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Showing posts from 2025

Microsoft Layoffs: Profits, CEOs, and a Culture of Fear?

This will be a rant, but a rant with roots in the belief that employee experience fosters customer experience. As it should be well-known by now, Microsoft fired around 9,000 employees in July, after doing some smaller layoff rounds already in 2025, totaling more than 15,000 employees according to the TechCrunch comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs . This continues a trend from 2023 and 2024 . Now, I get it. Companies need to be and stay profitable, reorganize and, if needed, lay off employees. As such, there is nothing wrong with this. Where things start to get wrong is when at the same time two other things can be observed: strong and successful growth in revenues as well as profits, and very generous payments to the C-suite. Microsoft is immensely successful. For a long time now, we see record revenue and profits every quarter, which means strong growth. Looking at the most recent Q4/25 numbers , this is poised to continue and made Microsoft the second $4 trillion company after ...

Zoho goes all in with AI - bold or inevitable?

The news On July 17, 2025 Zoho launched Zia LLM and deepened its AI portfolio with agents, an agent builder, MCP support and an agent marketplace. Key announcements from the press release include: In-House LLM : Zoho has developed its own large language model, Zia LLM, which comes in three sizes (1.3B, 2.6B, and 7B parameters) to optimize for different business use cases. This allows customers to leverage AI while keeping their data within Zoho's ecosystem, ensuring privacy. The three models allow Zoho to always optimize the right model for the right user context, striking the proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. Speech-to-Text Models : The company also unveiled two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for English and Hindi, with plans to support more languages in the future. Prebuilt AI Agents : To facilitate immediate adoption, Zoho has introduced a range of AI age...

Creatio goes agentic but adds an interesting twist

The news On June 25, Creatio announced the launch of version 8.3 of its platform, dubbed as the “Twin release”. The release features new prebuilt role-based AI agents, a unified conversational interface, and AI-powered no-code development tools. These new capabilities are natively embedded into the core of the platform. According to Creatio, the "Twin" release reflects the company's vision of AI as a collaborative force within the enterprise. Katherine Kostereva , CEO at Creatio, stated, “ Our approach is human-centric. With this release, we continue to expand our AI-native platform, placing unified, actionable, and composable AI automation at the very core of Creatio. The 8.3 release takes our AI automation to a new level, empowering organizations to transform processes and deliver results like never before. ” Key innovations in this release include Natively Embedded AI and a Unified Conversational Interface : The 8.3 "Twin" Release advances Creatio's AI...

Agentforce 3 - finally ready for the enterprise?

The news On June 23, 2025, Salesforce announced Agentforce 3 , the third iteration of its Agentforce platform. Agentforce 3 is a major upgrade to Salesforce’s digital labor platform. It gives customers the visibility and control that is needed to scale AI agents that already have proven useful at many companies. The release covers several additional capabilities. Salesforce has introduced the Agentforce Command Center, an observability console designed for managing AI agents. This tool allows businesses to track and scale AI agent activities. It is built into Agentforce Studio and includes features for monitoring performance metrics such as latency and error rates through live analytics. The update also brings native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which enables Agentforce to connect with any MCP-compliant server without requiring custom coding. The platform's Atlas architecture has been enhanced to improve latency, accuracy, and resiliency. Support for additional Lar...