Latest AI News
X announces a rebuilt ad platform powered by AI
Elon Musk’s X is still trying to woo back advertisers — this time with a rebuilt, AI-powered ads platform thatstarted to rollouton Thursday. The tech company initiallystruggledto grow ad revenue in the first few years of Musk’s reign, leading it to shift its focus to other monetization channels, includingAI and subscriptions.However, forecastsfromeMarketerindicate that X’s ad business has been turning around as of late, with estimated ad revenue of $2.26 billion in 2025, risingto $2.46 billion in 2026. While that’s still half the size of Twitter’s 2021 ad business, it’s headed in the right direction again. Now, X is hoping to juice that growth further with a new ad platform. According to X, it has begun a “phased rollout” of the new platform, which it claims will have more modern “retrieval and ranking systems,” powered by AI. These changes are meant to make it easier for marketers to create targeted campaigns that they can control. AI will be used to enhance the campaigns, offering better results, more relevant ad placements, and precise targeting, according to X. “Very few companies would have the ambition and technical courage to completely rebuild their entire advertising platform in such a short timeframe. This is classic X and xAI — bold, fast, and focused on building something substantially better for advertisers,” said Monique Pintarelli, head of global advertising at xAI, in astatement posted on X. “We are designing this new ad stack to enable more rapid and seamless integration of ongoing innovation. Advertisers can expect a smooth delivery of continuous improvements and a regular drop of new features as we keep pushing the platform forward.” It’s not surprising that rebuilding X’s ad platform was a priority for the company after itmerged with Musk’s xAI last year. AI has contributed to revenue growth in ad businesses across the tech industry, as this week’s earnings have shown. Google, Meta, and others have been enjoying a “digital ad boom,”The New York Timesnoted this week, as AI systems have helped to automate the various aspects of marketing, from ad creation to targeting to measurement. This has also lowered the barrier for smaller businesses, giving them access to the same tools used by corporate giants, the report said.
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Salesforce is crowdsourcing its AI roadmap — with customers
Artificial intelligence continues to advance at a dizzying clip, forcing enterprises to develop and release new products quicker than ever or risk becoming irrelevant to a faster-moving competitor. Salesforce believes it has found a strategy that allows it to keep up even if it isn’t clear where AI is headed next. The customer management software giant is crowdsourcing its AI roadmap in real time. Salesforce is certainly not the only company to work intimately with its customers for feedback on its products. However, it’s notable considering the sheer size of the company, the pace of new product launches or fixes to existing ones, and the granular level of these relationships. These aren’t annual or even quarterly discussions. Salesforce is meeting with some customers as often as once a week. “The 18,000 customers are a wellspring of information and a wealth of information that is really needed to get to customer success,” Jayesh Govindarajan, executive vice president at Salesforce AI, told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “The stack that we’ve built that has resonated with these customers. Over time we can get context to be better, and as it gets better, and LLMs get better, agent systems do more and more fully autonomous behaviors. That’s a long running innovation track and we’re going to invest in that.” Salesforce was one of the first companies to launchAI agent management softwarein late 2024 before agentic AI started to dominate headlines the following year. The company has since doubled down and continues to release new products forvoice AIandSlackat a rapid pace. Salesforce credits its customers for the rate of its product releases. The company told TechCrunch that by letting its customers lead the way it is able to build an AI product roadmap that can quickly react to where AI technology is headed. When large language models were introduced, enterprises naturally wanted to jump on the technology but didn’t have the last-mile tech needed to fully use LLMs, Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, the president and chief technology officer of Salesforce engineering, told TechCrunch. The need for that last-mile tech is what sparked Salesforce to launch its agent management platform Agentforce, Jayesh Govindarajan, executive vice president at Salesforce AI, said in a recent interview. From there, the company developed a bottom-up strategy led by themes — including agent context, observability, and deterministic controls, among others — as opposed to specific product timelines. This approach uses direct feedback from rotating groups of customers to build products with the assumption that other enterprises will have similar needs. “The innovation that we’ve brought, they are direct result of us working with a vast number of these customers and then classifying the problems they see in the real world,” Govindarajan said. ‘Then [we break] that down and say, which of this can be solved at the LLM layer, which cannot? And for things that we cannot solve at the LLM layer, we need to build that sort of agentic operating system components around the LLMs to be able to go do that.” Working so closely with customers’ engineering teams allows Salesforce to fix problems quickly before the technology evolves past them. “We can’t wait three months or six months to get feedback, and then go figure out another six months of work,” Krishnaprasad said. “We are literally reacting to it, week by week, month by month. That’s been a big change. Now we push code, pretty fast, and we have various sorts of gates to try out new features, get earlier feedback before we release it broadly as well. So those are all changes that we had to do to kind of accommodate this rapid change in this environment.” Engine, a travel management platform, is one of the companies within Salesforce’s customer feedback loop. And it’s not a casual relationship. The company’s operations team meets with Salesforce weekly, according to Engine founder and CEO Elia Wallen. Through the partnership, Engine gets access to AI tools before they’re released. Wallen said the access helps Engine stay competitive and get more value out of these tools than it would otherwise. The relationship goes both ways. Wallen said he’s seen feedback from Engine get implemented into Salesforce tools. For example, Wallen said he instructed an AI voice agent to book him a hotel in Chicago. He thought the voice and interaction felt a bit unnatural and shared that with Salesforce. Shortly after, the agent had been changed and the company’s A/B tests started showing better results. “If somebody is willing to actually help curate and build products that we need, they can help us better and really understand our problem and how they can solve it,” Wallen said. “For us, it’s fantastic to actually be invited into a thing like that, because we can influence the product.” This strategy also allows the company to roll out solutions and workflows built by users to its broader customer base too. Federal credit union PenFed has been able to slim down its tech stack by working closely with Salesforce, Shree Reddy, the company’s chief innovation officer and executive vice president told TechCrunch. “We invest our time, energy into the platforms that are more strategic, and we obviously spend a lot more time on this relationship,” Reddy said about Salesforce. “That investment has yielded good results in terms of strengthening that partnership that’s influencing each other, and what we see is the best value add mutually to both organizations.” Reddy said PenFed developed an IT service management (ITSM) workflow on its own using existing tools and agents in Agentforce that worked well for the company. Salesforce was able to see that success and roll out the tool into the broader platform for other enterprises to use as well. The downside to this approach is that it relies on the classic service sentiment that the customer is always right. Salesforce is hoping they are despite many enterprises still figuring outwhat role AI will playin their business, and many having yet tofind value from the tech. As a result, they might not be the best source for long-term product development. Plus, being willing to test and preview technology in beta now doesn’t necessarily translate to long-term usage habits or future software contracts either. The company also takes this bottom-up approach internally. Govindarajan said Salesforce employees are the biggest users of its AI tools. The company also shifted labor and resources at the start of the AI boom. When ChatGPT was released, Salesforce moved around teams and resources to create a new AI team — a strategy the company has found successful during different innovation waves in the past, Krishnaprasad said. “As the technology changes, we never know what’s going to come out a month from now,” Krishnaprasad said. “We will adapt to it. And that’s what we did all of last year. If you think about it, agents weren’t even in terminology when you look back a year and a half ago. And then we had to go react to it. We had to go react to all the advances, and we had to react to our customers.”
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Google Photos Introduces AI ‘Wardrobe’ Feature Inspired by Clueless
The upcoming feature will use AI to turn users’ photo libraries into a digital closet, enabling outfit creation and curation, organisation and virtual try-ons.
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Meta Reports 33% Revenue Growth, Testing Early Versions of Business AI
The company also confirms employee headcount reduction starting in May.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Teases GPT-5.5 Cyber AI Model Rollout, Could Take On Anthropic’s Claude Mythos
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman teased the successor to the GPT-5.4 Cyber artificial intelligence (AI) model on Thursday. Dubbed GPT-5.5 Cyber, the model was announced just a fortnight after the San Francisco-based AI giant introduced its first cybersecurity model. Not a lot is known about the model currently, but it is expected to follow the same limited release format as the predecessor. The model is said to be competing with Anthropic's Claude Mythos, and offers similar real-world vulnerability detection prowess.
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Google Photos Unveils New AI-Powered Wardrobe Feature to Help You Decide What to Wear
Google Photos will soon roll out a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature to help users decide what to wear. The feature brings several existing AI tools together to let users digitise their entire wardrobe and mix and match clothes virtually to create new outfits without the hassle of manually wearing clothes. The feature is set to be available on both Android and iOS, although it will debut on the former before the latter. The Motorola Razr 2026 series, which is expected to be launched in select global markets in the coming months, will offer this feature out of the box.
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Meta says its business AI now facilitates 10 million conversations a week
Meta doesn’t come up much in discussions of the top AI products these days, but its products are still benefiting from the ongoing surge of interest in the technology. The company’s business AI tools facilitated about 10 million conversations per week as of late March, up from 1 million in the beginning of this year, Meta said during its first-quarter conference call on Wednesday. The growth comes as the company recentlyexpanded the beta program of its business AI assistantin the U.S., EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. Meta isn’t monetizing its business AI tools yet, offering them for free to small businesses to achieve scale, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted that may change in the near future. “Business AIs today are currently free for most businesses on our messaging apps, but as we make more progress, we expect that we will also work towards establishing a longer-term monetization model,” Zuckerberg said during the call. Meta has been baking AI capabilities into its suite of business products on its various platforms, and is working to power these products with its new large language model,Muse Spark, the first one to be released under the Meta Superintelligence Labs division set up last year. The company said it has seen solid traction for its creative AI tools in the quarter. “Usage of our ad creative tools is also scaling, with more than 8 million advertisers using at least one of our GenAI ad creative tools, and particularly strong adoption among small and medium-sized businesses. These tools are benefiting performance as well, with advertisers using our video generation feature seeing more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests,” CFO Susan Li said on the call. The company is also launching the open beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors this week, which will let advertisers connect their Meta ad account to an AI agent. Zuckerberg noted that the company’s apps altogether generated revenue of $885 million in the quarter, largely due to demand for paid messaging on WhatsApp and subscriptions to its apps. Earlier this month, the company started testinga WhatsApp Plus subscriptionthat gives users access to custom icons, themes, and notification sounds. The company reported profit of $26.8 billion in the first quarter, up from $16.6 billion a year earlier. Revenue came in at $56.3 billion, up 33% from last year.
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Cognizant to Acquire Astreya to Strengthen AI Infrastructure, Managed Services Capabilities
The IT services firm looks to deepen capabilities in AI-led managed services and infrastructure amid a global surge in data centre investments.
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Google Photos Introduces AI ‘Wardrobe’ Feature Inspired by Clueless
The upcoming feature will use AI to turn users’ photo libraries into a digital closet, enabling outfit creation and curation, organisation and virtual try-ons.
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The Meta–Manus Saga is a Case Study on How Not to Undermine China
By blocking Meta's acquisition of Manus, China wants to signal that US firms cannot influence local startups with lucrative capital.
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Google Crushes AWS, Microsoft Azure as Hypergrowth Hits the Cloud
Google is increasing its capex to $180–190 billion, with most of it directed towards the Cloud business.
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Google Hits 350 Mn Paid Subscriptions Across Services, Search Queries ‘All Time High’: Sundar Pichai
Google, on Wednesday, announced the quarterly financial results for Q1 2026. During the earnings call with investors and analysts, company CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company increased its consolidated revenue by 22 percent year-over-year (YoY) to clock $109.9 billion (roughly Rs. 10.48 lakh crore) in the first quarter of the ongoing year. The quarter was also notable because the Mountain View-based tech giant hit a new paid subscriptions record, and grew its cloud services and the Search product significantly.
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