Editorial Director
Michael Nuñez is the Editorial Director of VentureBeat, where he leads the coverage of artificial intelligence and enterprise data. He has been an editor at Forbes, Popular Science, Gizmodo, and Mashable, and has written extensively about the social and ethical implications of technology.
The company says it is the first time an AI agent can begin a task in the cloud and dynamically hand off the confidential portions of that same task to a model running on the user's own hardware, without restarting the job or losing context. The feature becomes available today through Perplexity's desktop app for enterprise customers that opt in, as well as Pro and Max subscribers, on any Apple silicon Mac running macOS 15 or later.
The centerpiece of the announcement is Salesforce in Claude, a plugin for Anthropic's Claude CoWork that ships with 37 pre-built sales skills — covering meeting preparation, deal health reviews, and pipeline analysis — and lets sellers query, update, and act on live CRM data without ever opening Salesforce itself. The product is available to select pilot customers today, with an open beta planned for September and additional skills for other business functions beginning to launch in the third quarter.
The launch, developed in close partnership with Nvidia, is one of the most aggressive attempts yet to move serious AI agent workloads off the cloud and onto local devices. The model, the user's files, and the work itself can all stay on the machine. Work completed locally consumes no billing credits, and the company says every task starts on the device by default — with the system asking permission before sending any individual step to a more powerful frontier model in the cloud.
In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat, Scott White, Anthropic's head of product for enterprise, laid out the company's thesis for what it calls "multiplayer AI": a shift away from the single-user chatbot paradigm toward AI agents that operate across teams, read organizational context, and proactively insert themselves into work — sometimes without being asked.
The chip, which will power the next generation of IBM Z and LinuxONE systems, is the first dual-architecture mainframe processor ever built. It is designed to let enterprises run the vast and fast-growing ecosystem of Arm-native Linux software — including the AI frameworks that increasingly define modern infrastructure — directly alongside the z/OS transaction-processing workloads that anchor the world's banks, insurers, and governments.
The Salesforce-owned messaging platform today announced Slack Code, a new product that embeds AI coding agents — including Anthropic's Claude Code, Cognition's Devin, GitHub Copilot, and Vercel's agent — directly into dedicated Slack channels where entire teams can watch, steer, review, and ship software together. Slack Code is available on any Slack plan at launch, though customers need their own access to the partner agents.
The developer internet did what the developer internet does.
The headline numbers are striking: Writer says its agent product now operates at an average 52% lower cost, with a 48% improvement in speed and a 10% improvement in quality when paired with Palmyra X6. But the more consequential story may be how the company got there — and what its choices reveal about where the enterprise AI market is heading.
