Summary Bullets:
• AI-driven conversational discovery experience boosts the relevancy of marketplaces among broader audiences.
• Network services evolve into consumable and programmable products via enterprise agents.
Agentic AI innovations have boosted hyperscaler marketplaces’ relevance, and global telecommunications giants are taking notice.
Continue reading “Agentic AI Transforms the Marketplace UX as Infra Services Become Consumable Products”
Summary Bullets:
• Chinese providers are catching up with global leaders in three areas: generative AI, operationalized solutions, and agentic AI, giving enterprises broader options to diversify their AI partners.
• However, gaps in go-to-market, professional services, and model development remain large – crucial areas to drive adoption and accelerate deployments.
AI demand continues to grow rapidly. GlobalData Market Opportunity Forecasts to 2030: Artificial Intelligence (published on June 30, 2026) forecasts the global AI market to increase at 48.2% five-year-CAGR to reach $1.3 trillion in 2030. This is also reflected by 88% of the 3,069 global enterprises interviewed by GlobalData, who increased their AI budget this year (source: GlobalData ICT Customer Insights Survey 2026. Asia-Pacific shows a similar trend with a 48.6% CAGR, accounting for 36.2% of the global AI market in 2026. While growth is reported across the stack from the GPU to the application layer, cloud-based enterprise platforms remain crucial to drive adoption by providing broad and flexible capabilities to develop, govern, and scale AI deployments. GlobalData’s recent updates on Cloud-Based Enterprise AI Platforms: Competitive Landscape Assessment (September 17, 2026) shows that global hyperscalers (Google and Amazon) continue to lead the market, followed closely by Microsoft and IBM. However, Chinese players including Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, and Tencent are closing the gap. This is important especially in markets like Asia where these players already have a strong presence. This gives enterprises broader options to diversify their AI partners, but also attracts cost-sensitive customers through their cost-leadership strategy.
Continue reading “Chinese Cloud Giants Close Enterprise AI Platform Gap with Global Hyperscalers, but Execution Lags”
Summary Bullets:
• While IP voice is less ubiquitous, when it matters it, it really matters
• Agent-to-agent communication adds a new paradigm to IP voice services
Calling IP voice a legacy service is a little unfair, but only a little. Innovation in this arena is still happening as can be seen by BT’s recent launch of its automated UC edge platform designed to help enterprises move numbers between UC platforms automatically. However, a recent and stark counterpoint to this is Lumen’s decision to exit the IP voice market.
Continue reading “Agentic AI May Give IP Voice a New Lease on Life as Legacy Decline Continues”
Summary Bullets:
• Meta will need to shed its consumer-centric image to gain traction in the business market, even if it only targets smaller organizations.
• Convincing organizations that they can trust Meta to secure personal information and corporate intellectual property will take time and effort.
On Monday September 28, 2026, Meta announced plans to enter what is already a crowded enterprise AI market. It will develop Meta Enterprise Platform, a collection of tools and services that will help business customers implement their own AI strategies. Few details were shared other than the platform will incorporate Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and other solutions.
Continue reading “Meta Will Need to Shed its Consumer-centric Image to Gain Ground in Enterprise AI”
Summary Bullets:
• Three voice-activated features coming to Google Workspace reflect a broader trend of AI becoming incorporated into everyday workflows.
• The features also mirror how vendors are opening their team collaboration platforms to support the multi-platform environment in which their users operate.
Google recently announced three voice-activated AI features coming soon to Google Workspace. ‘Gmail Live’ lets users ask conversational questions to retrieve information from their Gmail inbox such as “What’s my flight’s gate number?”. Users can talk to ‘Keep Live’ to capture ideas that cross their mind and turn them into organized, actionable notes. With ‘Docs Live’ users can engage in real-time conversation to create documents on the fly. Although Workspace users cannot avail themselves of the features quite yet, ‘Gmail Live’ and ‘Keep Live’ are available to Google AI subscribers on the Plus, Pro, and Ultra plans while ‘Docs Live’ is reserved for Pro and Ultra subscribers.
Continue reading “Google is Keeping Workspace on the Cutting Edge”
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Nokia didn’t use the term “Physical AI” in its announcement, but its new Cognitive Operations (CO) platform reads like a carefully constructed argument for why it belongs in that conversation. Physical AI is not just AI applied to industrial data; it is AI that perceives, decides, and supports action in the physical world, often in real time, often with incomplete connectivity, and often where failure carries operational, financial, or human consequences. This is the exact scope that Nokia is targeting with CO, initially for mining, construction, public safety, and defense. Specific examples of platform capabilities include vehicle-as-a-node, local inferencing (GPU/TPU), video/sensor analytics, safety interventions (driver fatigue/collision), and independent continuity (where operations continue despite disconnection).
Continue reading “Without Saying So Directly, Nokia Asserts its Right to Play in Physical AI”
Summary Bullets:
• Conversational AI is driving a major voice resurgence in customer service by improving the IP voice experience.
• Long call queues on account of human agents being thinly stretched across large call volumes have led to customer frustrations and poor CX, but modern versions of conversational AI are set to change that by taking away the frictions associated with voice.
It was believed that voice would diminish in value as digital channels started to emerge as an alternative to the voice channel. While messaging and chatbots offer cost and scale advantages, GlobalData’s research shows that voice continues to remain a vital channel for connecting with customers despite the frictions. Voice provides instant gratification and tends to be more straightforward to use as it does not involve navigating through messaging channels, websites and so and having to type messages. While the elderly demography tends to prefer voice due to greater familiarity, voice is seen to be popular even with the younger generation.
Continue reading “A New Breed of Conversational AI is Leading to Voice Resurgence in Customer Service”
Summary Bullets:
AI is changing the cloud landscape, creating the near-term need for a vast increase in processing power and storage space. Hyperscalers are responding with substantial facility construction plans. Just this year alone, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft Azure are pouring a total of $500 to $700 billion into extensions of their data center footprints. Given AI’s dominance in enterprise technology investment plans, this is a logical track. However, not everyone is on board with these aggressive development plans -and AI plays a role in that resistance.
Continue reading “Public Opposition to New Data Centers Disrupts but Doesn’t Derail US Facilities’ Expansion”Summary Bullets:
• After a period of ‘token maxxing,’ organizations are looking to reign in and better control inference costs.
• Instead, enterprises are now embracing ‘value-maxxing,’ which focuses on outcomes.
Last week, Google announced several enhancements to Gemini Enterprise designed to help enterprises obtain greater and faster ROI on their AI projects. The improvements address one of the biggest frustrations expressed by organizations today, namely that the benefits promised by AI are taking too long to realize. Companies are clamoring for domain specific solutions in order to speed the deployment, reduce the integration complexity, and increase the value obtained from AI projects. Additionally, business leaders are eager for better tools to help them manage AI costs. They are looking for improved visibility on token use and costs, more proactive spending controls, and more flexible payment options.
Continue reading “Google’s New Tools Support ‘Value Maxxing’ to Address Organizations’ Growing Concern Over AI ROI and Tokenomics”Summary Bullets:
• Salesforce has integrated Slackbot more deeply into its platform, providing access purportedly to the entire Salesforce ecosystem.
• Despite positives the announcement generates concerns, the most pressing regarding security.
Salesforce has greatly extended the scope of Slackbot, the AI-driven personal work agent built into Slack, claiming it now spans the entire Salesforce platform. The change will add substantial value, keep Slack – the company – competitive with rivals, and cement the starring role Slack has come to play at Salesforce.
Continue reading “Slackbot Spreads Its Wings but Questions Remain”
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