Salesforce

Per-seat pricing for AI agents ranks last in G2's survey, with 9% of 1,019 buyers calling it fairest

G2's survey of 1,019 B2B buyers finds only 9% call per-seat pricing the fairest way to charge for AI agents, against 57% for pay-as-you-go. Vendors that kept agents inside seat plans go into 2027 renewals on the model buyers rank last, according to saastr.com's write-up.

ShinyHunters-linked crews take Okta with a phone call and a rogue MFA device, Health-ISAC warns

Health-ISAC warned members in September 2026 that ShinyHunters-linked crews extort healthcare without encrypting files, in one case taking over 1TB. A dev.to write-up of the warning points to new factor enrollments and bulk exports as the signals to watch.

Anthropic puts $100 million into training other companies' deployment engineers

Anthropic is putting $100 million into training 10,000 engineers from other companies as deployment specialists by the end of 2027. Business Insider ties the program to Claude spending ahead of an IPO, while Anthropic's executives describe a skills gap.

Federal agencies must now write 'SI' instead of 'AI'

Trump's September 29 executive order tells federal agencies to write "SI" instead of "AI" in their official documents and on their websites. The order does not bind private firms, but vendors that sell to agencies will meet "SI" throughout the documents they read.

Salesforce Data 360 injects a Spark listener plugin at its job gateway to find idle executors

Salesforce Data 360 instruments about eight million Spark runs a day at one submission gateway, without changing application code. The plugin fails open, so a broken collector leaves the platform team a data gap to chase while customer jobs keep running.

Chatbot users deferred to AI answers 80% of the time in a study aired at the New York Fed

Wharton researcher Steven Shaw told a New York Fed conference that chatbot users took the AI's answer 80% of the time and felt surer even when it was wrong. For banks, the fix discussed there is deliberate friction, paid for in the speed the tools were bought for.

SAP takes Joule outside its own apps with a general release this month

SAP said its Autonomous Enterprise architecture and Joule Work and Desktop become generally available this month, extending its agents to non-SAP apps. Rollout teams now have to decide where those agents may read and where they may act.

TikTok brings one-click checkout and an AI shopping agent into the For You feed

A product chief retrains her AI agent every couple of months because its answers get worse

Sumaiya Noor, a UK product chief, says her AI customer service agent gets worse over time and needs retraining every couple of months. For teams adding agents, that upkeep becomes recurring manager time, and so far only individual accounts describe it.

Nvidia adds BlueField-4 hardware watchdog to back up host-based AI agent containment

Nvidia on Monday launched an AI agent safety platform whose Sentry watchdog runs on its BlueField-4 data processors. The design assumes agents will work around their limits, so its strongest enforcement runs on hardware only Nvidia makes.

SaaStr's agent answers a $240,000 API-access estimate with a $5 Postgres mirror

SaaStr says one estimate puts AI-agent access to Salesforce, Atlassian and HubSpot at up to $240,000 a year, for API calls it never paid for. Its own revenue agent proposed mirroring the data into a $5 Postgres database, so vendors are now pricing against a buyer's cost of calling them less.

Software's 28-Point Lead Over Chips in Q3 Fueled by AI Sentiment Shift, Earnings and a Hedge Fund's Short Squeeze

Software stocks beat chips by 28 percentage points in the third quarter, as the IGV ETF rose 17% and SOXX fell 11%. Earnings now have to show how much of that came from AI revenue and how much from a hedge fund's forced buying.

ServiceNow handed a small in-house team a startup mandate to answer Serval and Slack

ServiceNow says a small team with a founder-like mandate built Flow, its AI service desk for Slack and Teams, in three months. For IT teams whose staff already work in chat, the question is whether a desk with no setup project will still fit once request volume and complexity grow.

Salesforce pays 67 times revenue for Listen Labs and its 50-million-person research panel

Salesforce agreed to pay about $2 billion for Listen Labs, roughly 67 times the AI interview startup's $30 million in annualized revenue. The price holds up only if selling those real-customer interviews through Salesforce's clouds lifts that revenue several times over.

AI agents are giving rank-and-file workers a manager's job at their old pay

Staff are doing manager work over AI agents without manager pay or title, Entrepreneur reports, with each engineer at startup Daytona overseeing about five. Companies are counting the output gains, and leaders now have to decide whether supervising agents counts toward job level and pay.

Salesforce agrees to buy AI interview startup Listen Labs at a reported 67 times revenue

Salesforce agreed to buy AI interview startup Listen Labs at a reported $2 billion, about 67 times its estimated revenue. Salesforce says the data will give its agents context, without saying how Listen's simulated customer answers are checked against real ones.

Salesforce agrees to buy Listen Labs to run real and simulated customer interviews in its CRM

Salesforce agreed to buy AI interview startup Listen Labs at a reported $2 billion that neither company has confirmed. Buyers get interviews with real participants alongside digital twins whose accuracy against real customers Salesforce has yet to show.

FBI memo tells every employee to treat their personal data as stolen after the FBIjobs.gov breach

FBI told staff in an internal memo to assume hacking group ShinyHunters stole data on every employee after a claimed 2 to 3 terabyte breach of FBIjobs.gov. Until the bureau confirms the scale, staff and the job applicants the hackers say are also in the files have reason to treat their home addresses as exposed.

McKinsey finds a third of companies skipped a software purchase they could build with AI

About a third of organizations in a 1,719-person McKinsey survey passed on at least one software purchase because they could build it with AI. The exposure is vendors' add-on revenue. Each builder also takes on upkeep a vendor would otherwise carry.

Zero raises $10.3M to point AI agents at the job salespeople refuse to do: log the CRM

Two Smartly.io veterans have $13M and a thirteen-person team to replace the Salesforce-plus-tools stack with background agents, and they are chasing Attio and Clay while both sit on far larger war chests.