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Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 1 of 99)

This category is focused on enterprise / workplace collaboration tools and strategies, including office suites, intranets, knowledge management, and enterprise adoption of social networking tools and approaches.

Microsoft announces agentic AI capabilities for retail

Microsoft announced a set of agentic AI capabilities aimed at supporting automation and decision-making across retail operations, including merchandising, marketing, store operations, and fulfillment. The tools are designed to connect data and workflows so teams can act on context in real time.

Copilot Checkout, now available in the U.S. on Copilot.com, allows shoppers to complete purchases directly within Copilot without being redirected to a retailer’s website, while merchants remain the merchant of record. The service integrates with partners including PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe, and supports participating retailers such as Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Ashley Furniture, and Etsy sellers.

Microsoft also introduced Brand Agents for Shopify merchants and a personalized shopping agent template in Copilot Studio. These tools enable conversational shopping experiences using a retailer’s product catalog, with options ranging from turnkey deployment to fully customizable implementations.

In public preview, a catalog enrichment agent template automates product onboarding and categorization by extracting attributes from images and enriching data for search and recommendations.

For physical stores, a store operations agent template provides natural-language access to inventory, policies, and operational insights, helping staff manage workflows, staffing, and day-to-day decisions using internal and external data signals.

https://news.microsoft.com/source/2026/01/08/microsoft-propels-retail-forward-with-agentic-ai-capabilities-that-power-intelligent-automation-for-every-retail-function

Snowflake to acquire Observe

Snowflake, an AI Data Cloud company, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Observe, a provider of AI-powered observability. With this acquisition, Snowflake will deliver their next generation of AI-powered observability, built on open standards and designed for the scale, complexity, and economics required by modern AI-driven enterprises. Snowflake and Observe will provide enterprises with: 

  • Agentic AI for faster troubleshooting: The combination of Observe’s AI-powered Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with data in Snowflake enables a shift from reactive monitoring to proactive, automated troubleshooting. Observe’s AI SRE leverages a unified context graph that correlates logs, metrics, and traces, allowing teams to detect anomalies earlier, identify root causes, and resolve production issues faster.
  • An open-standard architecture built for scale: The acquisition also establishes a unified, open-standard observability architecture based on Apache Iceberg and OpenTelemetry. Enterprises can manage massive telemetry volumes using economical object storage, elastic compute, and interoperable standards.
  • Full telemetry data retention with efficient economics: As AI-driven applications generate volumes of logs, metrics, and traces, enterprises have increasingly been forced to rely on sampling and short retention windows to manage cost. By unifying Observe’s AI-powered observability platform with Snowflake’s scalable data foundation, organizations may eliminate these tradeoffs.

https://www.snowflake.com/en/news/press-releases/snowflake-announces-intent-to-acquire-observe-to-deliver-ai-powered-observability-at-enterprise-scale

WP Engine acquires Big Bite

WP Engine, a global web enablement company providing products and solutions for websites built on WordPress, today announced its acquisition of Big Bite, an enterprise agency known for the development of advanced editorial tools to improve how global brands and media organizations create and share digital content.

A longstanding WP Engine agency partner, Big Bite has over a decade of experience developing newsroom platforms, publishing workflows, and specialized tools that combine editorial flexibility with technical excellence. Their publishing expertise has helped transform the digital ecosystems of some of the world’s biggest media brands, including The Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Metro, and Macworld. As part of this transaction, Big Bite’s agency business will be wound down, and its team will transition into WP Engine’s Engineering organization to help build products that enhance publishing solutions for customers and agency partners. 

Big Bite’s publishing expertise, focused on navigating the rapidly changing digital landscape with innovative solutions, will seamlessly integrate into the premium service WP Engine provides its network of global agency partners.

https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-acquires-big-bite/

Squirro announces Squirro Release 3.14.4

Squirro, a global supplier of enterprise-grade Generative AI and knowledge graph technology, announced the general availability of its latest Long-Term Support (LTS) platform update. Squirro Release 3.14.4 introduces new capabilities designed to close the gap between structured enterprise knowledge and ad-hoc user workflows.

Most notably, the update includes direct file uploads, multimodal image reasoning, and an enterprise-grade prompt library – features that help organizations extract insights from complex documents, whether stored in enterprise repositories or sitting on a user’s desktop.

The centerpiece of the latest Squirro Platform Release is an enhanced chat experience designed for versatility and depth. Direct file uploads let users bypass traditional indexing workflows by dragging contracts or reports directly into the chat for on-the-spot analysis. For complex long-form content, a new “Chat with Item” agent maintains deep memory context retaining the first 100 pages plus a summary to support Q&A sessions without losing the thread.

Multimodal image reasoning enables the AI to interpret charts, tables, and images contained within documents, while newly introduced table rendering capabilities automatically format structured data outputs into clean, readable tables.

By combining deep context memory, multimodal reasoning, and dynamic ad-hoc analysis, the upgrade enhances reasoning capabilities of auditable agentic workflows.

https://squirro.com/news-and-events/new-release-december-2025-enhanced-chat-multimodal-reasoning

Adobe delivers new AI assistants and models across Creative Cloud

Adobe announced new AI features across Creative Cloud apps including Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, and Illustrator. The updates focus on improving efficiency, precision, and control for creative professionals.

Highlights include the AI Assistant in Photoshop, which can handle repetitive tasks, provide personalized recommendations, and support conversational editing while allowing seamless switching to manual tools. Photoshop also gains Generative Fill with partner models, Generative Upscale using Topaz Labs and other partners, and Harmonize for blending objects naturally into scenes. Premiere introduces AI Object Mask, shape-based masking tools, and Fast Vector Mask in public beta for faster video editing. Lightroom receives an AI Assisted Culling feature to help manage large photo collections.

Firefly enhancements include Image Model 5 in public beta for 4MP photorealistic generation and editing, Prompt to Edit for natural language adjustments, and planned Layered Image Editing. Firefly Boards adds Rotate Object for 2D-to-3D perspectives, PDF export, and batch image downloads. Firefly Creative Production supports no-code batch editing of thousands of images. Firefly Custom Models let users create personalized models for stylistically consistent outputs.

Many features are in public or private beta, with partner models from Google, Black Forest Labs, Topaz, and others integrated directly into Adobe apps, available to Creative Cloud Pro and Firefly plan subscribers.

https://news.adobe.com/news/2025/10/adobe-max-2025-creative-cloud

Bloomreach and Uniform unveil turnkey conversational commerce framework

Bloomreach, an agentic platform for personalization, and Uniform, a composable digital experience platform, today announced a turnkey AI solution unveiled at the MACH Alliance’s AI Hackathon taking place from October 21-22. Powered by the Open Data Model from MACH Alliance, the solution showcased how composable technology and generative AI can be seamlessly combined, enabling any brand to build conversational experiences that help them retain control of their customer relationships.

Built on AWS, the solution aggregates product catalogs from multiple commerce platforms through Uniform, and enriches them with AI-driven tagging, normalization, and metadata optimization. Then, the product data flows into Bloomreach Clarity, where it powers a fully conversational shopping interface — allowing customers to browse, compare, and shop via natural dialogue. 

https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2025/bloomreach-and-uniform-to-unveil-new-turnkey-conversational-commerce-framework/https://www.uniform.devhttps://machalliance.org

Graphwise launches Graph AI Suite

Graphwise, announced Graph AI Suite, a comprehensive Graph AI platform that accelerates how businesses unlock value from their data. It turns enterprise knowledge into a self-improving engine for trustable AI by leveraging GraphRAG. The platform’s capabilities simplify how organizations build intelligent knowledge graphs that continuously learn at scale.

  • Modeling & Mapping: Allows organizations to build a graph from structured and unstructured data, including automated taxonomy building. It helps them mature from “text on a document” toward “structured content” and, eventually, a knowledge graph, improving GraphRAG performance.
  • Ingestion & Automation: These components connect to arbitrary systems and support specific use cases for each organization, enabling integration with LLMs such as Gemini, Llama, and others and agentic AI platforms.
  • Semantic Analysis: Automatically moves content toward a knowledge graph by creating taxonomies and enterprise vocabularies. It drives semantic metadata enrichment across data silos, building the basis for a highly accurate GraphRAG infrastructure. A key part of the AI Flywheel, it makes the platform easy for subject matter experts to use.
  • GraphRAG: This is the Graph AI Suite’s core capability for delivering trustworthy AI. It uses the knowledge graph to furnish the LLM accurate, context-rich and semantically relevant data, mitigating hallucinations and ensuring responses are grounded in verifiable facts.

http://www.graphwise.ai/

Google announces Gemini Enterprise

From the Google Products Blog…

AI has opened up new opportunities in the cloud market — and today, we announced our next chapter with Gemini Enterprise. Gemini Enterprise is designed on the premise that true business transformation in the era of AI must go beyond simple chatbots. You need a comprehensive and integrated platform that brings all your company’s data, tools, and people together in one secure place.

That’s exactly what we’ve built. Gemini Enterprise is an AI-powered conversational platform designed to bring the full power of Google AI to every employee for every workflow.

Built with Google’s most advanced Gemini models, it enables you to chat with your company’s documents, data, and applications. It also gives you the tools to build and deploy AI agents, as well as a suite of pre-built agents, and is grounded in your company’s information and your personal context at work.

Delivering this level of transformation requires a commitment to upskilling your teams. So today, we are announcing a comprehensive set of programs to help you succeed, including free Google Skills training, and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Ready (GEAR) program.

Gemini Enterprise: The new front door for Google AI in your workplace

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