The Gilbane Advisor

Curated for content, computing, data, information, and digital experience professionals

Gilbane Advisor 5-20-26 — HTML vs Markdown, humans vs agents

May 20, 2026 /

Featured articles from: Yanli Liu, and Jafar Sabbah & Oguz Acar.

Additional reading from: Ana Bildea, Nicolas Figay, Matt “TK” Taylor & Matt Kane, and Stanford University.

News from: CockroachDB, Aprimo, SAP, MongoDB. Also: All the news from Google I/O

Our next issue arrives 6/3/26.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

Opinion / Analysis

Anthropic’s engineer said kill Markdown. Here’s what he actually meant.

HTML vs Markdown: Here’s the decision tree both sides needed.

Whether you followed all the back-and-forth last week about this topic, or not, Yanli Liu’s detailed and balanced piece, including relative costs analysis and decision tree suggestions make this a worthy a read. (10 min)

https://generativeai.pub/anthropics-engineer-said-kill-markdown-here-s-what-he-actually-meant-36bee00c0ca2

Research: Traditional marketing doesn’t work on AI shopping agents

This should not be the least bit surprising, but what to do about it turns out to be complex, and unfortunately, a lot of work. Jafar Sabbah & Oguz Acar’s research is a must read for marketers. (7 min)

https://hbr.org/2026/05/research-traditional-marketing-doesnt-work-on-ai-shopping-agents

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content Technology News

CockroachDB brings distributed SQL to IBM Power and IBM Cloud

Organizations can modernize incrementally, while establishing a flexible, distributed data foundation aligned to hybrid and multicloud strategies.
https://www.cockroachlabs.com/partners/ibm/

Aprimo unveils Interconnected Content Operations

Interconnected Content Operations help enterprise teams automate content workflows, improve asset discovery, streamline reviews, & connect digital assets.
https://www.aprimo.com/blog/interconnected-content-operations-in-action

SAP announces Autonomous Enterprise

The unified SAP Business AI Platform, deepens partnerships with Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Palantir.
https://news.sap.com/2026/05/sap-sapphire-sap-unveils-autonomous-enterprise/

MongoDB releases MongoDB 8.3

The unified Data Platform delivers full text and vector search, native embeddings generation, persistent agent memory, and real-time operational data.
https://investors.mongodb.com/news-releases/news-release-details/mongodb-makes-enterprise-ai-production-ready

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

CockroachDB brings distributed SQL to IBM Power and IBM Cloud

May 13, 2026 /

Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB, a cloud-agnostic, PostgreSQL-compatible system of record for modern applications, announced that CockroachDB will be available in the IBM Cloud catalog and supported on IBM Power processor-based server systems. This can give enterprises a direct path to adopt a distributed SQL database within IBM’s ecosystem and enable them to modernize mission-critical workloads while preserving existing investments in IBM Power infrastructure and IBM Cloud.

By combining IBM Power Systems and IBM Cloud with CockroachDB’s distributed architecture, organizations can modernize incrementally, extending existing systems while establishing a flexible, distributed data foundation aligned to hybrid and multicloud strategies.

CockroachDB, IBM clients can unify globally distributed transactions with AI-driven data access patterns on a single platform, enabling agentic-scale distributed applications without the constraints of legacy architectures.

This collaboration provides a scalable path to deliver modern, distributed SQL capabilities to enterprises worldwide through IBM channels. Customers can procure and consume CockroachDB within existing IBM Cloud agreements, including committed spend; streamlining procurement, simplifying vendor management, and aligning with established enterprise buying models. The offering also includes IBM-backed support, service-level agreements, and consistent operations across hybrid environments.

https://www.cockroachlabs.com/partners/ibm

SAP Unveils the Autonomous Enterprise

May 12, 2026 /

SAP introduced the Autonomous Enterprise to help enhance critical business workflows, so that humans and AI work together to meet the accelerating demands of global business profitably, strategically and safely.

The Autonomous Enterprise includes a unified AI platform for building, contextualizing and governing agents, an autonomous suite that executes core business operations and a new user experience that redefines how people work with enterprise software.

SAP Business AI Platform unifies SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI into a single, governed environment.

At its core is the SAP Knowledge Graph solution, which gives AI agents a structured map of business entities, processes and relationships across a customer’s SAP landscape. Joule Studio is SAP’s AI-first solution for building enterprise agents, applications and agentic workflows. Developers can build using the no-code, pro-code and AI frameworks of their choice on SAP-managed infrastructure.

SAP also introduced SAP Autonomous Suite, which enables SAP’s existing business applications with AI agents capable of running processes from start-to-finish. The suite will deploy 50+ domain-specific Joule Assistants across finance, supply chain, procurement, human capital management and customer experience. These assistants will automate processes by orchestrating a subset of over 200 specialized agents to execute tasks.

https://news.sap.com/2026/05/sap-sapphire-sap-unveils-autonomous-enterprise/

Aprimo unveils Interconnected Content Operations

May 12, 2026 /

Aprimo, a provider of digital asset management and content operations solutions, announced its May 2026 release: Interconnected Content Operations. The release expands Aprimo’s agentic AI, DAM, and unified platform capabilities to help enterprise marketing teams automate content workflows, improve asset discovery, streamline reviews, and connect digital assets, work management, and marketing spend.

With Interconnected Content Operations, Aprimo brings AI-powered automation, digital assets, work management, reviews, and spend controls into a more unified operating model for enterprise marketing teams. The release is designed to help brands reduce manual handoffs, improve visibility, and move content from planning to activation with greater speed, control, and confidence. The release expands Aprimo’s platform across:

Agentic Content Operations — Extended agentic capabilities across DAM and Spend to help teams automate more of the manual work that slows content operations. New capabilities help teams use librarian agents to customize ingestion, enrich complex content, and automate invoice processing.

DAM Usability — Aprimo is improving everyday DAM experiences so users can upload, protect, search, and reuse content faster.

Unified Platform Experiences — The Unified Search Experience brings work management and DAM results into a single results experience, helping users find content and work objects from one place.

https://www.aprimo.com/blog/interconnected-content-operations-in-action

MongoDB releases MongoDB 8.3

May 7, 2026 /

MongoDB, Inc. announced new capabilities to deliver a unified AI data platform that gives enterprises what they need to run agents in production: a real-time database, full text and vector search, memory, embeddings, and reranker models, all in one platform.

MongoDB 8.3, available today, delivers significantly more reads, more writes, more ACID transactions, and more complex operations over MongoDB 8.0, without changing a line of application code.

Cross-region connectivity for AWS PrivateLink, now generally available, ensures that database traffic between MongoDB Atlas clusters in different AWS regions stays on the AWS private network, with no exposure to the public internet.

With Automated Voyage AI Embeddings in MongoDB Vector Search, now in public preview, embeddings are now generated automatically as data is written or updated to give agents accurate, real-time context.

Agents without memory can’t learn, improve, or be trusted. The LangGraph.js Long-Term Memory Store, now generally available, gives JavaScript and TypeScript developers persistent, cross-conversation agent memory that Python developers have had, powered by MongoDB Atlas, as a single backend, with no additional database required.

MongoDB runs across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, on-premises, and in hybrid environments. Customers get one database, one API, and one set of skills that work consistently wherever they deploy.

https://investors.mongodb.com/news-releases/news-release-details/mongodb-makes-enterprise-ai-production-ready

Gilbane Advisor 5-6-26 — Language games, agent reality gap

May 6, 2026 /

Featured articles from: Stephanie Shen, and Cobus Greyling.

Additional reading from: Annalise Sumpon, Daniel Tunkelang, Rachel Draelos, and Michael Andrews.

News from: Microsoft, Deepgram, Acquia, Otter. ai.

Our next issue arrives 5/20/26.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

Opinion / Analysis

The illusion of understanding

Wittgenstein, neuroscience, and why language is not thought in humans or AI

Stephanie Shen’s intriguing essay provides novel way to look at how humans and LLMs each “think”. Shen wrote this piece for a general audience; no philosophical, neuroscience, or AI expertise required. Every reader will learn something. Highly recommended. (12 min)

https://medium.com/illumination/the-illusion-of-understanding-8b083cc1e11e

The AI agent reality gap

Researching AI agents in production and the gap between demo and deploy

Cobus Greyling summarizes a study, Measuring Agents in Production, from UC Berkeley, Intesa Sanpaolo, UIUC, Stanford University, and IBM Research, that surveyed 306 practitioners and conducted 20 in-depth case studies across 26 domains. Greyling’s article design is a bit loud, but a way to quickly get the take-aways, some of which are surprising. Link to the paper below. (8 min)

Article: https://medium.com/@cobusgreyling/the-ai-agent-reality-gap-143c04136b5b
Paper (PDF): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04123

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content Technology News

Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365 now generally available

Agent 365 is the control plane for agents, extending the visibility, control, and trust that organizations rely on for users to the agents they deploy.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/05/01/microsoft-agent-365-now-generally-available-expands-capabilities-and-integrations/

Deepgram launches Flux Multilingual

Flux Multilingual supports 10 languages in a single conversational model, enabling teams to build and deploy voice agents globally with one integration.
https://deepgram.com/learn/introducing-flux-multilingual

Acquia enhances Acquia Source

The unified intelligent workspace with the new Acquia AI allows digital teams manage content, applications, AI agents, and analytics in one place.
https://www.acquia.com/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-announces-significant-updates-acquia-source-and-launches-acquia-ai

Otter. ai launches enterprise Conversational Knowledge Engine

Knowledge Engine turns every meeting, call, and discussion into data that is searchable, cross-referenced, connected to your existing tools, and available to your AI systems.
https://otter.ai/blog/otter-ai-evolves-from-ai-notetaker-to-create-100b-enterprise-conversational-knowledge-engine-market

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365 are now generally available

May 1, 2026 /

From the Microsoft 365 Community blog…

Today, Microsoft 365 E7 – the Frontier Suite – is generally available, offering a single, integrated solution that unifies intelligence and trust, so organizations can move from experimentation to enterprise-wide AI adoption. Microsoft 365 E7 brings these capabilities together in one suite: 

  • Microsoft 365 Copilot: AI built for work
  • Microsoft 365 E5: enterprise‑grade productivity, security, identity, and compliance
  • Microsoft Entra Suite: identity and network access controls that secure employee use of all apps and AI
  • Microsoft Agent 365: the control plane for governing, observing, and securing AI agents at scale

Today also marks the general availability of Microsoft Agent 365. Agent 365 provides a consistent way to:

  • Observe: Gain visibility into agents in your environment, understand how they’re used, and act quickly on performance, behavior, and risk signals before they impact the business.
  • Govern: Establish guardrails for agents and people, onboard agents with IT oversight, and govern agent access to resources and data. Be audit ready with built-in compliance and data retention.
  • Secure: Secure agent identities, control access to resources, prevent data oversharing and leaks, and defend against threats and vulnerabilities with enterprise-grade security solutions.

Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365 are now generally available | Microsoft Community Hub

Deepgram launches Flux Multilingual

April 29, 2026 /

Deepgram, a real-time AI infrastructure company in the Voice AI economy, announced the general availability (GA) of Flux Multilingual, expanding its conversational speech recognition model beyond English to support: English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, and Dutch, with the ability to automatically detect, understand, and switch languages dynamically within a single conversation in real time. Developers, enterprises, and product teams building voice agents now have access to a real-time conversational speech recognition model, delivering accurate turn-taking, interruption handling, low latency, and natural human-like conversations at global scale. 

Traditional automatic speech recognition (ASR) is designed for transcription. Flux introduced a new approach, conversational speech recognition (CSR), built from the ground up to understand dialogue flow and enable real-time interaction. With native support for turn-taking, interruptions, and code-switching within a single interaction, voice applications remain fluid, responsive, and natural regardless of language or region. Flux Multilingual delivers monolingual-grade accuracy across languages. Developers can guide the model with language hints or let it auto-detect, adapting in real time even mid-conversation.

Flux Multilingual is available via Deepgram’s Cloud API or as a self-hosted deployment. Developers can get started today at deepgram.com or try Flux Multilingual directly in the Deepgram Playground.

https://deepgram.com/learn/introducing-flux-multilingual

« Older posts

Policies

Contact

twitter   rss   Mastadon   Bluesky   Medium

Contact • customerservice@gilbane.com

© 2026 Bluebill Advisors (except for contributed posts which are licensed under creative commons)

Banner photos: Sakonnet Harbor, Little Compton, RI, Fort Point Channel, Summer St bridge, and Northern Ave bridge, Boston

Bluebill Advisors Inc logo

© 2026 The Gilbane Advisor

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑