From the completion of Salesforce’s Informatica acquisition to the impact of the Cloudflare outage, here are extracts from some of this week’s most popular news stories.
Will Salesforce’s Informatica Acquisition Make Agentforce Unstoppable?
Salesforce has announced the acquisition of Informatica.
First reported back in May, the purchase has now officially been confirmed for approximately $8BN.
The deal will see Salesforce leverage Informatica’s AI-powered cloud data management capabilities to improve its agentic AI offerings – most notably, the Agentforce platform.
Alongside the data catalog, Salesforce will also gain access to Informatica’s integration, governance, quality and privacy, metadata management, and Master Data Management (MDM) services.
The end goal is to use these capabilities to build a unified data foundation for agentic AI, enabling safe, responsible, and scalable AI agents across the enterprise.
Indeed, in discussing the news, Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff described data and context as the “true fuel of Agentforce.”
“When companies get their data right, they get their AI right, and Agentforce becomes unstoppable.”
In terms of the specifics, Salesforce also detailed how Informatica’s capabilities will sharpen its Data 360 feature… (Read more).
Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Major Platforms, Payments, and Black Friday Plans
It’s becoming a familiar story: A technical glitch at Cloudflare, one of the biggest internet infrastructure providers, knocked a number of websites and services offline for a few hours on November 18, disrupting customer access and merchant payments.
X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Spotify and payment giant Square were among those caught up in the fallout.
The trouble began just before 11:48 GMT, when Cloudflare posted that it was dealing with an “internal service degradation” causing intermittent outages across its service network. Users saw error pages, stalled logins, broken APIs, and sites claiming connections were blocked. There were a few conflicting signals about the restoration progress, as at one stage the company reported that services were beginning to recover, but then around 15 minutes later reverted to “continuing to investigate this issue.”
By 13:04 GMT, Cloudflare admitted that one of its fixes involved disabling WARP access in London entirely, temporarily cutting off users from its WARP performance-boosting and VPN service that helps secure and accelerate internet connections:
“During our attempts to remediate, we have disabled WARP access in London. Users in London trying to access the Internet via WARP will see a failure to connect.”
Cloudflare announced a fix five minutes later, but continued to receive “reports of intermittent errors” until close to 17:00 GMT… (Read more).
Five9 Targets CX Inefficiencies with New Genius AI Upgrades
Five9 has introduced a fresh wave of Genius AI updates designed to push the company’s “Agentic CX” vision further into the contact center core.
Announced at the company’s CX Summit in Nashville, the new capabilities span routing, quality management, analytics, and digital engagement, tying them more closely together to help organizations extract greater value from AI at scale.
As many enterprises attempt to take AI from pilot projects into day-to-day operations, fragmentation continues to slow progress.
Disconnected data, inconsistent reporting, and standalone AI experiments often make it difficult to achieve the continuous improvement leaders expect.
Five9’s latest releases aim to combat these challenges by treating AI not as an add-on but as the connective layer running across the environment.
Five9 Chief Product Officer Ajay Awatramani framed the shift as a more fundamental rethinking of how AI should function inside the contact center:
“Our Agentic CX vision is about creating systems that don’t just respond but also help teams better understand and anticipate customer needs.”
So, let’s take a closer look at Five9’s newest features… (Read more).
UJET Acquires Spiral to Address Customer Data Analysis Roadblocks
UJET has announced its acquisition of Spiral to bolster its AI capabilities.
The AI startup will allow UJET to continue its AI roadmap for enhanced customer service solutions.
This partnership will also address customer data analysis issues for UJET’s enterprise customers.
This acquisition is set to further UJET’s AI roadmap vision by bolstering the company’s AI capabilities and addressing customer experience concerns.
By highlighting these issues of visibility between customer and leader, organizations will be able to improve their customer issues before they reach escalation.
In fact, UJET has reported that organizations that are unaware of these individual customer problems are losing approximately $5MN-$30MN in customer churn revenue.
This can be linked to ignored or forgotten negative customer experience complaints, with organizations reportedly gathering only five percent of reported customer issues.
According to UJET CEO, Vasili Triant, customer churn remains a blind spot for many enterprises, arguing that customer interaction analysis is not done effectively… (Read more).
