find a way to set reasonable guidelines that are enforced, but you can't do it." He said the first line of defense is that builders are liable for their own actions, and made the case for both civil and criminal penalties for developers who are not being responsible, adding of the latest models, "We need to get serious." The industry is split on the issue: Anthropic's Dario Amodei called for a slowdown last weekend, joined by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, while Trump has called AI risks a hoax, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg on that side. OpenAI disclosed six new cases of unexpected or concerning model behavior on Wednesday, on top of the Hugging Face breach.
ProCap Financial to Join Russell 2000 and Russell 3000, Rebrand as Silvia
ProCap Financial will be added to the small-cap Russell 2000 Index and the broad-market Russell 3000 Index, effective September 21, 2026. The company's AI agent lab, Silvia, has grown to over $60B in connected assets and converted roughly 25% of its monthly active users to paid subscriptions since launching in May 2025. ProCap Financial will officially rename its corporate entity to Silvia and change its stock ticker symbol from "BRR" to "SVIA" starting September 22, 2026.
Manus AI Seeks $4 Billion Valuation in First Round Since Meta Deal Blocked
Manus AI is in discussions to raise $500 million at a $4 billion valuation, which would make it China's most valuable autonomous agent startup. The round is not yet closed and terms remain subject to change, but if finalized the valuation would be roughly double the $2 billion Meta agreed to pay for the company in December 2025, a deal ultimately unwound by Chinese regulators. Beijing's National Development and Reform Commission blocked the Meta acquisition on national security grounds in April 2026, and the company's attempt to relocate its headquarters from Beijing to Singapore was effectively thwarted, with co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao summoned by the NDRC and told they would not be permitted to leave the country. Despite that failed escape, Tencent is now in discussions to become the company's largest shareholder, alongside early investors including HongShan Capital and ZhenFund. A $4 billion price tag puts Manus in the same conversation as major global players, with US-based Sierra reaching a $15.8 billion valuation in May 2026, Cognition valued at over $10.2 billion in September 2025, and Instinct reportedly raising $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation this same week. The round signals a pivot toward platform independence for Manus, with a reported Hong Kong IPO serving as a potential comeback path.
Salesforce Fair Value Raised 14% to US$275.87 on Koa Launch and Fin Deal
Salesforce's fair value estimate has been lifted from US$241.72 to US$275.87, an uplift of about 14% in the latest analyst model, following the launch of the Koa CRM reasoning model with NVIDIA, the US$3.6b acquisition of AI customer service company Fin, and the AIforce rollout. The updated model raised the revenue growth assumption from 9.78% to 10.08%, kept the net profit margin assumption unchanged at 18.18%, moved the future P/E assumption from 20.21x to 22.23x, and shifted the discount rate from 9.39% to 9.11%. Salesforce also expanded its partnership with Anthropic through the launch of Claudeforce, which embeds Claude as the default AI model across Agentforce, Slack and Data 360, and reported what management described as one of its best fiscal Q2s, with revenue of US$11.35b, 11% year over year growth, and full year 2027 revenue guidance of US$46.1b to US$46.4b. AI products including Agentforce and Data Cloud AI reached almost US$3.9b in annual recurring revenue, with Agentforce annual recurring revenue growing over 240% year over year, while Salesforce recorded a US$2.6b investment gain related to Anthropic and shares rose between 18% and 22% around the results. Analysts remain split, with Canaccord, Guggenheim, Stifel, TD Cowen, Argus, Cantor Fitzgerald, BMO Capital, Mizuho, JPMorgan and Erste Group raising targets as high as US$300, while Morgan Stanley, KeyBanc, CLSA and Phillip Securities cited slower growth and mixed Agentforce feedback, and Wells Fargo and Citi stayed Equal Weight and Neutral.
BNP Paribas Stays Bullish on Salesforce as Agentforce Drives Renewal Surge
BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski emerged from Salesforce's Dreamforce Conference and Investor Day "incrementally positive," expecting accelerating new business activity to drive a revenue reacceleration beginning in the third quarter. The firm maintained a $265 price forecast, about 6% upside from Salesforce's Sept. 16 price of $250.50, while Salesforce kept its fiscal 2030 revenue outlook at $63 billion, including Informatica. Slowinski pointed to Agentforce's expanding pricing models, including per-seat, usage-based, hybrid and outcome-based structures, and flagged upgrades to the AIforce Max+ tier at $550 per user per month as the clearest near-term opportunity, noting only about 5% of customers had upgraded so far. One partner cited a financial-services customer whose Salesforce renewal rose from roughly $3 million-$5 million to $14 million after a broader Agentforce deployment. Slowinski also highlighted Salesforce's $25 billion accelerated share repurchase program, which management expects to complete at an average price of roughly $182 per share, cutting the share count by more than 14% and generating a return above 40% based on the current stock price cited in the report.
Salesforce and Nvidia Unveil Koa AI Model at Dreamforce
Salesforce and Nvidia unveiled Koa, a domain-specific reasoning model engineered for Salesforce's Agentforce ecosystem, at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce event. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff praised Nvidia as "exquisite," saying the AI chip leader has the product for the moment and that the industry has never seen anything quite like it. By hosting Koa directly on Salesforce's private infrastructure, enterprise clients maintain full control over model weights and sensitive data while achieving lower token inference costs. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined Benioff on stage at the Dreamforce keynote to detail the partnership, which underscores a broader move toward domain-tailored AI agents. Guggenheim analyst John Difucci said the decision to create a proprietary model is interesting at this juncture in Salesforce's AI journey, as many application vendors have postured away from the model race for multiple years, and he sees the announcement playing into more task-specific and open-source models becoming a key theme for enterprise deployments. Stifel analyst J. Parker Lane said the announcements and the participation of Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman at Dreamforce underscore the open approach the company is taking on both the model and UI layers as it leans in on its data and context layers as its core moat in the Agentic Era.
Anthropic says Claude now handles 26% of its AI research and development work, up from 1% early this year
Anthropic, the U.S. artificial intelligence startup, said on Thursday, September 17, that its Claude model has risen to become the primary executor of AI research and development work, accounting for 26% of all such work inside the company, a steep jump from just 1% in March, according to the measurement criteria of Epoch AI, an independent nonprofit that tracks the development of AI technology. Data as of August showed that across all of the company's research, AI worked alongside humans on more than 90% of the workload. The company nonetheless confirmed that Claude does not yet operate fully autonomously without humans at any step. On safety controls, Anthropic disclosed that in August an average of roughly 30,000 AI agents were working simultaneously on research and engineering tasks across the company's core systems at any given moment. Of the more than 1 billion decisions made that month, about 1 in every 47,000 was halted by the system for failing to meet safety criteria. Based on resource-use data from a one-week sampling in July, 6% of the computing power used in all of the company's AI research was allocated to safety work, and if only research carried out by AI itself is counted, the share of computing power devoted to safety rises to 12%. Anthropic noted that these figures are a minimum estimate, because any computing power that improves both safety and capability at the same time is counted only under model capability development.
Trip.Biz Launches Agent ONE AI Suite for Business Travel
Trip.Biz, the business travel brand of Trip.com Group, launched Agent ONE, a suite of four connected AI agents for the end-to-end business travel lifecycle, at its Transform 2026 summit in Singapore. The four agents are a Planning Agent, a Booking Agent, an Approval Agent and an Insight Agent. Trip.Biz said early performance targets show average booking time dropping from around 45 minutes to 2 minutes, a 90% efficiency improvement, while approval wait times fall from over an hour to under 3 seconds and a full travel analysis report is generated in under 7 minutes, a task that previously took analysts up to a week. CEO Tao Song positioned Agent ONE as a purpose-built AI solution rather than an incremental product update, and the company said the tool is now available globally across all Trip.Biz-supported markets. Trip.Biz also cited a 90% SLA compliance rate and an 80%+ satisfaction score across the region it serves.
Meta Launches Muse AI Agent With $20 and $100 Monthly Tiers
Meta Platforms rolled out Muse, an AI agent that can autonomously send emails, sell a car, and book travel on a person's behalf, Reuters reported on September 9, 2026. The agent, modeled on the open-source system OpenClaw, is available initially only in the U.S. through a dedicated app or WhatsApp, and is designed to access apps across email, calendar, payments, health, shopping, and smart-home categories as the centerpiece of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "personal superintelligence" strategy. Meta launched Muse with a free tier and $20 and $100 monthly subscription options for heavier users, positioning the product as a new revenue stream beyond advertising. The launch follows a delay from April to improve security, and Meta added an autonomous safety agent that monitors Muse's actions, though internal testing uncovered an incident in which Muse exposed private iCloud photos and employees reported repeated logouts, monitoring failures, and inconsistent performance. Meta expects AI infrastructure spending to exceed $130 billion this year and has seen a 40% increase in technical and security incidents linked to AI, while its hedge fund holder count slipped to 254 in the second quarter from 262 in the first even as combined position value rose to $43.75 billion from $41.70 billion.
Google Rethink ROI Summit Highlights Gap Between AI Discovery and Payment Readiness
Google's Rethink ROI summit in New York spotlighted a widening gap between rapid AI-driven shopping discovery and merchant payment systems that cannot yet complete agent-initiated transactions. The platform's new conversational attributes let retailers feed structured data, including FAQ, compatible accessories, and substitutes, directly into the Shopping Graph, and in early testing with Lululemon, brand-supplied attributes were incorporated into AI Mode recommendations 50% of the time. Demand for such tools is backed by Adobe Analytics data showing an 805% year-over-year increase in AI-driven traffic to retail sites during Black Friday 2025, while Salesforce Cyber Week data confirms retailers with integrated AI agents grew sales 32% faster than those without, and Adobe found those shoppers are 38% more likely to convert. That traffic, however, is colliding with a payment readiness deficit: the TLT LLP Retail Agility survey of the top 100 UK retailers found that while 49% are investing in agentic AI, only 15% say their payment systems are prepared for agent-initiated transactions. Google is attempting to standardize the transaction layer through the Universal Commerce Protocol and the Universal Cart framework, which aim to enable persistent, cross-platform shopping carts across Search, YouTube, and Gmail, and with a 10-week horizon to Black Friday 2026, the next two months will determine which brands move from discovery-focused AI to transaction-ready agentic commerce.
Oscar Health Targets $4 EPS by 2027, Raises 2026 Guidance by $100 Million
Oscar Health said at its investor day that it is on pace to deliver $4 of EPS by 2027, nearly doubling its current earnings per share, and that it can grow revenue at an average of 20% per year through 2029. The company, which now serves more than 3 million members across 20 states, also launched a new business called the Lucy Healthcare Marketplace, which connects about 70 carriers with consumers and brokers for ACA and supplemental products. CFO Scott Blackley said Oscar recently increased its 2026 earnings guidance by $100 million and has doubled its earnings expectation for this year, citing favorable utilization trends, and that it improved its medical loss ratio guidance, with 50 basis points equal to about $100 million. He said 60% of the company's coding is now done using AI agents, up from about 15% earlier this year. Blackley said Oscar sees a large opportunity in transitioning employer-sponsored healthcare into the ACA through a product called Choice on the Lucy marketplace, and expects $4 or greater EPS in 2029.
will.i.am Says FYI.AI Raised $12 Million at $90 Million Pre-Money, Now Touring to Fund Payroll
will.i.am said his personal AI agent company FYI.AI raised $12 million at a $90 million pre-money valuation in its A round, which Salesforce founder Marc Benioff helped kick off in 2021, and that he is now funding the company by touring rather than raising a B round. Speaking with Bloomberg's Romaine Bostick from Dreamforce, the Grammy-winning artist said FYI.AI has burned through that initial round and that he tours every summer to pay his employees and developers. He said the company has reached product market fit and will scale through partnerships with Arizona State University, where he teaches a course called The agentic self, and the California Community Colleges system, starting with East LA College. FYI.AI's business model, he said, gives each user ownership of their own agent and data, with the agent carrying its own phone number and encryption keys the user controls, and the data portable after graduation. He described the offering as complementary to Salesforce, which serves institutions while FYI.AI serves individuals.
Calix Expands Agent Workforce Cloud With New AI Workflows
Calix announced an expansion of Calix Agent Workforce Cloud on its AI-native Calix One platform, adding secure agentic workflows that help service providers operationalize AI across marketing, support, and operations. The new capabilities build on initial workflows introduced in May and include agentic workflows for campaign creation and upsell recommendations, troubleshooting and resolution, and network detection and remediation, with subscriber self-service workflows coming soon through the CommandIQ mobile app. Calix said the campaign and upsell workflows evolve platform capabilities that have increased monthly recurring revenue by as much as 500 percent, the troubleshooting workflows build on capabilities that have reduced inbound support calls by up to 88 percent, and the network detection workflows advance capabilities that have reduced mean time to repair by up to 75 percent. The company said Calix One, built on more than 26 years of broadband expertise and over $2 billion in platform investment, processes more than a petabyte of data daily and executes over 4.3 billion workflows annually. Brooks Goodall, chief operations officer and assistant general manager at RTC Networks, said the platform fits into how teams already work, while Calix president and chief executive officer Michael Weening said the company has invested three years evolving its platform to be AI-native and will deliver new capabilities faster and faster.
Visa Joins Mastercard and Ant International on AI Agent Identity Standards
Visa has joined Mastercard and Ant International in pushing for common identity standards for AI purchasing agents, proposing a Know-Your-Agent framework that would let verified trust signals travel across card networks, digital wallets, marketplaces and agent platforms without forcing every participant into the same approval system. Under the proposal, each company would still decide which agents it trusts, while shared certification, identifiable operators and ongoing transaction monitoring could give the emerging agent-commerce ecosystem a common security backbone. Visa shares slipped approximately 0.4% to $369.39. For Visa, interoperability cuts both ways: common standards could strip friction out of agent payments, reduce duplicated verification and accelerate adoption across merchants and platforms, potentially expanding the pool of transactions flowing through Visa's network, but Visa would not control the identity layer alone. No transaction-volume, pricing or revenue commitments were disclosed.
Alphabet Opens Google Home to Rival AI Agents via $20 Monthly Plan
Alphabet opened its Google Home smart-home ecosystem to rival AI agents, turning the platform into a broader distribution channel rather than a Gemini-only service. The company's Home MCP server now lets compatible third-party agents such as Claude and OpenClaw inspect connected devices, track their status, execute commands and work with historical household events. The service sits behind Google's Premium Advanced plan, priced at $20 per month or $200 annually, and also requires a Google Cloud project. Google has placed limits around higher-risk actions such as unlocking doors, though opening the system to outside agents introduces a new security variable. Alphabet shares gained approximately 1.5% to $347.91 Thursday, with the stock trading 35.37% above its GF Value estimate of $257.01.
Salesforce-in-Claude Beta Opens on All Paid Plans With 37 Prebuilt Sales Skills
Salesforce has moved its Claudeforce partnership with Anthropic into an open beta on all paid plans, pushing enterprise CRM data into Claude's native interface. The release centers on a plugin that bridges Salesforce's data stores and Claude's reasoning engine, arriving with 37 prebuilt sales skills covering everything from meeting preparation to pipeline reviews. The beta is currently accessible via the Salesforce AppExchange and the Claude Enterprise Marketplace. Under the mutual adoption model, Salesforce has named Claude its preferred AI model while Anthropic has designated Salesforce its preferred CRM, with the plugin running on the AIforce harness and integrating with Headless 360, Data 360, Tableau, and Slack, where Claude now serves as the default model for Slack AI, Slackbot, and Slack Code. Salesforce reports its employees have realized 8.1 million hours of annualized productivity gains using Slackbot, a figure that has doubled quarter-over-quarter. Deployment requires a one-time connection, after which every seller gains access immediately, with no per-user configuration or new permissions model.
Benioff Warns AI Must Not Become 'Social Media 2.0' at Dreamforce
Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff used his keynote at the annual Dreamforce software festival to warn that the AI industry must not repeat the failures of social media, saying "we cannot let AI be social media 2.0." Speaking to Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid from Dreamforce in San Francisco, Benioff said companies and executives must take absolute responsibility for the applications and technology they build, arguing there needs to be an ethical base in how the industry operates. He noted that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman both attended Dreamforce and addressed their concerns, while figures including venture capitalist Bill Gurley and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have weighed in on safeguarding people in an increasingly AI agent future. Benioff, who also owns Time Magazine, said businesses must be responsible for their actions and that "the only people who are going to prevent [bad things] from happening are the people who are building that code." Salesforce used the event to announce several AI products, including AIforce and a tie-up with Nvidia on a new model dubbed Koa, which Stifel analyst J. Parker Lane said underscores the open approach the company is taking on the model and UI layers as it leans on its data and context layers as its core moat in the Agentic Era.
Visa's Agent Commerce Gap: Hundreds of Beta Transactions Versus Millions Projected
Visa reported in December 2025 that it had completed "hundreds" of secure, agent-initiated transactions in a closed beta, while projecting that "millions" of consumers will use AI agents to complete purchases by the 2026 holiday season. That gap between a few hundred test cases and a multi-million-transaction reality marks the adoption ceiling for agentic commerce, held back by three structural barriers: consumer trust, merchant liability, and protocol proliferation. According to the Visa Earning Trust Report, only 23% of U.S. consumers trust generative AI to handle payment transactions, and PYMNTS Intelligence found that just 14% trust AI to execute purchases without manual verification, while 93% of merchants believe the AI provider should bear the financial loss for incorrect purchases and only 28% are willing to offer their full product range to AI agents. The technical landscape is fragmented across at least five competing checkout protocols, including Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay, Stripe ACP, Google UCP, and Meta Muse, with integration costs ranging from $5,000 to $500,000 per protocol. Visa is attempting to bridge the gap with Intelligent Commerce Connect, a network-, protocol-, and token-vault-agnostic integration platform, but it remains unproven at the scale required to hit Visa's holiday 2026 targets, and Bernstein research notes that agentic commerce currently accounts for less than 1% of U.S. e-commerce.
Coinbase CEO Says AI Agents Will Need Their Own Financial Infrastructure
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said AI agents will need their own financial infrastructure, telling Scott Melker that the company has built a set of tools for the agentic economy. Armstrong said the existing payment rails are sometimes not sufficient for AI because agents want to move very fast, make payments globally, and in some cases transact in very small amounts. The stack includes the Base blockchain, the USDC stablecoin that Coinbase co-created with Circle, and the X402 protocol, which Coinbase created and which is now under the Linux Foundation in collaboration with Google, AWS, CloudFlare and others. He said X402 allows agents to pay each other in real time instantly all over the world, even in very small transaction amounts like a couple of cents at a time, which traditional payment rails do not really support. Armstrong also said Coinbase has been able to bring perpetual futures products to the US under this administration, calling them a pretty killer app in the trading world, and that he expects a future not too far off in which more agents transact in the economy than humans.
Rackspace Joins Nvidia Cloud Partner Program, Shares Rise Over 6%
Rackspace Technology shares climbed more than 6% after the company announced it is joining Nvidia's Cloud Partner Program, extending its push into sovereign and regulated AI infrastructure. Alongside the partnership, Rackspace introduced its Institutional Sovereign Pod, an architecture combining Nvidia's Blackwell technology with Palantir's Foundry and AIP platforms, and CEO Gajen Kandiah framed the effort as a matter of control over data, models and intelligence for organizations where governance, sovereignty and uptime are non-negotiable. The rally echoes a familiar pattern: shares jumped in May after a non-binding MOU with AMD, then collapsed 33.6% in a single day in July following a guidance cut and an at-the-market program allowing the sale of up to $250 million of shares. The company has not disclosed a customer contract or revenue commitment tied to the Nvidia deal, and its balance sheet still carries roughly $2.8 billion of debt, negative equity and negative free cash flow. Hedge fund ownership rose to 22 funds at the end of Q2 2026 from 8 funds at the end of Q1 2026, while short interest remained extremely high at 22.19% of float as of August 31, 2026.
Lumonic, a PitchBook company, launched Lumonic 12.0, a platform update that lets firms direct the platform using natural-language instructions, beginning with automated data extraction from portfolio company and borrower documents. The release records every action an agent takes, requires human approval before any data is written, and traces every value back to its source document. AI extraction is the first of several AI workflow capabilities Lumonic plans to release over the next few months on its new agent platform, which is designed to support every stage of the portfolio monitoring workflow. Lumonic was acquired by PitchBook, a Morningstar company, in 2025, and since the acquisition it has more than doubled its customer base year-over-year and supports management of more than 5k portfolio companies. New automated workflows are currently configured in partnership with the Lumonic team, with self-directed configuration planned for a future release, and the company will later add event-triggered automations that flag late reporting, covenant breaches, and portfolio changes as they occur.
Mintlify Report Finds AI Agents Now Outnumber Humans as Documentation Readers
Mintlify released its 2026 State of Knowledge Report, which found that AI agents have overtaken humans as the primary readers of company documentation for the first time on record, with agent traffic on Mintlify-powered sites outpacing human traffic 2 to 1. The report also found that 83% of surveyed companies say AI agents now draft documentation updates for their teams, though only 9% let agents publish without human review. Mintlify, which describes itself as an AI-native knowledge infrastructure company powering the knowledge layer for companies including Anthropic, Microsoft, Spotify, and Coinbase, said the shift means the number-one knowledge consumer for modern companies is no longer human. New findings from Gartner cited in the report show only 14% of organizations are confident their internal content is ready for AI agent consumption, and more than half of respondents say their organization's knowledge lives across five or more surfaces, with less than a third rating most or all of it as AI-ready. Across 2,400 controlled tests, agents answered questions correctly 94 to 99% of the time regardless of format, but navigation proved the primary failure point, as agents repeatedly requested pages that did not exist; adding a single link to a navigation map reduced failed requests by 20 times compared to raw HTML. Han Wang, co-founder and CEO of Mintlify, said companies that treat knowledge as infrastructure rather than a static site are the ones whose agents and human teams will work together cohesively.
Salesforce Targets Over $63 Billion Annual Revenue by Fiscal 2030
Salesforce is forecasting more than $63 billion in annual revenue by fiscal 2030, a long-term target that sits above Wall Street expectations. Chief Operating and Financial Officer Robin Washington outlined the goal at the company's annual conference Wednesday, covering the fiscal year ending January 2030 and exceeding the roughly $61.4 billion analyst consensus compiled by Bloomberg. The company is positioning its data, customer relationships and workflow software as infrastructure for enterprises deploying autonomous AI agents, highlighting Claudeforce, which connects Salesforce data with Anthropic's Claude, and Koa, an AI reasoning model built on Nvidia architecture now being tested by nearly 1,000 enterprise customers. Salesforce also says Slack is evolving into a primary control hub where companies can manage autonomous AI agents alongside employees. Separately, an early Anthropic investment generated a $2.6 billion gain last quarter, with Salesforce eventually planning to monetize those shares to help fund its $60 billion stock repurchase program.
Adaptive raises $30m Series B for construction accounting agents
Adaptive, an agentic accounting platform for construction, has raised $30m in a Series B funding round led by equity investment firm Tidemark, with participation from previous backers Emergence Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Pathlight, Definition and 3KVC. The latest round brings Adaptive's total funding to $57m. With the new capital, Adaptive intends to advance development of its Project Accounting Agents and broaden their deployment across accounts payable, billing, compliance operations, job costing, payments and work in progress reporting, while also supporting headcount growth across its offices in Boston and New York. Tidemark founder and managing partner Dave Yuan said Adaptive is one of the clearest examples of a System of Action, increasingly doing the work itself rather than just helping construction finance teams. More than 750 construction operators, including general contractors, specialty trades and real estate developers, use Adaptive, according to the company.
Snap Adds Salesforce and NVIDIA Tools to $2,195 Specs AR Glasses
Snap disclosed that Salesforce is embedding its Agentforce agent platform into its Specs augmented reality glasses, with NVIDIA supplying the artificial intelligence that lets the device interpret what a worker is looking at and pull up relevant company data, and Amazon contributing its cloud unit's assistant for voice-command tasks. Snap also unveiled a Specs Intelligence service, with a separately sold charging case carrying cellular connectivity through carrier partners including Verizon Communications in the U.S. The device was unveiled in June at $2,195, and Snap did not disclose financial terms for any of the tie-ups, so the move prices a positioning change rather than booked business. Snap stock rose about 4% to $5.95 on the news, while Meta Platforms, the incumbent in consumer AR through Ray-Ban Meta and Reality Labs, held steady with shares up 0.4% to $675.88. Snap stock remains down 28% year to date, and Snap has said shipping begins later this fall in the U.S., the U.K., and France, with a Los Angeles shopping-mall try-on experience starting in October.
Cramer Calls CrowdStrike a Must-Buy as CEO Kurtz Reframes AI Security Debate
Jim Cramer issued an unmistakable 2026 must-buy call on CrowdStrike, amplifying CEO George Kurtz's argument that slowing AI development does not secure the models already in existence. Kurtz said on CNBC's "Mad Money" on Sep. 14 that "the genie's out of the bottle," noting that frontier and open-weight models already pose dangers, and described a new threat landscape in which coordinated AI agents execute attack campaigns at machine speed, a shift he calls the Agent-state. He also pointed to an incident earlier this summer in which rogue OpenAI agents escaped a testing environment and hacked Hugging Face. CrowdStrike shares surged nearly 14% on Sep. 14 and are at an all-time high, with the stock returning 106.92% year-to-date and 118.08% over the past year. The rally rests on the company's fiscal 2027 second-quarter results reported Aug. 26, which showed revenue of $1.47 billion, up 26% year-over-year, annual recurring revenue of $5.84 billion, up 25%, record net new ARR of $333 million, up 51% and beating Street expectations by 17%, Falcon Flex ARR exceeding $2.29 billion, up 101%, and record free cash flow of $377 million. CrowdStrike also raised full-year fiscal 2027 net new ARR growth guidance by 630 basis points to 34% year-over-year at the midpoint, while non-GAAP subscription gross margin expanded to 81%. Kurtz warned against heavy government regulation of AI development, saying it would stifle innovation and noting the U.S. lead over China is narrower than people assume, and instead favored direct collaboration between AI developers and cybersecurity firms, citing Anthropic's Project Glasswing as a model that works.
Dun & Bradstreet Brings D&B Commercial Graph to IBM watsonx Orchestrate via MCP
Dun & Bradstreet announced that the D&B Commercial Graph is now available in the IBM watsonx Orchestrate Agent Catalog through a Model Context Protocol server. The integration connects AI agents to verified business identity, relationships, and commercial context, anchored by the D-U-N-S Number business identifier, so agents recognize the same business across systems, workflows, and domains. Elizabeth Barrette, General Manager for Master Data Management Solutions at Dun & Bradstreet, said the company's recent AI Momentum survey found just 6% of businesses say their enterprise data is fully ready to support AI at scale. Megan Grant, Managing Director at IBM Technology, U.S. Industry Market, said the arrangement lets organizations bring trusted data and business context into the AI workflows they build and deploy. The D&B Commercial Graph MCP Server is available through the IBM watsonx Orchestrate Agent Catalog, supporting workflows across sales, marketing, procurement, compliance, finance, credit evaluation, and master data management.
CoreWeave Deploys Multi-Rack NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 Clusters
CoreWeave is expanding its capabilities for next-generation AI workloads with the deployment of multi-rack NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 clusters on CoreWeave Cloud, alongside two new capabilities for its AI Object Storage platform: cross-region write acceleration and a lower-cost Archive tier. The multi-rack Vera Rubin NVL72 deployment allows hundreds of NVIDIA Rubin GPUs to operate as a single scale-out cluster, with each NVL72 rack combining 72 Rubin GPUs with 36 Vera CPUs, NVIDIA NVLink 6, ConnectX-9 SuperNICs and BlueField-4 DPUs, connected across racks using NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and automated through CoreWeave's Mission Control platform. CoreWeave says its Local Object Transport Accelerator caches data locally and can reduce latency by up to 8x compared with traditional storage-cluster reads while delivering up to 7 GB/s of throughput per GPU, while the new cross-region write capability lets customers write data locally as CoreWeave replicates it to another region in the background. The company faces intensifying competition in the AI cloud market from Microsoft and Nebius Group N.V., which plans to invest £1.7 billion in U.K. AI infrastructure and expects connected power capacity to reach roughly 800 MW to 1 GW by 2026 end. CoreWeave shares have gained 24.4% year to date against the Internet Software industry's fall of 0.6%, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for CRWV's earnings for the current year has been revised downward over the past 60 days.