Meta is banking its future on its new Muse AI agent, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled as the centerpiece of the company's vision at the Meta Connect conference on Wednesday. The agent has quickly jumped to the top of both Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store, and according to Zuckerberg, millions of people are already using it. Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang demonstrated use cases ranging from scheduling meetings to negotiating better cable rates and making purchases across multiple services, and Meta is also bringing Muse to its next-generation Meta VR Glasses and to the Muse Charm, a handheld device that lets users interact with the agent without a smartphone or smart glasses. Meta said it will make money from Muse by taking a small cut on transactions made via the agent, and Zuckerberg said he expects Muse to grow into the personal super intelligence that billions of people around the world will use. The company dedicated part of the keynote to privacy, citing the Muse Secure VM and a forthcoming Muse Confidential VM, though it may take time to earn trust after its $5 billion settlement over the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal in 2019.
Microsoft merges Copilot apps into enterprise-focused platform, exits consumer AI race
Microsoft has consolidated its consumer and workplace Copilot assistants into a single enterprise-focused application, effectively ending its two-year effort to build a personal AI companion and pivoting its AI strategy entirely toward corporate productivity. According to Bloomberg, the move marks a strategic retreat from the personal chatbot market currently dominated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Meta's Muse. The redesigned app reorganizes the enterprise experience around three core capabilities: Home, a central hub blending conversational Chat and task delegation through a new Office in Copilot feature for collaborative editing of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents; Code, powered by GitHub Copilot technology, which lets non-technical employees build custom apps, dashboards, and automated workflows using natural language within a secure, IT-governed sandbox; and Autopilot, previously codenamed Scout, a persistent digital agent that lives in a company's cloud tenant and autonomously executes complex, multi-step background tasks such as supplier reviews. Microsoft announced a split pricing model to support the new autonomous features: a fixed-rate subscription called USL for everyday Chat capabilities and a pay-as-you-go Usage-Based Billing model, or UBB, for long-running agentic tasks in Code and Autopilot, with administrators managing variable costs through new FinOps for AI governance tools. Charles Lamanna, a Microsoft executive, told customers at a private preview event that the company is not going to build a Copilot that is like a personal companion, adding that people do not want that from Microsoft. The pivot comes as Microsoft reported having over 30 million paid Copilot enterprise subscriptions as of June, representing roughly a third of its M365 commercial user base.
Docker Launches Cloud Sandboxes to Extend Secure AI Agent Execution
Docker, Inc. has announced the launch of Docker Cloud Sandboxes, a new solution that extends secure AI agent execution from local environments into the cloud. The offering lets developers run complex agentic workflows without tying up local resources, providing a trusted and elastic environment for scalable workloads through features including microVM isolation, policy enforcement, and swift transitions from local to cloud execution. Docker also released its next-generation Kits, designed to package agentic sandboxes under the open OCI standard to promote interoperability and broad ecosystem support. In market moves, Everpure rose 11.2% to close at $121.88 after providing fiscal year 2028 earnings guidance on Wednesday for revenue between $7.0 billion and $7.3 billion, while TD SYNNEX fell 9.9% to $259.47 after announcing third-quarter earnings growth, a quarterly dividend, updated guidance, and the completion of a share buyback. Alphabet finished at $342.36, up 1.3%, following its collaboration with Experian to integrate Experian with Google Gemini for personalized credit insights via conversational AI, Microsoft closed at $497.93, down 0.5%, after teaming with Photonic on quantum resource estimation, and Oracle settled at $139.54, down 3.5%, after announcing new capabilities for its Digital Assets Data Nexus.
SAP Cloud Revenue Jumps 24% as AI Platform Expands
SAP SE reported second-quarter 2026 cloud revenue up 24% to €6.3 billion, with total revenue rising 11% to €9.9 billion and current cloud backlog growing 26% to nearly €23 billion. AI and SAP Business Data Cloud were embedded as key pillars in more than 90% of SAP's 50 largest deals. The company's new Business AI platform is built around three pillars — build, context and reason, and run and govern — spanning Joule Studio, SAP Business Data Cloud, Dremio, Reltio and Prior Labs, and is being extended through Joule Work, a single interface for collaborating with AI agents. Following Sapphire, beta programs for the new platform, Suite and Joule Work were immediately oversubscribed, and SAP plans to release nearly 50 assistants by the end of the third quarter and more than 400 Autonomous Suite agents by year-end. SAP's RISE and GROW with SAP offerings have driven strong uptake of its AI ERP migration toolchain, with customers achieving up to 30% lower ERP migration costs, and management expects outcome-based pricing and value-based monetization of AI agents to accelerate AI cloud revenue over the next 12 months. For 2026, management expects cloud revenue between €25.8 billion and €26.2 billion, cloud and software revenue of €36.3–€36.8 billion and approximately €10 billion in free cash flow.
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