Computerworld.com [Hacking News]

Microsoft will offer voluntary retirement buyouts to about 7% of its US workforce, or roughly 8,750 employees, in the first such program in the company’s 51-year history, as the technology industry restructures under the cost pressure of AI investment.

The program, available to US-based employees at the senior director level and below, comes as large technology companies, including Microsoft, increase capital spending on AI infrastructure such as data centers and compute capacity while reviewing workforce structures to align with those investments. The initiative marks the first time Microsoft has implemented a voluntary exit scheme of this kind, CNBC reported, citing an internal memo.

Microsoft employed 228,000 people worldwide as of June 30, 2025, including 125,000 in the US, according to its latest annual filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, putting the eligible pool at about 8,750 people.

“Our hope is that this program gives those eligible the choice to take that next step on their own terms, with generous company support,” Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s executive vice president and chief people officer, wrote in the memo.

The program offers financial incentives for eligible employees to leave voluntarily, providing an alternative to layoffs. Microsoft has not said whether roles vacated through the program will be backfilled, the report added, leaving open how responsibilities may be redistributed.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A controlled workforce reset

The retirement offer follows two earlier rounds of cuts at the company. Microsoft laid off about 6,000 employees in May 2025 and a further 9,000 in July, both rounds framed around efficiency and AI-driven productivity.

“Microsoft’s move towards voluntary buyouts is best understood not as a softer alternative to layoffs, but as a more controlled instrument of structural change,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research. “This is not about compassion. It is about precision. Large technology firms are entering a phase where workforce design is being actively recalibrated to align with a very different economic model — one defined by sustained, capital-intensive investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure.”

Capital-intensive AI investments

The buyout program comes as Microsoft increases spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure and services. The company said earlier this year it expects to spend about $80 billion in fiscal 2025 on capital expenditures, primarily to build AI-enabled data centers and support cloud-based AI workloads.

The scale of this investment has implications for operating costs and workforce allocation, as companies balance capital-intensive infrastructure spending with headcount and other expenses, analysts say.

“Enterprises are reallocating from labour-heavy coordination models towards compute-heavy execution models,” Gogia pointed out, referring to investments in data centers, AI accelerators, and platform infrastructure.

Microsoft has not directly linked the buyout program to specific AI initiatives, but the timing aligns with a broader shift in how resources are being deployed across the business.

Knowledge loss and execution risks

Gogia said the quieter risk for enterprises is what walks out of the building with the employees who accept the offer.

“The most significant and least understood risk in AI-driven workforce transitions is not job displacement. It is the erosion of institutional knowledge,” he said. “This knowledge is rarely documented in a way that can be easily transferred or automated. It resides in experience, in exception handling, in the unwritten rules that govern how processes actually work under real-world conditions. When experienced employees exit through voluntary programmes, they take with them not just skills, but context.”

He added that this can affect execution, especially as organizations adopt new AI systems at the same time. “Teams are expected to adopt new technologies while compensating for knowledge gaps, which can slow execution and increase reliance on oversight,” he said

Broader tech layoffs

The Microsoft announcement landed on the same day Meta told employees it would eliminate about 8,000 jobs, roughly 10% of its global workforce, and leave another 6,000 open roles unfilled. The Meta cuts take effect May 20 and come as the company prepares to roughly double its 2025 capital spending on AI infrastructure.

Three weeks earlier, Oracle announced up to 30,000 job cuts, roughly 18% of its 162,000-person global workforce, through termination emails on March 31. The company disclosed a $2.1 billion restructuring charge in its SEC filings. Investment bank TD Cowen had warned in January that the reductions would free up $8 billion to $10 billion in cash flow to fund Oracle’s AI data center expansion.

Amazon announced 16,000 job cuts in January, and Salesforce has linked roughly 1,000 reductions to AI automation. Meta, Salesforce, Microsoft, Dell, and Intel have collectively announced more than 24,000 AI-related job cuts, according to an earlier tally, with a running industry timeline spanning dozens of companies.

Full details of the offer are expected to reach eligible employees in the coming weeks.

Google Keep lets you create notes and to-do lists that sync across your computer and phone or tablet. It’s handy in a variety of ways: You can record voice memos, and Keep will transcribe them as text notes. You can include images in your notes, and if an image includes text, it shows up in search results. You can create time-triggered reminder notifications based on your notes. You can share your notes with other people and collaborate on them.

Keep is free for individual users and included with a subscription to Google Workspace. You use it through a web browser on your computer, and it’s also available as an app for your Android or iOS device. You’ll get the most mileage from Keep if you use both the desktop browser version and the mobile app in your daily workflow, so that you can take notes and access them wherever you are. Your Keep notes will sync to the cloud through Google Drive.

This guide walks you through how to quickly start using Keep. We’re focusing on the web version here, but most of the same features are also in the Keep mobile app, just laid out differently.

In this article:

• Meet the Keep home page
• Create a new note
• Enhance your note
• Finish your note
• Manage your notes
• Use keyboard shortcuts

Meet the Keep home page

Start by going to keep.google.com. If you’re not already signed in with your Google account (for Gmail or Google Workspace), you’ll be prompted to do so.

Keep’s home page comprises a main board in the center and a sidebar along the left. The first time you use Keep, this main board will be empty; once you start adding notes, they’ll appear here. The white bar in the center of the main board (with “Take a note…” inside it) is what you use to create notes.

Your first view of the Google Keep home page.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Create a new note

Start typing inside the “Take a note” text box. As you type, the white bar expands down and becomes a new note. You can type in whatever text you want or paste in text that you’ve copied from another source.

Along the top of the note, you can type in a title for the note. To the right of this title line is a pushpin icon. Clicking it prioritizes the note by pinning it toward the top of the main board. (You’ll find more details about how pinned notes work later in this guide.)

Click the pushpin icon to pin the note near the top of your notes board.

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If you paste in a web link, a preview of the linked page appears along the bottom of the note as a thumbnail with sample text from the page. Clicking the preview opens the link in a new browser tab. To remove the preview, click the three-dot icon that appears at its right and select Remove.

Link previews appear on notes by default but can be removed.

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For each additional link you add, a preview for it is added to the bottom of the note, below the preview for the previously added link. This link preview feature may not work for every link you paste into your note, though. (It can also be turned off under Keep’s settings, described later in this guide.)

If you want to create a list of numbered items in your note, start a line by typing 1. Then type your text and press the Enter key; the next line automatically begins with “2.” You can delete this subsequent number by pressing the Backspace key. Similarly, typing an asterisk (*), typing text, and hitting Enter creates a bulleted list.

If you start a numbered list, Keep automatically numbers subsequent lines.

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5 more ways to create Keep notes

Here are other ways to create a new note in Keep:

• Start a to-do list by clicking the checkbox icon on the right side of the “Take a note” bar. Then follow the steps in “Turn a note into a to-do list” below.
• Draw a doodle to put into the note by clicking the paintbrush icon on the right side of the “Take a note” bar. Then follow the steps in “Add a drawing” below. Note that this tool is available only when you use Keep in Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or another browser that’s based on Chromium, as well as the mobile app. It does not appear in Firefox.
• Upload an image to put in the new note by clicking the picture icon at the end of the “Take a note” bar. Then follow the steps in “Add or remove images” below. If you’re using the mobile app, you can take a photo with your phone or tablet.
• In the mobile app, record a voice memo. In the Android app, press the + icon and then the microphone icon that appears. On iOS, press the microphone icon at the bottom of the home screen. Start speaking, and Keep will transcribe your spoken words into text in real time.

In the Keep Android app, press the + button and then the microphone icon to record a voice memo.

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• Have Google’s AI tool, Gemini, generate a list: In the Keep app for Android, tap the + icon, select Help me create a list, and enter a prompt. This feature is available only if you have a Pixel phone or a Google AI Pro, Google AI Ultra, or Workspace Labs account.

Some Android users can enlist Gemini to generate task lists.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Use the Keep Chrome extension to create notes

Google offers a Keep extension for Chrome that lets you quickly create notes based on web pages as you browse. After you’ve installed it, pin the Keep icon to Chrome’s address bar so that stays visible: Click the Extensions icon, and on the panel that opens, click the pin icon to the right of Google Keep Chrome Extension.

Now open a web page and click the Keep icon to the right of the address bar. A new blank note will appear at the upper right. When you’re finished filling it out, click Create Note, and this new note will appear on your Keep notes list. The link to the web page will be set at the top of the new note.

The Keep extension for Chrome lets you create a note without having to open the Keep web app.

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You can also use text on a web page to create a note: Highlight the text, right-click on it, and select Save selection to Keep.

And you can save an image on a web page to a new note: Right-click the image, select Google Keep Chrome Extension > Save image to Keep. A new blank note will appear at the upper right for you to fill out, as described above, with the image embedded on it.

The Keep extension lets you create a new note from selected text or an image on a web page.

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Enhance your note

At the bottom of a note is a toolbar that lets you take various actions on a note. Starting from the left…

Format text in a note

Click the icon of the underlined “A” to open a toolbar that lets you format text that you’ve selected in your note. There are three size options (heading 1, heading 2, normal) and three styles (bold, italic, underline). If you haven’t selected any text, new text that you start typing in your note will appear in the size and style that you’ve selected on this toolbar.

Change the background

The palette icon lets you change the background color of the note. You can choose from eleven colors and nine background images.

A background color can help a note stand out on your board.

Howard Wen / Foundry

You may find it helpful to change a note’s background color to make it easy to spot on the main board, or to designate notes under a similar category with the same color. Or you could come up with a color-coded system — for example, red notes have the highest priority, while yellow notes get lower priority.

Set a reminder for your note

Click the bell icon to pick a day and time when you want a notification to be sent to your PC, phone, or tablet about this note. Select one of Keep’s suggested three reminder times or Pick date & time to set a custom time for the alert to appear. You can use this function to remind you of an appointment or other important event.

Remember important items or events by creating a note and adding a reminder.

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A reminder appears along the bottom of an opened note or a note on the main page of Keep. You can remove a reminder from a note by hovering over it and clicking the X by the reminder. To change the reminder’s date, time, or interval: Click the reminder itself, which will open a panel that lets you change these attributes.

Note: Reminders for your Keep notes are saved and can also be managed in Google Tasks, which you can access through its web app or mobile app for Android or iOS.

Invite collaborators

The headshot icon lets you share the note with others so that you can work on it together. These people can be from your list of contacts saved under your Google account (or your corporate directory under a Google Workspace account), or you can invite people by entering their email addresses. They’ll get an email inviting them to collaborate on your note; they will need to sign in with a Google account to do so.

Need help with a note? Invite collaborators.

Howard Wen / Foundry

The people you invite to collaborate can change all aspects of your note, as described throughout this guide, except for deleting the note.

Add or remove images

To add images to your note, click the picture icon and select an image file stored on your PC. (In the mobile app, you can take a photo or choose an image stored on your phone or tablet.) It will appear at the top of your note.

Images you add to notes appear at the top.

Howard Wen / Foundry

You can keep adding images; each subsequent image you add to a note appears to the right of the first image you added. When you click an image in a note, a viewer tool shows you the image in a larger size.

To remove an image: Move the mouse pointer over it and click the trash can icon that appears on the lower-right of the image.

Archive a note

Clicking the “down arrow in a box” icon removes the note from the main board and stows it in your Keep account’s archive. This is a good place to put notes for safekeeping when you’re no longer using them but don’t want to delete them.

Tag a note with a label

Tagging a note with one or more labels enables you to find them quickly later. For example, you can choose to see only the notes that you’ve tagged with the “Work” label on the main board. (Later in this guide we’ll discuss how to filter notes by label.)

To add a label to a note: Click the three-dot icon on the note’s toolbar and select Add label from the pop-up menu. (If your note already has a label, select Change labels from the pop-up menu.) You can type a new label inside the “Enter label name” box and press the Enter key, or select the checkbox for a label that you’ve previously created on the list below. When you’re done adding labels to your note, just click anywhere outside of the “Label note” pop-up panel.

You can select from existing labels or create new ones on the fly.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Label tags appear along the bottom of an opened note or a note on the main page of Keep. You can remove a label from a note by hovering over it and clicking the X by the label.

Add a drawing

Remember, this option is available only if you’re using Keep in Chrome or a Chromium-based browser, or the Keep mobile app.

Click the three-dot icon on the note’s toolbar and select Add drawing from the pop-up menu. A simple drawing tool opens; you can use it to quickly sketch a doodle using a mouse, touchpad, or the touchscreen of your phone or tablet.

Add a quick sketch to illustrate a point in your note.

Howard Wen / Foundry

When you’re finished, click the left-pointing arrow in the upper-left corner to return to your note. The drawing you sketched appears at the top of your note, and you can manage it like any other image.

Note: You can edit a drawing that you’ve made or draw over an image that you’ve added to a note. Simply open the note and click on the drawing or image. A drawing you’ve created will open immediately in the drawing tool. To open other images in the drawing tool, click the pen icon at the upper-right corner.

Turn a note into a to-do list

Click the three-dot icon on the toolbar and select Show checkboxes from the pop-up menu. Checkboxes will be set at the beginning of each line of text in the main body of your note.

(If you turn this function on for a blank note by clicking the checkbox icon at the right end of the “Take a note” bar, each new line of text that you type will start with a checkbox.)

Give yourself a feeling of accomplishment by turning your note into a to-do list and checking items off as you complete them.

Howard Wen / Foundry

When you have a note with a checklist open,  a six-dot icon appears to the left of each checkbox. You can rearrange the order of the items in the list by clicking and holding a six-dot icon, then dragging and dropping the item into another spot in the list. (In the mobile app, press and hold a six-dot icon, then drag and drop the item.)

You can use the same technique to indent items in the checklist: Grab the six-dot icon next to an item, then drag it to the right and release. This allows you to make a checkbox item appear as a subsection below the item above it.

Indent checklist items to make them subsections of your main list.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Clicking an item’s checkbox crosses out its text and sends it to the bottom of the note. If you click the checkbox again to remove the checkmark, this sends the checkbox line of text back to the list of unchecked items. Its text will no longer be crossed out.

Checking off completed items moves them to the bottom of the note.

Howard Wen / Foundry

You can delete a checkbox item (rather than marking it complete) by hovering the mouse pointer over it and clicking the X that appears over its right end.

To uncheck or delete all items you’ve checked, or to hide the checkboxes: Click the three-dot icon in the toolbar at the bottom of the note and select Uncheck all items, Delete checked items, or Hide checkboxes.

Extract text from images

If an image attached to your note depicts text, Keep can try to extract it. Click the three-dot icon, then select Grab image text to insert that text into your note.

Keep can detect text in images and insert it into a note.

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Send your note to Google Docs

When a note starts to turn into a missive, you can send it to Google Docs for more advanced editing options. Click the three-dot icon and select Copy to Google Docs. A copy of the note will be sent to your Google Drive, where you can further work on it in Docs as a normal document.

Finish your note

When you’re done tweaking your note, click Close. This shrinks down the note and sends it to the main board of your Keep home page. You can reopen a note by clicking it, make further changes to it, and click Close again.

Click Close to save your note and send it to the main board.

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Manage your notes

The main board of your Keep home page is where your notes appear. Imagine it as a big cork board that your notes are pinned to as cards.

Once you’ve created several notes, it can be difficult to find the one you want. But never fear: Keep has a number of ways to make them easier to find.

Arrange your notes

Notes that you’ve pinned (by clicking the pushpin icon to the right of a note’s title line) are set toward the top of the main board. More recently pinned notes appear first. Unpinned notes are pushed down toward the bottom.

Pinned notes appear at the top of your main board.

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To rearrange your notes, just drag and drop one note to another spot on the main board. The other notes will rearrange themselves to accommodate the note in its new spot.

If you want to see a certain note at the top of your main board, pin it and then, after newer pinned notes displace it, drag and drop it at the top. Or open the note, unpin it, and immediately re-pin it. This will set the note as the first one at the upper left of the board.

Search for notes

Along the top of your Keep home page is a search box you can use to search for text in your notes. Notes that contain your search query will appear on the main board.

Find notes quickly by using the search box up top.

Howard Wen / Foundry

You can also narrow down the search to certain types of notes (for example, those that contain drawings or voice memos), notes that have certain labels, or notes that you’ve shared with certain contacts. Keep provides handy shortcuts below the search box that you can click to look for notes containing these and other criteria.

Keep has some search tricks up its sleeve, too: Remember how it transcribes voice memos to text? That text is searchable. What’s more, if text appears in an image in a note, Keep can search that text as well.

Choose List view or Grid view

To the right of the search box are three icons:

• Refresh (a circular arrow — click this to reload your Keep home page)
• List view/Grid view (two horizontal bars or four small squares)
• Settings (a gear)

By default, your Keep home page is set to Grid view, which arranges your notes in a grid layout.

Clicking the horizontal bars icon puts your main board into List view, which makes your notes wider and shows them in one long, single column. This can be better for scrolling through them on a phone screen, or if you’d rather see more information on individual notes at a glance.

When you’re in List view, the icon changes to four small squares. Click it to return to Grid view.

Click the List view icon to see more of each note at once. If you prefer the default compact view, click the Grid view icon.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Navigate the left sidebar

Keep’s left sidebar helps you filter which notes are shown on the main board.

• Click Reminders to see only notes that you set with reminder notifications.
• Click one of the labels to see only notes that you’ve tagged with that label.

The left sidebar lets you filter notes by label.

Howard Wen / Foundry

• Click Edit labels to create a new label, change the name of a label, or delete a label.
• Click Archive to see only notes that you’ve archived.
• Click Trash to see notes that you’ve recently deleted. From here you can restore a note to the main board. Otherwise, a deleted note stays in Trash for 7 days before it’s removed forever from your Keep account.

Select a note in Trash, then click the Restore icon on the toolbar along the bottom of the note to restore it to the main board.

Howard Wen / Foundry

• Click the triple-bar icon at the upper-left corner to narrow or widen the left sidebar. When narrowed, the sidebar shows only the icons of these note labels. This may enable another column of notes to be shown on the main board, but it depends on your screen resolution, the size of your browser window, and your browser’s zoom level. You can try zooming your browser view in or out by pressing Ctrl + – (minus key) or Ctrl + + (plus key) to see how that affects the notes shown in the main window.

Click the three-line icon at the upper left to narrow the left sidebar and allow for another column of notes to be shown on the main board.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Adjust settings

To the right of the List view/Grid view icon, click the gear icon and select Settings from the pop-up menu. A panel opens where you can disable note sharing, turn off thumbnail previews for links in your notes, and more.

Settings lets you tweak some of Keep’s default behaviors.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Use keyboard shortcuts

You can save time in Google Keep by using keyboard shortcuts to trigger some actions. Below are some of the most useful shortcuts. To see more, click the gear icon at the upper right of the Keep home page and select Keyboard shortcuts, or just type ? when you’re on the Keep home page.

Handy Google Keep keyboard shortcuts ActionWindows shortcutmacOS shortcutON THE KEEP HOME PAGEStart a new noteccStart a new checklist notellSearch notes//Move highlight to next notejjMove highlight to previous notekkSelect highlighted notexxArchive selected note(s)eeMove selected note(s) to Trash##Pin or unpin selected note(s)ffToggle between List view and Grid viewCtrl-g⌘-gIN A NOTECopyCtrl-c⌘-cCutCtrl-x⌘-xPasteCtrl-v⌘-vUndoCtrl-z⌘-zRedoCtrl-y⌘-yFinish editing noteEscEsc

This article was originally published in January 2019 and most recently updated in April 2026.

Related reading:

• 26 note-perfecting tips for Google Keep on Android
• Google Workspace power tips: Tap into cross-app productivity
• More Google Workspace tips and tutorials

Workers are facing a conundrum: They worry about the potential for their displacement by AI even as it dramatically speeds up their own productivity.

According to a new survey from Anthropic, workers in roles most likely to be taken over by AI (developers or IT workers, for instance) recognize their precarious position. Yet, perhaps naturally, they readily adopt the tools that could take their jobs, and see first-hand how well they work.

This measurement is fundamentally different from the way others are gauging AI job displacement, noted Thomas Randall, research director at Info-Tech Research Group.

While macro reports, such as those from Goldman Sachs, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or the World Economic Forum (WEF), are asking what share of existing job tasks AI could theoretically perform in the future, “Anthropic is measuring qualitative experiences of workers in the present,” he pointed out. This “tells us how people are navigating this landscape in real time.”

The paradox of AI in the workforce

Anthropic’s survey of 81,000 Claude users gauged peoples’ “visions and fears” around advances in AI, and weighed these findings against the company’s own measurement of jobs most vulnerable to AI displacement. This was based on Claude usage data; jobs are identified as more exposed when associated tasks are significantly performed on the platform, in work-related contexts, and take up a larger share of a role.

Some occupations at risk include computer programmers, data entry keyers, market researchers, software quality assurance analysts and testers, information security analysts, and computer user support specialists.

Overall, one-fifth of respondents expressed concern about displacement, noting that their job, or at least aspects of it, is being taken over by automation. Those in jobs identified as most exposed readily recognized that fact, voicing worry three times as often as those in less at-risk positions. One software engineer remarked: “like anyone who has a white collar job these days, I’m 100% concerned, pretty much 24/7 concerned, about losing my job eventually to AI.”

Early-career respondents were also more nervous than others.

At the same time, those in the highest-paid occupations reported the largest productivity gains when using AI. This is most notably in terms of their ability to perform new tasks, which was cited by 48% of users. In addition, 40% of workers said the technology helped speed up their work, and a little more than 10% said it improved the quality of their work.

In general, enterprise usage of AI is “actually quite consistent,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. Teams are using the technology “where information is abundant and time is limited,” such as in drafting documents and code, summarizing content, responding to customer queries, navigating internal systems.

Is AI actually creating more work?

Still, not everyone thinks AI makes their jobs easier or faster. In some cases, people felt it made their work harder; for instance, project managers are assigning tickets for issues that are much more difficult to solve, Anthropic noted.

Gogia agreed that, even when tasks become easier, scope and responsibilities expand, and roles can absorb adjacent tasks. This results in a “redistribution of effort,” rather than a reduction of effort.

“Faster generation means higher expectations on quality,” he said. More output feeds into decision pipelines that are already constrained. “In some cases, the system becomes heavier, not lighter.”

Delayed impact on enterprises

 The market is rewarding those who can integrate AI into complex workflows to do more, faster, and often with better outcomes, Gogia noted. However, the most exposed tasks, including  documentation, basic coding, routine analysis, and structured support work, often “sit at the base of the experience ladder.”

These very tasks traditionally have given entry-level workers a way in, and the automation of them reduces the urgency for companies to hire them. “What you begin to lose is not the job,” said Gogia. “It is the path into the job.”

This can have a delayed impact; enterprises may not realize until years later that they do not have enough mid-level experts because they didn’t bring enough people in at lower levels. As AI plays a greater role in the workplace, there must be a “conscious effort” to rethink how people enter and grow, Gogia said. “New pathways need to be created, and they need to be deliberate.”

How enterprise leaders should adjust

As is often the case, sentiment moves faster than structural change, Gogia pointed out. Workers feel the shift almost immediately, but organizations take longer to adjust hiring, redesign roles, and rethink workforce structures.

“This is why expectations can become misaligned,” he noted. The reality is that most enterprises have introduced AI into existing ways of working without fundamentally changing them. Acceleration occurs in unchanged systems that still carry the same dependencies, approval chains, and coordination challenges.

Ultimately, Gogia advised, leaders must approach the shift with “intentional design.” This requires clarity, he emphasized; people need to understand how their work is expected to change. What will be enhanced? What will reduce? Where should they focus their development?

Baselines are moving: Roles may begin to look “oversized” as what used to be considered a full day’s work begins to look like half a day’s work, or what used to be considered efficient begins to look average. “AI is changing how work is done, but more importantly, it is changing what work expects from people,” said Gogia.

As well, Info-Tech’s Randall pointed out that workers who experience AI expanding what they can do by performing tasks previously outside their competence appear to relate to AI more positively than those who experience it as doing their existing job faster. So, he advised, “tech leaders should design AI deployment around capability extensions.”

Along with goal setting, managers must have support, Gogia emphasized. They set expectations and interpret strategy, and when they’re not properly equipped, “even the best tools will fall short,” he said. Measurement must also evolve; enterprises need to look at quality, sustainability, and capability development over time.

“What we are witnessing right now is not a sudden disruption,” said Gogia. “It is a gradual shift that is becoming impossible to ignore.”

The AI agent introduction frenzy continued at a torrid pace this week, with OpenAI launching what it called workspace agents in ChatGPT and Microsoft adding hosted agents to its Foundry Agent Service.

Both launched on the same day that Google both updated its Gemini Enterprise app to provide new ways for office workers to build, manage, and interact with AI agents, and launched the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which the company said is designed to build, scale, govern, and optimize agents.

This trio of offerings follows Anthropic’s early April introduction of Claude Managed Agents, a suite of composable APIs for building and hosting cloud-hosted agents, which is now in public beta.

In its announcement, OpenAI said, “workspace agents are an evolution of GPTs. Powered by Codex, they can take on many of the tasks people already do at work—from preparing reports, to writing code, to responding to messages. They run in the cloud, so they can keep working even when you’re not. They’re also designed to be shared within an organization, so teams can build an agent once, use it together in ChatGPT or Slack, and improve it over time.”

Microsoft, meanwhile, stated in a blog that its latest move “brings agent-optimized compute and services designed for production-grade enterprise agents.” After its preview of hosted agents last year at Microsoft Ignite, the company said, “this refresh is a fundamentally different experience: secure per-session sandboxes with filesystem persistence, integrated identity, and scale-to-zero economics.”

Announcements are connected

Jason Andersen, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said, “these four announcements are connected, as the frenzy around agents continues. What OpenAI is announcing is the native ability to support the creation and sharing of agents.”

This is new functionality for OpenAI, which is a bit late to the game; Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and others have had this capability for some time, and are in fact moving farther ahead with these other announcements, he said.

 “What we are seeing with Anthropic and Microsoft is that, as agents become more powerful, they will go to great lengths to solve the problem they are posed with, and sometimes that includes the agent writing code and doing other tasks,” he pointed out. “This increases complexity and concerns about agents and models being well managed while running. The hosting options both of these vendors provide are a more advanced infrastructure for agents to run.”

Right now, he added, “many agents are being treated as simply a more advanced front end. These newer options provide the ability for an agent to do things like spin up a dedicated container, and they can support semi-autonomous and, in some cases, autonomous operations. These two announcements are more infrastructure-related, whereas OpenAI is more about agent building.”

He described the Google launch as being “something in between.”

He noted, “OpenAI’s announcement is very similar to last year’s announcement of Gemini Enterprise from Google. This year, Google took steps forward to enable a management control plane for agents called Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which enables a much richer sharing experience and a number of management and governance capabilities.”

On the whole, Andersen said, “the agent space is getting very hot, and some who have been later to the party are getting on board, and those who have been investing are evolving to provide end customers more scale, operations, and security capabilities.”

Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said that with the flurry of announcements “we’re seeing a race to gain critical mass as the agentic platform becomes the daily work interface for the enterprise. Anthropic and OpenAI are coming at it from their AI startup positioning, while Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are leveraging their entrenched hyperscaler and enterprise platform positions.”

Jackson pointed out that the differentiation in what these tech firms offer is most clear in who they are targeting and their delivery model.

He noted that OpenAI’s Workspace Agents are designed for non-technical business teams. They provide templates for agents that can automate tasks from lead scoring to vendor research reports. Users can “prompt” their way to work automation without worrying about the behind-the-scenes mechanics – what model is being used, what APIs are being called, how data is retrieved and written, or how permissions are granted.

Anthropic is taking a different approach, he said. Rather than going directly to business users, it is providing tools to enterprise development teams to build their own agents and provide a custom interface to their users. Anthropic’s Managed Agents are a group of composable APIs that developers can use. The approach is more flexible, but it requires more effort to produce value.

Microsoft and Google, on the other hand, are both vertically integrated platforms providing an agentic layer on top of an extensive stack. Microsoft’s Foundry is similar to Anthropic’s offering, but offers even more flexibility by remaining model-agnostic and allowing developers to choose their preferred agentic framework.

New problems as the market develops

As the agentic platform market develops, Jackson observed, “we are seeing new problems crop up regarding observability. Detecting and observing agents will be rooted in the identity system used to provision them. However, since each platform uses its own identity system, it will be difficult for any one platform to see all agents created in an enterprise, or worse, those created by a rogue user (‘Shadow AI’).”

Furthermore, he added, “agentic workflows imply significantly higher AI token consumption to complete work. We are already seeing AI capacity constraints and price increases due to high demand. Because agents require multiple ‘reasoning’ steps to complete a single task, it is very hard to predict what a workflow you automate today might cost to run one year from now.”

This means that IT leaders need to decide where they will build the agentic layer of their stack. “You don’t want to get it wrong, because becoming entrenched in one platform means significant vendor lock-in,” he said. “We already worry about lock-in with systems and data, but when you add an intelligence layer, you are essentially building a brain with neuronal pathways to your workflows. It is not going to be easy to do a ‘brain transplant’ to another platform later.”

This article originally appeared on InfoWorld.

Global IT spending is expected to rise this year to $6.31 trillion, according to a new forecast from Gartner, a 13.5% increase compared to 2025.

According to the research firm, AI is the single most important driver behind the growth, with investments in AI infrastructure, in particular, driving the trend. The data center systems segment is expected to grow by a whopping 55.8% during the year, by far the fastest growing of all categories.

At the same time, IT services continue to account for the largest share of total spending and are expected to exceed $1.87 trillion this year. Software is also showing strong growth, particularly in generative AI.

Growth is also expected in the device market, though at a significantly slower pace. Overall, the market is expected to reach approximately $856 billion, though Gartner says this growth is being slowed by rising memory prices.

Chinese market research firm Sigmaintell expects Apple to be the only company to see growth in the laptop market this year.

Overall, Sigmaintel predicts global notebook shipments will reach 181.1 million units this year, a decline of 8%. That drop will, in part, be caused by memory and component shortages and also by slowing market demand. That’s going to damage all of the notebook vendors, bar Apple,. 

Apple laptop sales expected to rise more than 20%

Sigmaintell calculates Apple will ship 28 million laptop in the year, up 21.7% from 2025. This puts Apple in third place in laptop shipments, a demand the company will be able to meet despite component shortages because of the efficient use of memory inherent to its systems. That memory efficiency acts as a protection against the impact of climbing costs, even as competitors struggle with the affects on their business.

Apple’s incoming CEO, John Ternan, is being presented as a hardware man, so he will no doubt be pleased to experience the benefit of MacBook Neo’s massive attack on the lower echelons of the market. The Neo is already generating millions of additional sales, something Apple’s diversified revenue engine, including services, can further capitalize on.

PC makers face steep decline

There’s quite stark news for PC manufacturers. The report predicts Lenovo, Dell, HP, and ASUS will see sharp sales declines and warns that the entire industry will need to quickly transition from hardware-based sales toward full ecosystem plays. 

That’s going to be extraordinarily difficult for most PC makers. Not only do most of them use operating systems they don’t build themselves, but most lack a successful range of services customers will happily choose to use. 

For the most part, while Apple offers Apple Music, competitors only offer Spotify, a situation that generates far less revenue for them. That lack of successful monetization in terms of attached income across the customer base meant less when the PC market was growing, but in an environment buffeted by multiple business challenges it becomes a vulnerability that cannot be ignored. It exposes the inherent weakness of a strategy in which hardware manufacturers rely on third parties for operating systems and services, as the lion’s share of income doesn’t reach those hardware makers. 

You can go your own way

There’s little doubt that part of the reason Apple is in such a strong position is because of its highly strategic outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, who led efforts to build a strong services business, accompanied by a wide ecosystem of complementary accessories. You don’t just buy an iPhone, you buy a Mac, AirPods, and Apple Music. You don’t just get an iPad, but you likely also acquire Apple Arcade. 

To a great extent, Apple’s strength now owes a big debt to the many years in which the company was marginalized. Forced to follow its own path, Apple deliberately developed its own unique platform-based approach. That approach meant the company remained profitable even when it held just a few percentage points of the PC market; as its market share improves, we can also see its profitability climb. 

The way that you do it

This good news may not matter as much as you might think to Apple’s leadership team. To them, while becoming the industry’s fastest-growing notebook manufacturer is nice, what matters more is crafting a platform experience that means something to the people using it. That, after all, is how to generate the high user satisfaction Apple’s platform loyalty and word-of-mouth recommendations come from.

That 16% of everyone purchasing a notebook this year will choose a Mac suggests a watershed moment for all Apple’s platforms.

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Apple’s Tim Cook was viewed as a worthy successor to Steve Jobs when he took over as CEO in August 2011, two months before Jobs’ death. 

Apple products became successful (and profitable) in many ways due to his success as COO, where he whipped company operations and supply chains into shape. Cook expanded the company’s product portfolio into new devices such as the Vision Pro and Apple Watch, rolled out a plethora of profitable services, and cut off failed projects like the rumored Apple car.

But Cook, who announced this week he will step down as CEO on Sept. 1 to become executive chairman, has one major blemish on his legacy. He missed perhaps one of the most important moments in computing history — the AI revolution. 

Apple could still win AI war, and it now falls on incoming CEO John Ternus, formerly Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, to play catch-up with AI rivals Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. 

When ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022, Apple was years behind in the AI race and had to scramble to catch up. Cook’s failure is mostly attributable to Apple believing it could always go it alone when it comes to technology, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates

“They have a bias to doing everything in house,” Gold said.

The company did not believe in AI until ChatGPT emerged to take the tech industry by storm, according to a 2025 Bloomberg news report, and Cook did not provide the resources needed in-house to develop an AI-powered Siri. Apple was forced in early 2025 to look at partnering with Anthropic and OpenAI to push Siri into the AI era; in finally settled on working with Google’s Gemini.

The stumble was even more apparent since Apple was onto the AI trend early on, when it introduced neural chips for AI in iPhones as early as 2017. (Qualcomm introduced AI chips in its smartphone chips around the same time.)

At the time, the neural engine was hailed as a revolutionary development for developers to plug AI into applications. Apple wanted to use the neural chip’s matrix computing features to accelerate image and video processing, and users loved the results. 

Then in 2024, Apple introduced Apple Intelligence to much fanfare, hoping to bring AI technology across its devices and platforms. The AI layer was based on homegrown foundation models. 

Though it arrived nearly two years after ChatGPT, Apple Intelligence at the time offered truly innovative features. It had better OS and app integration and privacy features that kept user data secure — in part because of Private Cloud Compute. Other AI providers at the time were harvesting user data to improve their AI models.

Behind the scenes, however, Apple leadership and technological challenges slowed the development of Apple Intelligence. Apple in 2018 had hired former Google executive John Giannandrea to bring AI to Apple products. Giannandrea’s leadership was largely seen as ineffective and he retired last December. In early 2026, Apple turned to former Microsoft AI leader Amar Subramanya to lead the company’s AI efforts.

As a result, many of the main Apple Intelligence features were delayed, with hopes they  would finally arrive in 2026.

Then in January came the partnership with Google: “The next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology,” the companies said in a joint statement.

Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus and current CEO Tim Cook.

Apple

Now, the work for Apple’s soon-to-be CEO Ternus is clear: bring the company fully into  the AI age. “Unlike previous market inflections and transitions, Apple can’t afford to come in late to the party this time around,” said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

With its experience in devices and talent, Apple is well equipped to build AI into a personal experience, McGregor said. “Apple has to chart a path to reinvent the personal experience, which will drastically change devices and how we use them,” he said.

To succeed, Ternus will have to look at more partnerships and drop Apple’s reliance on in-house development, analysts said.

“When AI is moving at such a fast pace, no one company like Apple can really move fast enough to keep up,” Gold said.

The Google partnership is a solid step in that direction, as finding the expertise to hire the right people is a major hurdle, given the compensation package that others are offering, Gold said.

Whether the company has finally righted the AI ship should become clear in a little over a month at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference — the last one of the Cook era.

The Claude Mythos Preview appears to be living up to the hype, at least from a cybersecurity standpoint. The model, which Anthropic rolled out to a small group of users, including Firefox developer Mozilla, earlier this month, has discovered 271 vulnerabilities in version 148 of the browser. All have been fixed in this week’s release of Firefox 150, Mozilla emphasized.

These findings set a new precedent in AI’s ability to unearth bugs, and could turbocharge cybersecurity efforts.

“Nothing Mythos found couldn’t have been found by a skilled human,” said David Shipley of Beauceron Security. “The AI is not finding a new class of AI-exclusive super bugs. It’s just finding a lot of stuff that was missed.”

However, the news comes as Anthropic is reportedly investigating unauthorized use of Mythos by a small group who reportedly gained access via a third party vendor environment, revealing the double-edged nature of AI.

Closing the fuzzing gap

Firefox has previously pointed AI tools, notably Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, at its browser in a quest for vulnerabilities, but Opus discovered just 22 security-sensitive bugs in Firefox 148, while Mythos uncovered more than ten times that many.

Firefox CTO Bobby Holley described the sense of “vertigo” his team felt when they saw that number. “For a hardened target, just one such bug would have been red-alert in 2025,” he wrote in a blog post, “and so many at once makes you stop to wonder whether it’s even possible to keep up.”

Firefox uses a defense-in-depth strategy, with internal red teams applying multiple layers of “overlapping defenses” and automated analysis techniques, he explained. Teams run each website in a separate process sandbox.

However, no layer is impenetrable, Holley noted, and attackers combine bugs in the rendering code with bugs in the sandboxes in an attempt to gain privileged access. While his team has now adopted a more secure programming language, Rust, the developers can’t afford to stop and rewrite the decades’ worth of existing C++ code, “especially since Rust only mitigates certain, (very common) classes of vulnerabilities.”

While automated analysis techniques like fuzzing, which uncovers vulnerabilities or bugs in source code, are useful, some bits of code are more difficult to fuzz than others, “leading to uneven coverage,” Holley pointed out. Human teams can find bugs that AI can’t by reasoning through source code, but this is time-consuming, and is bottlenecked due to limited human resources.

Now, Claude Mythos Preview is closing this gap, detecting bugs that fuzzing doesn’t surface.

“Computers were completely incapable of doing this a few months ago, and now they excel at it,” Holley noted. Mythos Preview is “every bit as capable” as human researchers, he asserted, and there is no “category or complexity” of vulnerability that humans can find that Mythos can’t.

Defenders now able to win ‘decisively’?

Gaps between human-discoverable and AI-discoverable bugs favor attackers, who can afford to concentrate months of human effort to find just one bug they can exploit, Holley noted. Closing this gap with AI can help defenders erode that long-term advantage.

The industry has largely been fighting security “to a draw,” he acknowledged, and security has been “offensively-dominant” due to the size of the attack surface, giving adversaries an “asymmetric advantage.” In the face of this, both Mozilla and security vendors have “long quietly acknowledged” that bringing exploits to zero was “unrealistic.”

But now with Mythos (and likely subsequent models), defenders have a chance to win, “decisively,” Holley asserted. “The defects are finite, and we are entering a world where we can finally find them all.”

What security teams should do now

Finding 271 flaws in a mature codebase like Firefox illustrates the fact that AI-driven vulnerability discovery is now operating at a scale and depth that can outpace traditional human-led review, noted Ensar Seker, CISO at cyber threat intelligence company SOCRadar.

Holley’s “vertigo,” he said, was because defenders are realizing the attack surface is larger, and “more rapidly discoverable than previously assumed.”

Security teams must respond by shifting from periodic testing to continuous validation, Seker advised. That means integrating AI-assisted code analysis into continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, prioritizing “patch velocity over perfection,” and assuming that any externally reachable code path will eventually be discovered and weaponized.

“The goal is no longer just finding vulnerabilities first, but reducing the window between discovery and remediation,” he said.

Shipley agreed that any company building software must evaluate resourcing so it can quickly and proactively find and fix vulnerabilities. “But stuff will happen,” he acknowledged. So, in addition to doing proactive work, enterprises must regularly exercise their incident response playbooks.

“The next few years are going to be a marathon, not a sprint,” said Shipley.

Dual-use nature of AI is a challenge

However, the dual-use nature of these systems present a big challenge. The same capability that helps defenders identify hundreds of flaws can be turned against them if the model or its outputs are exposed, Seker pointed out.

The reported unauthorized access to Mythos “reinforces that AI systems themselves are now high-value targets, effectively becoming part of the attack surface,” he said.

It’s not at all surprising that people found a way to access Mythos, Shipley agreed; it was inevitable. “Nor does Anthropic have some unique, insurmountable or exclusive AI capability for hacking,” he said, pointing out that OpenAI is already catching up in that regard, and others will “catch and surpass” Mythos.

Striking a balance requires treating AI models like privileged infrastructure, Seker noted. Enterprises need strict access controls, output monitoring, and isolation of sensitive workflows. Developers, meanwhile, must adapt by writing code that is resilient to automated scrutiny; this requires stronger input validation, safer defaults, and “fewer assumptions about obscurity.”

“In this paradigm, security isn’t just about defending systems; it’s about defending the tools that are now capable of breaking them at scale,” Seker emphasized.

This article originally appeared on CSOonline.

Google wants its Chat app to become the main interface for office workers to interact with AI agents within its Workspace suite.

“We’re making Chat the centerpiece through which people talk, not just with other people, but with all their agents, whether they are in Workspace or built on our platform,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a briefing on the company’s plans. 

The Ask Gemini in Chat feature — generally available now — also allows Workspace users to interact with third-party tools such as Asana, Jira, and Salesforce, Google said in a blog post. Ask Gemini in Chat provides a “daily briefing” that highlights action items, unread message threads, and tasks to complete. It can also act on behalf of a user, generating documents and slides, scheduling meetings, and retrieving files, for instance.

Irwin Lazar, principal analyst at Metrigy, said the addition of Ask Gemini in Chat highlights Google’s efforts to compete more directly with Microsoft Teams. “Today, chat is the primary interface for employee engagement as email has fallen by the wayside,” he said. “Ideally, I’d like to see the AI interface be equally accessible across all apps, so one could access it in Gmail, Docs, etc.” 

Other AI-related updates to Workspace apps announced at Google Cloud Next include the ability to build and edit spreadsheets in Sheets via natural language prompts; Gemini can orchestrate “multi-step construction” and combine data from various sources such as a user’s files, emails, and chats, as well as the web. Gemini in Docs is getting an upgrade, too, with the ability to create infographics grounded in business data.

Underpinning some of the Gemini features is a new work graph, Workspace Intelligence, that connects data held across emails, chats, files and the web to improve the accuracy and relevance of outputs from Gemini agents. Workspace Intelligence “understands complex semantic relationships” between a user’s data and apps, helping to personalize these outputs by learning past work and communication patterns,” Google said.

Customers’ Workspace Intelligence data is not reviewed by Google staff, sold to advertisers, or used to train Google’s AI models, unless the customer gives permission to do so, the company said.

Work Intelligence is similar to tools such as Microsoft’s Work IQ, said Lazar. “The basic idea is giving employees an AI agent that has visibility into both their own activities as well as company knowledge, enabling them to be more efficient in managing work,” he said. “The challenge for any of these tools is that to be truly useful, they need to be able to pull in data from external sources such as CRM, ERP, project management, etc.”

It’s also important to function in multi-vendor environments now common for customer organizations, such as “mixed Google-Microsoft-Zoom-Cisco-Slack shops,” he said. “The third-party integrations are still coming, but I’m not sure if/when we’ll see multi-vendor integration.” 

Google also unveiled a series of updates at Cloud Next to Gemini Enterprise, the  standalone app that lets users interact with AI agents, as well as new governance tools for IT teams.

Google has updated its Gemini Enterprise app, adding new ways for office workers to build, manage, and interact with AI agents. The company also rolled out additional tools for IT teams to govern the use of agents via the new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

Google first unveiled Gemini Enterprise last year, pitching it as a way for knowledge workers to access agents that can surface information and carry out tasks autonomously. 

At Google Cloud Next this week, Google announced a raft of new features in the Gemini Enterprise app that are expected to be available over the “coming months.” Among these are new ways to interact with Gemini Enterprise, either independently or alongside colleagues. Projects is a new collaborative workspace that enables teams to interact with a shared “expert” chatbot that’s connected to specific data sources from Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and team chats. 

The Gemini Enterprise application is built on Google’s new Agent Platform for building and managing agents at scale.

Google

A new Canvas tool lets users create and co-edit documents directly within Gemini Enterprise, whether that’s Google Docs and Slides, as well as Microsoft 365 files. Google is also making agents more accessible to users — and more capable. 

Agent Designer, for example, is a no-code agent builder tool that lets users create “schedule- or trigger-based” agents with natural language prompts or via a visual interface. Announced in preview last year, the feature is now ready for general release in the next few weeks, providing users a “virtual flowchart” interface to inspect and test each step in an agent workflow. It’s also possible to insert human-in-the-loop checkpoints to approve actions when needed. 

[ Also see: How to build your own AI agents with Google Workspace Studio ]

Then there are new “long-running” agents that can tackle more complex business processes, Google said. The agents work autonomously in cloud sandboxes, and can complete multi-step workflows such as financial reconciliations that can take days to complete. 

The Agent Gallery provides access to third-party agents from the likes of Adobe, Lovable, and ServiceNow. 

To help manage the various agents working across Gemini Enterprise, Google introduced Inbox, a “central command location to monitor, guide, and securely manage all of your agent activity,” the company said in a blog post. That includes the long-running agents. 

The Inbox tab provides a space for Gemini Enterprise users to manage agents, receive notifications, and track task completion progress.

Google

From Inbox, users can monitor active agents and view notifications around agent actions such as “Needs your input,” “Errors,” and “Completed,” to provide a “clear, consolidated view of ongoing agent progress.” 

Mike Leone, vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said that while the Project and Canvas features are “table stakes” these days when it comes to AI agents, the Inbox feature is an interesting addition. “Keeping humans in the loop when async agents are running multi-day workflows in the background is a genuinely unsolved problem, and treating agent output as a prioritized notification queue is a solid way to tackle it,” Leone said.

Gemini Enterprise costs $30 per user each month for large organizations, and $21 per user for smaller businesses. Gemini Enterprise relies on Google’s own large language models (LLMs) such as Gemini 3.1 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Flash Image, and Lyria 3, as well as third-party models such as Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7.

Underpinning the Gemini Enterprise app is the new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform that’s billed as the platform to “build, scale, govern, and optimize agents,” said Michael Gerstenhaber, vice president of product management, Cloud AI, Google Cloud.

IT gets new agentic AI management tools, too

As part of the Agent Platform, Google introduced new tools at Cloud Next to help IT teams manage agents built and deployed in Gemini Enterprise. Among these is Agent Identity, which assigns a unique cryptographic ID to each agent operating in Gemini Enterprise. 

“This creates a clear, auditable trail for every action an agent takes, mapped back to defined authorization policies,” said Gerstenhaber. It’s similar to Microsoft’s Agent 365 platform, where each agent is assigned a unique Microsoft Entra ID to track usage and apply risk policies. 

The new Agent Registry acts as a “central library,” indexing all internal agents and skills to help IT ensure that only approved assets are accessible; Gerstenhaber described Agent Gateway as the “air traffic control” for a customer’s agents, providing “secure, unified connectivity between agents and tools across any environment.”

These are all tools that will appeal to IT as businesses start to push on with their use of agents, said Leone. “Google wants every agent action to leave the same audit trail a payroll transaction does. That’s a high bar,” he said. “Agents are going to be taking real actions on employees’ behalf at scale, and no enterprise will roll that out without knowing exactly who did what, when, and why.” 

Agent Platform “sits in the same competitive neighborhood” as enterprise agent products from the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI, and AWS, said Leone, that also provide tools to build, govern, and orchestrate agents at scale.  

“Implementing agentic processes is seen by most vendors as the next big opportunity to drive adoption of AI technologies in enterprise environments,” said Ed Anderson, research vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “There will be a lot of competition in this area.”

According to Leone, Google’s edge lies in a “full-stack ownership claim few other vendors can make as cleanly, across infrastructure, models, data, security, and end-user apps,” he said. Tools such as Agent Identity, Registry and Gateway — as well as security features such as Model Armor and MCP and A2A protocols to connect agents — will help provide IT with visibility and control when running thousands of agents across business units. 

“My bigger concern is that a typical IT buyer still struggles to figure out what to buy from Google and what each product actually includes as the portfolio and services have grown and evolved quickly,” said Leone.

Pricing for the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform was not immediately available.

Meta plans to track US employees’ mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and screen activity to train workplace AI agents, according to Reuters, offering an early look at how far major tech companies may go to build systems that can automate knowledge work.

The company plans to do so through a tool called Model Capability Initiative, or MCI, which will run on work-related apps and websites and periodically capture screen snapshots, according to the report.

Meta reportedly told staff in internal memos that the data collected through MCI would be used to help train AI models in areas where they still struggle to mimic how humans interact with computers, such as navigating dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts. The company added that the data would not be used for performance reviews and would be limited to AI training.

The move is likely to intensify debate over worker surveillance and data governance as companies push to use AI for a growing share of workplace tasks.

In a separate memo, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told employees the company was expanding internal data collection as part of its broader “AI for Work” push, now rebranded as the Agent Transformation Accelerator, Reuters added. Bosworth said Meta’s goal was to build a future in which AI agents “primarily do the work” while employees “direct, review and help them improve.”

The move comes as the broader AI industry pushes toward agents that can operate software on behalf of users. Anthropic has already showcased computer-use capabilities, while OpenAI launched its Operator agent last year.

“Meta’s move signals a shift from automating discrete tasks to replicating entire human workflows by learning from real employee behavior,” said Pareekh Jain, CEO of Pareekh Consulting. “Enterprise systems will increasingly act as data exhaust pipelines, capturing how work actually gets done so AI agents can execute it.”

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said the shift is important because companies are no longer just documenting workflows for automation, but capturing how work is actually carried out inside systems. “Systems do not just learn from historical data anymore. They learn from the way people intervene, adjust, and get outcomes despite the system itself,” he said.

Governance and compliance concerns

For enterprise IT leaders, this kind of monitoring raises a new category of behavioral data risk because it captures not just business information, but also how employees perform tasks inside enterprise systems.

“Privacy and compliance risks are significant, especially in Europe under GDPR and labor laws, where capturing keystrokes and screen activity may be restricted or require explicit consent,” Jain said. “Security risks increase because training datasets may contain credentials, IP, and sensitive workflows, making them high-value attack targets.”

Gogia said the risks should not be viewed in isolation. “These risks stack. They interact. They reinforce each other,” he said, adding that data gathered for AI training could also be repurposed over time for productivity monitoring or other employment-related decisions.

Jain added that governance could become more difficult because companies may struggle to trace what AI systems learned from specific employees. Employee awareness of monitoring could also affect the quality of the data itself. “People do not behave the same way when they know they are being observed,” Gogia said. Over time, that could mean systems are trained not on how work naturally happens, but on behavior shaped by observation.

For all the fancy-schmancy things our modern-day technology promises to do for us, one thing Google has yet to give us is a simple and reliable way to sync the clipboards on our Android phones and computers.

It’s such a powerful feat to have at your fingertips, when it works well — ’cause you can just copy something in one place and then paste it immediately in the other, without any thought or effort. At its best, it’s like your two work surfaces share the same clipboard and work harmoniously to make your life easy.

What’s most frustrating is that Google actually had a super-simple system for this years ago, within Chrome — a single switch you could flip that’d just make your clipboards sync seamlessly and automatically, across any two devices where the browser was installed — but then, in typical Google form, the company gave up on the concept and killed it off at some point along the way. (Sigh.)

Since then, we’ve been left with a mishmash of overly complicated workarounds and compromise-ridden consolation prizes to choose from.

It’s overwhelming, to say the least, and more than a little annoying. But with the right pinch of one-time planning, you can still set up a synced clipboard between your Android device and computer. You just have to know where to begin.

Lemme show you the four best paths, then you can figure out which one of ’em makes the most sense for you.

[Get smart solutions in your inbox with my free Android Intelligence newsletter. Three new things to try every Friday — and my Android Notification Power-Pack as a special welcome bonus.] 

Android-computer clipboard syncing option #1: The keyboard connection

If you’re using a Windows computer alongside your favorite Android companion, you’ve got one especially easy option — though it does come with a catch.

And no, it isn’t Microsoft’s official Link to Windows app. That system is obnoxiously limited and locked down in terms of which specific devices it allows to use it — for absolutely no good reason — and it more often than not isn’t even worth your time to futz around with.

The simplest path for Android-Windows clipboard syncing is actually the Microsoft-owned SwiftKey Keyboard. It’s one of my picks for the best Android keyboard apps, in large part because of the native Windows clipboard syncing it offers.

In short, if you don’t mind using SwiftKey for your Android text input, you can set it up so that anything you copy on Android is instantly available on Windows — and vice-versa. There’s nothing to it. It just works, instantly and automatically, which is something no other clipboard-syncing setup currently offers.

The catch is that you’ve gotta commit to stickin’ with SwiftKey as your keyboard. It’s honestly a solid all-around keyboard, so you might not mind — and/or you might find the clipboard syncing sorcery useful enough to make any hesitations worth accepting.

If, on the other hand, you strongly prefer Gboard — or any other Android keyboard app — keep reading, ’cause you do have other options.

Android-computer clipboard syncing option #2: The simple share

If the keyboard syncing path isn’t right for you (or maybe if you aren’t even using Windows to begin with), the next best option is leaning on Google’s native Quick Share system to sync stuff across your clipboards manually, as needed.

This setup lacks the instant, ongoing syncing that SwiftKey provides, which is a bummer. At the same time, it could present a privacy advantage, from some perspectives — since everything you copy won’t automatically be synced across your devices without warning or any opportunity for exception.

• On the Android front, provided you’re using a reasonably recent device, Quick Share is already built in and present — so there’s nothing you need to do there. The same is true for ChromeOS, on Chromebooks.
• On Windows, you’ll need to install and set up the official Google Quick Share Windows app.
• On Macs — sorry, Charlie: Apple doesn’t like its devices to play nicely with things it didn’t create. But, with the right device, you might be able to share stuff into Apple’s propriety AirDrop system, thanks to a recent (and ongoing!) Android-side workaround.

To get things ready, you’ll need to go into the Quick Share settings on any device involved and make sure that system is set to be visible to all of your other nearby devices. (On Android, search your system settings for Quick Share to find the appropriate area. On Windows, open the Quick Share app you just installed. And on ChromeOS, click the clock in the lower-right corner of your desktop and then click the Quick Share tile.)

Then, when you’ve got something you want to sync to the clipboard on one of your other devices — from Android:

• Press and hold your finger onto the text you want to share to highlight it, then select “Share” from the menu that pops up.
• Select “Quick Share” from the list of options.
• And select your computer from the list of available devices.

It isn’t obvious, but Android’s Quick Share system has an easy way to sync text from your phone’s clipboard to a computer.

JR Raphael, Foundry

That’s it! Within a split second, you should see a notification on the computer that the text has been received and is on the clipboard and available — and you can then hit Ctrl-V in any open field to paste it.

From Windows, meanwhile, you’ll copy your text normally — using Ctrl-C — then open the Quick Share app and hit Ctrl-V to paste it and sync it over to your Android phone’s clipboard.

You can sync text from a Windows computer’s clipboard over to Android, too, with Quick Share in place.

JR Raphael, Foundry

With ChromeOS, there’s weirdly no way to sync stuff from the computer to Android (go figure). But maybe, hopefully, surely, Google’s upcoming Android-ChromeOS “merger” plan will address that and make this kind of cross-device clipboard sharing even richer and more effective in that arena.

Android-computer clipboard syncing option #3: The browser beam

Two other interesting options exist for quick ‘n’ easy clipboard sharing — at least, if you’re going from Android to another computer.

No matter what kind of computer it is (yes, even the illustrious Macintosh, in this instance!), as long as you’ve got Chrome installed there and signed into the same Google account you’re using on the Android front, remember this:

In Chrome on Android, you can highlight any text on any page — by pressing and holding it with your finger — then select “Share” followed by “Send to devices.”

Chrome’s “Send to devices” options is a hidden gem for clipboard syncing from Android.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Chrome will show you a list of all the devices where you’ve been signed into the browser with that same Google account in recent days. You can tap any of ’em — and in an instant, your text will be on that system’s clipboard and ready for pasting anywhere your precious pinkies (and other assorted appendages) desire.

Select any other device, and boom: Your text will be on its clipboard instantly.

JR Raphael, Foundry

And last but not least…

Android-computer clipboard syncing option #4: The Lens limb

If you want to sync some text from Android to a computer and the text isn’t already in a standard plain-text form — something from a photo, for instance, or in an area of the operating system for whatever reason doesn’t support standard text selection — just capture a screenshot or share the existing image over to Google Lens.

Lens is a fantastic and free Google app. You’ll need to download its official shortcut from the Play Store before you can share to it.

Once you’ve got whatever you’re seeing into Lens, you can then press and hold any text within the image there to select it.

Google Lens makes it easy to select text from within any image on Android.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Then, tap the three-dot menu icon within the text selection menu that appears — and hey, how ’bout that? Tucked away there, where no reasonably sane person would ever think to look, is a handy little command called “Copy to computer.”

Lens has its own tucked-away “Copy to computer” option for quick clipboard syncing. Who knew?!

JR Raphael, Foundry

Tap that bad boy and tap it good, and you’ll be able to choose from any computer where you’re currently signed into Chrome with the same Google account — Windows, Chromebook, Mac, Linux, you name it — and after that, the text from that image will be on your computer’s clipboard and ready to paste wherever.

As long as your computer has Chrome — with the same Google account signed in — Lens can send text directly into its clipboard.

JR Raphael, Foundry

These options may not be as easy or effortless as they oughta be, but they do get the job done. And once you know how to use ’em, you’ll have a whole new kind of time-saving text trick in your toolkit and ready to deploy — just like the total tech wizard we all know you’re meant to be.

Check out my free Android Intelligence newsletter for even more thoughtful knowledge — including three new things to try each Friday and a trio of useful Android notification tools to get you going.

For years now, Microsoft has been doing its level best to move you from desktop Office and Windows to Microsoft 365, Windows 365, and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). Since the company first started down this road, however, something changed: the AI revolution, which has become a huge deal for the guys from Redmond. 

So, it should come as no surprise that the company is now combining its efforts to push cloud-based PCs and get as many users working with its AI services as possible.

First, Microsoft has reduced pricing for Windows 365 and AVD in select configurations by 20%. In particular, the company is slashing prices for persistent desktop deployments and lower-tier virtual machines (VMs). These are the instances commonly used by task workers and call centers, not by developers or white-collar office worker bees. 

Microsoft is also expanding bundled discounts tied to existing enterprise agreements and Microsoft 365 subscriptions. This cuts the per-user cost for organizations already invested in its Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) ecosystem. 

Beyond that, the company is introducing an on‑demand start experience that allows Cloud PCs to hibernate when users disconnect. The change will lower infrastructure costs while preserving performance when sessions resume. 

In addition to lower base pricing, Microsoft is promoting new autoscaling and power management features in AVD. For example, unused instances will now shut down automatically. This addresses one of the key criticisms of cloud desktops: the cost of idle capacity. 

Considering how PC prices are skyrocketing, this new DaaS pricing makes a lot of sense. But what the company giveth, the company taketh. Turns out that price cut comes as Microsoft 365 costs are set to rise in July. Microsoft wants you to think that a per desktop price increase of up to 33% is worth it for all the brand-spanking new AI goodness. Me? I’m still not sure Notepad Copilot improved my work life by 0.33%, never mind 33%! 

Windows prices are also going up. After July 1, standalone Windows components (per user/month, commercial list), such as Windows E3 and E5 are going up while Windows Enterprise (per device/month) is set to jump by 31%, from $5.85 to $7.63.

Overall, according to US Cloud, a leading independent provider of third-party Microsoft support and enterprise licensing optimization, Microsoft’s pricing decisions will mean a cumulative cost increase of up to 25% on a typical $10 million Enterprise Agreement by mid-2026. That is the company’s “AI Tax.” (Hey, those gigawatt AI centers aren’t going to build themselves!)

Meanwhile, back in DaaS land, Microsoft is positioning its AI‑enabled Windows 365 Cloud PCs as a higher‑end class of virtual desktops: Still in beta, they combine Windows 365 with AI acceleration to deliver integrated Windows AI features to any device via the cloud.

These high-end virtual AI desktops require Windows 365 Enterprise SKUs with at least 8 vCPU, 32GB RAM and 128GB storage. In other words, while the low-end virtual desktops are getting cheaper to use for AI, you’ll want the most expensive configurations. These currently cost $123 per user, per month.

By comparison, for serious AI use, Microsoft recommends Copilot+ PCs. These are high-end Windows 11 PCs powered by a turbocharged neural processing unit (NPU) capable of delivering more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS). These, such as Lenovo’s ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 Snapdragon, cost around $2,100. 

It might appear that the standalone PC is cheaper for AI. But Microsoft argues that its cloud PC — which you can run on any device — will scale well beyond what a fixed NPU can deliver in a Copilot+ PC configuration. 

What I see happening is Microsoft is using its lower-end DaaS price cut as a broadening of the funnel into Windows 365 while it keeps the AI‑heavy experiences as an upsell on more capable Cloud PCs. In other words, the low-end DaaS price cuts and the increases in PC prices are, Microsoft hopes, all about getting you to move to high-end AI cloud-based desktops. 

There’s also the rumor that Microsoft will be shifting its AI-cloud services from a fixed priced plan to a token-based one. True, for model APIs and gen‑AI services, the company had already standardized on token‑based pricing. But we always knew flat-pricing for AI services was a loss leader. If Microsoft can get you on a cloud-based AI desktop today, it’s betting it’ll get far more revenue from you tomorrow than it can with today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) such as Copilot in Microsoft 365. 

If all this sounds complicated, you’re right — it is. As SAMexpert CEO Alexander Golev reports, “Microsoft AI uses two billing systems: Predictable per-user licensing and variable Azure consumption. Hybrid products like Copilot Studio and Security Copilot can charge through both, so costs land in different budgets, require separate monitoring, and complicate forecasting.” You think?

Of course, Microsoft has long been about shifting people from buying software to leasing it. Promoting Windows 365 AI‑enabled Cloud PCs is very much about using AI as the differentiator to justify running a Windows desktop from Azure instead of a cheaper, more generic VDI/DaaS stack or a more generic Windows DaaS. 

What all this boils down is that while Cloud PC list prices are coming down for small and midsize businesses, Microsoft is baking more AI into its Enterprise Cloud PCs. Thus, AI will be the value‑add that keeps the high end of its desktop cloud premium. This will all, Microsoft hopes, continue to empower growth, which increasingly relies on Azure and AI. 

So, what does this all mean for you and me? While I admit AI can be valuable in some areas such as programming, I remain cynical about AI in broader business uses. After all, as the MIT NANDA report, “GenAI Divide / State of AI in Business 2025,” states: “95% of organizations are getting zero return” from AI. 

Let’s say AI eventually does deliver the goods — or as I see it, we finally figure out how to get real value from the technology beyond just meeting summaries. That’s great. But it begs the question, “Do you really want to tie yourself to Microsoft’s desktop and service?” I don’t think so. 

Personally, I’ve never wanted to put all my desktop eggs in one Microsoft basket, and I’m sure not going to do that now with AI.  

Generative AI is fundamentally (and quickly) shaping how information is discovered and acted on, forcing enterprises to rethink how they engage with both humans and machines.

Adobe is responding to this shift, introducing new tools that keep up with evolving branding, surface campaign insights, and speed up content creation. At this week’s Adobe Summit, the company introduced a new Brand Intelligence system and expansions to its GenStudio platform, as well as launching products that use agentic AI to reshape customer experience.

And last week, Adobe announced one of its most significant AI rollouts, the new Firefly AI Assistant, interestingly on the same day rival Canva introduced its own new agentic platform, Canva 2.0.

“Brand visibility is going to shift toward what agents see, and what is picked up, understood, and returned by those agents,” said  Terra Higginson, a principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group. “Adobe is well-positioned for this shift.”

[ More Adobe Summit 2026 coverage ]

Helping teams stay on brand

Adobe describes Brand Intelligence as a “continuously-learning engine” that provides context to AI agents so teams can quickly create content that aligns with evolving branding. Instead of basic, static brand guidelines, the platform can gain from more nuanced insights like customer feedback, rejections, and approvals.

The system is based on a collection of small language models (SLMs) tailor-made to have a much deeper understanding of how a brand shows itself, in a multi-modal fashion, Adobe VP Sundeep Parsa explained to Computerworld. Enterprises can tweak the content along the way.

Brand Intelligence essentially reshapes the content supply chain so that teams can measure, plan, create, and manage brand-specific materials. Such customization is critical, because, he pointed out, “Coca Cola’s brand intelligence system is going to look very different from Nike’s.”

Info-Tech’s Higginson pointed out that an interesting use case for this would be when a brand wants to capitalize on a trend quickly. Back in the day, “instant” still meant a lot of planning and rework, but new Brand Intelligence capabilities can personalize agentic content immediately while still adhering to brand guidelines and localization requirements in real time.

“It’s taking personalized content to another level,” she said.

Ultimately, with LLMs in the mix, brand visibility is “twice as hard” as it used to be, and marketers’ jobs have gotten significantly more complex, Higginson noted.

“They don’t just need to convince humans to buy their products; they now need to convince agents, too,” she said. That means content must be instantly accessible, structured properly, and governed by brand guidelines.

New GenStudio enhancements

Along with Brand Intelligence, Adobe has rolled out new offerings within its GenStudio content creation platform. Notably, this includes a ‘Workflow Optimization Agent’ in Adobe Workfront, its workflow management platform.

The agent automates actions across workflows such as planning, execution, review, and approval. This can help teams build projects, speed up reviews, and pull out insights on demand, without the need for manual reporting. Teams can also involve AI agents in project planning and assign them tasks, such as resolving simple issues or performing reviews based on specific instructions and context.

Additionally, new creative production capabilities in Adobe Firefly for Enterprise Workflow Builder help developers build reusable workflows, link generative actions, and run batch production. Teams can also launch AI agents that interpret campaign briefs, compile supporting assets, and build templates and workflows.

Adobe is also rolling out a new dedicated ‘canvas’ interface to help teams pull together inputs and performance data to build better campaign briefs. Here, too, they can kick off an AI assistant.

Further, Adobe is announcing a new GenStudio module for marketing that turns long-form documents and videos into tailored campaigns, builds customer case studies, and writes web content. Marketers can quickly pull out performance insights (such as leads generated or follower statistics) and ask AI for recommendations to expand audience reach. And a new agency system of record will preserve enterprise context as it moves across content flows, supporting governance, accountability, and a shared understanding of branding.

“End users are seeing an exponential increase in the amount of content that needs to be created,” Higginson noted, adding that the benefits of a tool like Adobe GenStudio are not just generation of more content, but faster iteration, and less manual rework.

“It’s necessary because humans can basically no longer keep up with the demand for creation, iteration, testing, optimization, localization, and related workflows,” she emphasized.

Firefly AI Assistant speeds up creation

Adobe also announced a new Firefly AI Assistant (available soon) that users can interact with in natural language. Based on human instructions, agents can build workflows, ask contextual follow-up questions, offer suggestions, and report on results. They can also organize and share work in the Frame.io collaboration platform, interpret feedback, and automatically apply changes.

Agents have access to pre-built skills purpose-built for specific workflows, such as retouching portraits. They learn from creators over time, determining their preferred tools, workflows, and aesthetics, and maintain persistent memory across sessions. This carries over to other Adobe apps, too, so developers don’t have to start from scratch with each one.

A primary use case for the Firefly AI assistant is that of a creative team requesting input from the division owner, Higginson explained, including questions about color and brand consistency. In a demo at the event, Adobe illustrated this with a campaign for a major travel company. Feedback was folded in “almost in real time,” then localized across languages and countries.

“Work that would have taken months was reduced to minutes,” Higginson said. The platform makes creative workflows “more conversational and easier to manage across teams, which gets users to optimization much faster.”

Competition launches the same day

In an interesting development, Adobe announced its new Firefly AI Assistant on the same day that Canva introduced its next-gen agentic platform, Canva 2.0. Available now in research preview, Canva 2.0 also features brand intelligence tools and AI agents. Canva calls it its “most significant product evolution” since the company launched in 2013.

The platform upgrade reflects a broader move, beyond design “into more unified, AI-driven workflows,” Higginson said. Canva’s recent acquisitions of Simtheory and Ortto reinforce that push: They suggest the company is building toward a “wider marketing platform,” with content-centric workflow, stronger measurement, and lighter customer data platform (CDP) and lifecycle marketing capabilities that overlap with entry-level customer relationship management (CRM) territory.

That makes Canva more competitive, particularly with broader user groups and small to medium businesses (SMBs).

“Canva’s strength is accessibility, while Adobe’s strength is enterprise workflow depth,” said Higginson. “Adobe, though, still appears better positioned in complex enterprise environments where governance, scale, and established workflows matter more.”

LinkedIn is testing a new AI feature, Crosscheck, which allows users to compare several popular AI models directly on the platform. Users enter prompts into Crosscheck and receive two different responses generated by competing AI models from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

After the user selects the best response, the model behind each answer is revealed. LinkedIn product manager Hari Srinivasan describes the service as a kind of blind taste test for AI models, according to Engadget.

Crosscheck works only with text, but has no limits on the number of questions. At the same time, LinkedIn shares anonymized user data with the AI companies to provide insights into how the models perform across different professional groups.

The feature is initially available to LinkedIn Premium subscribers in the US, with plans to expand to more countries and free users soon.

Adobe Summit serves as a platform for Adobe to introduce new services, capabilities, and enhancements to its portfolio of creative and marketing software and services. The 2026 edition kicks off live in Las Vegas on April 20, with a virtual event running alongside it.

The company has long been a name to watch as a developer of creativity and design software. This year will be a pivotal one for Adobe, with the recent announcement that its CEO is stepping down after 18 years at the helm, and the rise of AI tools challenging both creators and the software vendors that serve them. Expect announcements setting out Adobe’s response to those challenges — and watch for signs that the company may be changing direction or losing ground to AI offerings from companies such as Microsoft, OpenAI, or Google.

Adobe is also one of the bigger players in the enterprise digital marketing solutions, and Adobe Summit will also provide insights into changes to Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform.

Follow this page (and this one) for the latest news and insights from Adobe 2026, and check out recent related coverage below.

Adobe news and analysis Adobe bets on AI agents to stay at the center of marketing workflows

April 24, 2026: Facing pressure from rival design software vendors and general-purpose AI assistants, Adobe is rolling out agentic systems to coordinate and execute creative work across workflows and apps.

Adobe builds an ‘agentic content supply chain’ for the AI era

April 21, 2026: Adobe is adding new capabilities to GenStudio and Firefly to automate content creation and provide agentic assistants to keep up with branding as it evolves in the age of AI. The additions include a ‘Workflow Optimization Agent’ in Adobe Workfront, its workflow management platform.

Adobe bets on agentic AI to rewrite SaaS for customer experience

April 20, 2026: Adobe is shifting its approach to what it calls ‘Customer Experience Orchestration (CXO).’ Announced today at Adobe Summit, the new Adobe CX Enterprise suite is a pivot to a future defined by agents rather than by software alone, where SaaS companies claim an advantage based on their deep domain expertise and troves of first- and third-party data.

The top priority for Adobe’s next CEO? Prepping for the ‘age of agents’

April 9, 2026: Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen announced plans to step down last month after 18 years leading software vendor. For whomever is tapped next for the top job — the CEO search is expected to take several months — the biggest priority will almost certainly be reshaping Adobe’s products and strategy for the next wave of agentic AI, analysts said.

Adobe Acrobat Standard review: A polished PDF editor with clear limits

March 16, 2026: Adobe Acrobat Standard is Adobe’s entry paid-tier PDF editor, sitting between the free Acrobat Reader and the more fully featured Acrobat Pro. It’s meant for people who need more than viewing, signing, and basic annotations, but not Adobe’s full set of advanced document tools. It handles routine PDF work well, but advanced features still require a move up to Pro.

Adobe CEO steps down after 18 years

March 13, 2026: It’s all change at the top for Adobe as CEO Shantanu Narayen is stepping down after 18 years. He will relinquish the role as soon as a successor has been found, although he will continue to serve as chairman. The creative software company’s new boss will have to face the challenge of AI.

Adobe makes Agent Orchestrator and AI agents generally available

September 10, 2025: Adobe has launched AEP Agent Orchestrator and six AI agents for building, delivering, and optimizing customer experiences and marketing campaigns. Agent Composer, coming soon, will aid with customizing and configuring agents.

Adobe Commerce and Magento users: Patch critical SessionReaper flaw now

September 10, 2025: Adobe issued an emergency patch for one of the most severe vulnerabilities ever discovered in the Magento Open Source ecommerce platform and Adobe Commerce, its enterprise counterpart. The flaw allows unauthenticated attackers to hijack user accounts and, in some cases, execute arbitrary code on servers. Security experts warn of exploits soon.

Adobe is developing an agent to integrate Adobe Express with Microsoft 365

March 20, 2025: Adobe is working with Microsoft to develop an AI agent that can generate graphics and design content from within the Microsoft 365 interface. The Adobe Express Agent, still under development, will allow users to create and embed graphics directly within productivity applications such as Word and PowerPoint.

Adobe makes agentic AI push with Agent Orchestrator, purpose-built agents

March 18, 2025: Adobe unveiled Agent Orchestrator, a new capability for Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) to supervise AI agents, whether from Adobe or third-party ecosystems. It also introduced 10 new agents built on the capability at Adobe Summit 2025.

Apple now has a new iCEO, as current leader Tim Cook (65) announced late Monday that he is set to become chairman of the board, while current head of hardware engineering, John Ternus, prepares to take over as CEO on Sept. 1.

As you’d expect, this leadership transition at one of the world’s most successful firms, is generating reams of news reports and hot takes. Here’s mine: Just as Steve Jobs presided over the resurrection of Apple and Cook led the company through unprecedented business growth, Ternus will guide the company through an era of equally unprecedented hardware proliferation. 

Expect more growth

He’s someone who cares about craft in hardware design and recently appeared in a worth-watching video interview (chaperoned by Greg Joswiak, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing). The soon-to-be-CEO did well in what was an obvious media training exercise. “Everything we do, even if our customers don’t necessarily see it, everything we do has some new ideas in it…, we feel like we’re innovating all the time,” he said. 

Among a range of achievements, Cook innovated operations to the extent that every product Apple makes is supported by the world’s most efficient multinational manufacturing and logistics system. While he did, Ternus innovated product. “John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor,” said Cook.

The current CEO has had to handle huge supply chain challenges while scaling logistics to support growth. The numbers illustrate this: Apple sold 18.1 million Macs in the year following his appointment as CEO 15 years ago. In 2025, it sold 27.2 million. iPhone sales grew from 136 million in 2011 to 247 million last year. Rumor has it the MacBook Neo has shifted as many as 10 million units, just as Ternus turns up to take that figure higher.

“Tim’s unprecedented and outstanding leadership has transformed Apple into the world’s best company,” said outgoing Apple board chairman Arthur Levinson. 

You don’t need a weatherman

You can see which way the wind blows. 

Apple’s hardware is selling in record quantities, even as the company seems more prepared – and better able – than ever before to widen its addressable market with more affordable products. It is able to do this without compromising on product quality or user experience for three big reasons: 

• The massive per-customer services income built by Cook.
• Huge iPhone sales as an inheritance from Steve Jobs.
• The adoption of Apple Silicon, which has been presided over by Ternus and led by Johny Srouji.

Srouji will take on the hardware leadership role being vacated by Ternus and as part of this will combine the hardware technologies and hardware engineering teams, separated in 2012. “I am excited to bring these teams together and deepen their integration to help us innovate even more than we do today. There is no limit to what we can achieve together,” he wrote. 

That optimism is well-founded. Apple’s processor designs will enable the company to push fast in its new phase of proliferation. With 1nm chips on the horizon, Apple’s processors are small, powerful, and energy efficient, making them suitable for a plethora of new hardware designs the world hasn’t even seen yet.

Making impossible things possible

Apple under Ternus will no doubt lean into that opportunity. This approach means that not only will you see Apple widen its addressable market with a combination of product quality at better prices, but you’ll also watch it expand its offer with new product families. 

It’s no coincidence, for example, that Ternus at one point led Apple’s robotics team as the company prepares to introduce its first robotic products in the coming months. Apple’s hardware is supported by Apple’s software, of course. 

While it will offer some of its own solutions within Apple Intelligence, Apple doesn’t even need to make the AI. It just needs to make the best hardware to run AI on, which is what Ternus is going to focus on. 

You can already see it. With Ternus leading hardware, the Mac is more powerful and more popular today than at any point in its history — and the MacBook Neo is building on that success. It represents the thin end of a wider wedge of hardware-driven market share growth across all Apple’s products that will now accelerate under Ternus, even while the latter makes his own transition.

As board chairman, Cook will turn to handling the complex political and strategic relationships he’s been dealing with as CEO. Cook is very good at that, which also raises the question of whether he has wider ambitions for political engagement.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon, and MeWe. 

Apple announced late Monday that Tim Cook, the company’s CEO since 2011, is stepping down Sept. 1 to be replaced by current senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus. Cook will become executive chairman of the board.

Cook, who is 65, will continue as CEO until the end of August to assist in the transition, which, Apple said, came after a “thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.”

“It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company, Cook said In the announcement about the changes. “I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people who have been unwavering in their dedication to enriching the lives of our customers and creating the best products and services in the world.”

John Ternus will succeed Tim Cook as Apple CEO in September.

Apple

He also sang his successor’s praises: “John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor. He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future. I could not be more confident in his abilities and his character, and I look forward to working closely with him on this transition and in my new role as executive chairman.”

Current board non-executive chairman Arthur Levinson, who has held the post for 15 years, will become Apple’s lead independent director on Sept. 1. When he assumes his new role, Ternus will join the board.

Apple also announced that Ternus’s job will be filled by Johny Srouji, effective immediately.

“Johny is one of the most talented people I have ever had the privilege to work with,” Cook said about that change. “He has played a singular role in driving Apple’s silicon strategy, and his influence has been felt deeply not just inside the company, but across the industry. He has always led his organization with remarkable deftness and judgment, and time and again, his team has delivered breakthrough innovations that have transformed our products. We are incredibly fortunate to have him as Apple’s chief hardware officer.”

The ongoing shortage of memory chips looks likely to continue throughout the year as demand from the AI sector surges. According to Nikkei Asia, leading manufacturers are expected to be able to meet only about 60% of global demand despite expansion plans.

Although new factories are on the way, several of them are not expected to reach full production until 2027 at the earliest. Even once those facilities are up and running, additional time will be required to scale up to efficient production levels.

An annual production increase of around 12% would be needed to catch up with demand, analysts said, though current plans are significantly lower. The balance between supply and demand for memory is not expected to normalize until 2028.

Because of the shortage, memory prices have risen by approximately 90% during the first quarter of 2026.

Apple Silicon has another big journey to take, one that means Apple will probably be the first to introduce 1.4- and 1-nanometer chips inside its systems. If that happens, Macs, iPhones, and iPads will continue to lead the industry in performance per watt.

Why do I say this? Mainly because reports claim TSMC is working to build sub 1nm chips by 2029 — and Apple remains that company’s most important customer, despite competition from AI server manufacturers today.

Demand for AI servers could yet slow, given the looming energy crisis and the trend toward on-prem and edge AI services. I don’t think the current level of investment in AI is sustainable, which is why I think Apple will continue to be TSMC’s lead customer once that bubble, inevitably, bursts.

What’s happening at TSMC?

The latest news is that TSMC intends to begin trial production of its sub-1nm A10 process tech by 2029, setting up Apple to be the first big company to use these new processors inside its hardware when volume production begins. 

What’s interesting is that this move to 1nm isn’t just about making transistors smaller, but also about ensuring close integration between chips, memory, and energy systems. A report in 2021 said TSMC was able to reach 1nm by using bismuth instead of silicon in the design.

Apple, of course, already works very, very hard to integrate those different elements on its existing processors, which is why it delivers better performance at lower wattage than competitors. That integration means its systems can accomplish a great deal more from lower quantities of memory, which helps protect the company’s margins against rapidly accelerating RAM prices. 

We currently expect up to 30% improvement in both performance and power efficiency from these new chip designs. That implies that iPhone Pro models introduced in 2030 (or possibly 2031) will be powered by these new chips.

Apple’s silicon road map seems secure

TSMC is expected to introduce 1.6nm chips in the next 18 months, though Apple might choose to skip that iteration to guarantee a leadership position once the 1.4nm TSMC process hits in 2028. That iteration will deliver yet another big speed and performance boost to Apple’s devices, with Apple becoming the first PC, tablet, or smartphone manufacturer to ship 1.4nm systems at scale. 

What benefits can we expect? During TSMC’s 2025 North American Symposium the company said 1.4nm chips should be 15% faster and consume around 30% less power than the processors inside Apple’s current devices. That’s all good, but it is also interesting to note that the iPhone 17 series hasn’t even made the leap to 2nm as yet, with Apple using TSMC’s N3P process. So, the company has lots of scope to secure the future of Apple Silicon.

Where next for Apple’s chips?

If it is correct that Apple will skip TSMC’s 1.6nm process and then climb aboard the 1.4nm and 1nm chips, we could see the two big processor development chapters between now and 2030. This year we can see it introduce 2nm chips, with 1.4nm to follow probably in 2028 and the huge leap to sub-1nm processors to follow in 2030-31.

As these chips will be deployed across Apple’s hardware platforms, including within new designs we don’t know about yet, it means you can anticipate highly significant performance gains wherever in the ecosystem you happen to sit. Whether you’re looking at the next-generation MacBook Neo, MacBook Pro, iPhone or iPhone e, you’ll see impressive performance gains unlocked in all into the last half of this decade. 

Those performance gains, combined with improved energy consumption, allows Apple’s hardware designers to work towards thinner, lighter and smaller devices in a range of design configurations — some of which could not have existed before. (Think about spectacles with the kind of performance you once got from a Mac.) The way ahead is clear. Apple has a wide open road for chip design, and while tensions between today’s US and China could derail some of these plans, TSMC’s continued investment in fabrication capacity in the US might help mitigate against even that potential calamity.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon, and MeWe.