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.
In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat, Willem Avé, Block's head of product at Square, described Managerbot as a decisive break from the company's earlier Square AI assistant, which functioned as a reactive chatbot that answered seller questions about sales, employees, and business performance.
The launch partners include Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palo Alto Networks. Anthropic says it has also extended access to more than 40 additional organizations that build or maintain critical software, and is committing up to $100 million in usage credits for Claude Mythos Preview across the effort, along with $4 million in direct donations to open-source security organizations.
The Nvidia CEO unveiled the Agent Toolkit, an open-source platform for building autonomous AI agents, and then rattled off the names of the companies that will use it: Adobe, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Siemens, CrowdStrike, Atlassian, Cadence, Synopsys, IQVIA, Palantir, Box, Cohesity, Dassault Systèmes, Red Hat, Cisco and Amdocs. Seventeen enterprise software companies, touching virtually every industry and every Fortune 500 corporation, all agreeing to build their next generation of AI products on a shared foundation that Nvidia designed, Nvidia optimizes and Nvidia maintains.
The trio of models — MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2 — are available immediately through Microsoft Foundry and a new MAI Playground. They span three of the most commercially valuable modalities in enterprise AI: converting speech to text, generating realistic human voice, and creating images. Together, they represent the opening salvo from Microsoft's superintelligence team, which Suleyman formed just six months ago to pursue what he calls "AI self-sufficiency."
The announcement, timed to a keynote event that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is headlining Tuesday morning, arrives less than three months after Slackbot first became generally available on January 13 to Business+ and Enterprise+ subscribers. In that short window, Slack says the feature is on track to become the fastest-adopted product in Salesforce's 27-year history, with some employees at customer organizations reporting they save up to 90 minutes per day. Inside Salesforce itself, teams claim savings of up to 20 hours per week, translating to more than $6.4 million in estimated productivity value.
The company's new AI Co-Builder lets non-technical users describe in plain language the software they need, and the platform generates a fully integrated system — database, user interface, permissions, and business logic included — connected and ready for real-world deployment immediately. The move marks a fundamental evolution for a company that spent five years building a no-code business before layering AI on top of what it describes as a proven infrastructure of constrained, pre-built building blocks.
The funding marks a significant escalation in the race to apply AI not just to software and content generation, but to the physical infrastructure that powers modern life. While most AI investment headlines have centered on large language models and generative tools, ThinkLabs is pursuing a different and arguably more consequential application: using physics-informed AI to model the behavior of electrical grids in real time, compressing engineering studies that once took weeks or months into minutes.
The enterprise voice AI market is in the middle of a land grab. ElevenLabs and IBM announced a collaboration just this week to bring premium voice capabilities into IBM's watsonx Orchestrate platform. Google Cloud has been expanding its Chirp 3 HD voices. OpenAI continues to iterate on its own speech synthesis. And the market underpinning all of this activity is enormous — voice AI crossed $22 billion globally in 2026, with the voice AI agents segment alone projected to reach $47.5 billion by 2034, according to industry estimates.
The update, available immediately as a research preview for paying subscribers, transforms Claude from a conversational assistant into something closer to a remote digital operator. It arrives inside both Claude Cowork, the company's agentic productivity tool, and Claude Code, its developer-focused command-line agent. Anthropic is also extending Dispatch — a feature introduced last week that lets users assign Claude tasks from a mobile phone — into Claude Code for the first time, creating an end-to-end pipeline where a user can issue instructions from anywhere and return to a finished deliverable.
The announcement caps a remarkably aggressive week for Mistral, which also released its Mistral Small 4 model, unveiled Leanstral — an open-source code agent for formal verification — and joined the newly formed Nvidia Nemotron Coalition as a co-developer of the coalition's first open frontier base model. Together, these moves paint the picture of a company that is no longer content to compete on model benchmarks alone and is instead racing to become the infrastructure backbone for organizations that want to own their AI rather than rent it.
The message to the AI industry, and to investors, was unmistakable: Nvidia is not slowing down. The Vera Rubin platform claims up to 10x more inference throughput per watt and one-tenth the cost per token compared with the Blackwell systems that only recently began shipping. CEO Jensen Huang, speaking at the company's annual GTC conference, called it "a generational leap" that would kick off "the greatest infrastructure buildout in history." Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will all offer the platform, and more than 80 manufacturing partners are building systems around it.