It’s been another busy week in the wonderful world of customer experience, with a major acquisition from Salesforce, fighting talk from NVIDIA and ServiceNow, some eye-opening findings in Cisco’s agentic AI report, and a deep dive into Microsoft’s recent layoffs.
Here are the extracts from these popular news stories.
Salesforce to Acquire Informatica for $8BN: 3 Big Talking Points
Salesforce has agreed to acquire Informatica for approximately $8BM.
Bloomberg hinted at the news late last week, citing “a person familiar with the matter”.
Salesforce was linked to a move for Informatica in early 2024, but cooled its interest after reportedly failing to agree on an acquisition fee.
Yet, since the move broke down in April last year, Informatica’s stock price has dropped by over a third, and Salesforce has now swooped.
The deal – which is worth roughly $8BN in equity value – will see holders of Informatica’s Class A and Class B-1 common stock receive $25 in cash per share.
Explaining the company’s motives for the deal, Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce, said:
Together, Salesforce and Informatica will create the most complete, agent-ready data platform in the industry.
Investors did not react kindly, with Salesforce’s stock down by over three percent on the news (Read on…).
NVIDIA CEO: ServiceNow Is Destined to Be the Best Platform for Enterprise AI Agents
“As a third party watching the world of enterprise AI, ServiceNow is destined to be the best platform, the operating system of enterprise AI agents.”
Those are the opening comments of Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, as he took to the stage at this month’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2025 event. He continued:
The reason for that is because every company in the world needs AI agents. And those AI agents are going to be curated, managed, and improved by the IT department. ServiceNow is already in every company’s IT department.
Those IT departments may use the newly launched ServiceNow AI Control Tower as a single dashboard to do precisely what Huang suggested: curate, manage, and improve AI agents.
These agents will sit within the ServiceNow AI platform, which provides a framework for AI agents to flit between enterprise systems.
NVIDIA is powering many of the first-party AI agents that run across that platform. Yet, ServiceNow also supports third-party AI agents from the likes of Microsoft, Google, and many others.
As it does so, ServiceNow – again through the Control Tower – tracks AI agent adoption across departments, monitors ROI, and enables governance.
Unsurprisingly, Bill McDermott, Chairman & CEO of ServiceNow, celebrated the Control Tower’s launch and agreed with Huang’s take (Read on…).
Cisco Predicts Agentic AI Will Handle 68% of Contact Center Interactions by 2028
Cisco has released a new report, predicting that agentic AI will handle 68 percent of contact center conversations by 2028.
It also suggests that agentic AI will help automate as many as 56 percent of interactions by 2026.
Cisco’s report includes a survey of almost 8,000 business and technical decision-makers in 30 countries.
Summarizing its findings, Cisco described agentic AI as “the most transformative technology to impact customer experience in decades.”
Its customer contact automation predictions mirror those of Gartner earlier this year.
Indeed, the research firm stated that by 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80 percent of routine customer service issues, resulting in a 30 percent drop in operational costs.
In addition to assisting interaction-handling, Cisco’s study also revealed that 93 percent of respondents believe agentic AI will empower B2B tech vendors to deliver more personalized, proactive, and predictive services.
Moreover, 88 percent are confident this AI-driven approach will support their organization in reaching broader objectives (Read on…).
The Microsoft Layoffs: What Aren’t They Telling Us About AI?
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that it was laying off three percent of its global workforce.
The move will impact over 6,000 staff, making it the highest number of job cuts since January 2023 when 10,000 employees were let go.
Microsoft has yet to provide an official release on the cuts but has confirmed the news to some media outlets.
Speaking to CNBC, a Microsoft spokesperson said:
“We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace.”
Interestingly, the layoffs came just weeks after Microsoft’s Q3 2025 earnings call, where the company posted strong figures, including breaking the $70 billion mark in total revenue, a 13 percent YoY increase.
Given the impressive performance, many questioned why the vendor has decided to reduce its headcount at this time, with some publications reporting that Microsoft made the move because of the transformational impact of AI (Read on…).
