It's been another busy week in the wonderful world of customer experience, with a major acquisition from Salesforce, fighting talk from NVIDIA and ServiceNow, some eye-opening findings in Cisco's agentic AI report, and a deep dive into Microsoft's recent layoffs.
Here are the extracts from these popular news stories.
Salesforce to Acquire Informatica for $8BN: 3 Big Talking Points
Salesforce has agreed to acquire Informatica for approximately $8BM.
Bloomberg hinted at the news late last week, citing “a person familiar with the matter”.
Salesforce was linked to a move for Informatica in early 2024, but cooled its interest after reportedly failing to agree on an acquisition fee.
Yet, since the move broke down in April last year, Informatica’s stock price has dropped by over a third, and Salesforce has now swooped.
The deal – which is worth roughly $8BN in equity value – will see holders of Informatica’s Class A and Class B-1 common stock receive $25 in cash per share.
Explaining the company’s motives for the deal, Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce, said:
Together, Salesforce and Informatica will create the most complete, agent-ready data platform in the industry.
Investors did not react kindly, with Salesforce’s stock down by over three percent on the news (Read on...).
NVIDIA CEO: ServiceNow Is Destined to Be the Best Platform for Enterprise AI Agents
“As a third party watching the world of enterprise AI, ServiceNow is destined to be the best platform, the operating system of enterprise AI agents.”
Those are the opening comments of Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, as he took to the stage at this month’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2025 event. He continued:
The reason for that is because every company in the world needs AI agents. And those AI agents are going to be curated, managed, and improved by the IT department. ServiceNow is already in every company’s IT department.
Those IT departments may use the newly launched ServiceNow AI Control Tower as a single dashboard to do precisely what Huang suggested: curate, manage, and improve AI agents.
These agents will sit within the ServiceNow AI platform, which provides a framework for AI agents to flit between enterprise systems.
NVIDIA is powering many of the first-party AI agents that run across that platform. Yet, ServiceNow also supports third-party AI agents from the likes of Microsoft, Google, and many others.
As it does so, ServiceNow – again through the Control Tower – tracks AI agent adoption across departments, monitors ROI, and enables governance.
Unsurprisingly, Bill McDermott, Chairman & CEO of ServiceNow, celebrated the Control Tower’s launch and agreed with Huang’s take (Read on...).
