Salesforce is reimagining Slack as a conversational AI assistant with agentic capabilities that can also serve as the gateway to third-party agents within the operating system. The upgrade, which is expected to be complete by the end of the year, will feature native AI experiences built into Agentforce for Sales, IT and HR Service, Tableau and more. Salesforce’s Slack redesign could position the app to compete with Microsoft’s Copilot and Teams as the conversational AI layer inside an enterprise’s daily workflow — the place to talk to both people and agents, accessing and interacting with a company’s data. Read more

Walmart has partnered with OpenAI to make its products, as well as those from its Sam’s Club wholesale warehouse, available for purchase within ChatGPT. The AI-first shopping experience is designed to shift the purchasing interface “from reactive to proactive as it learns, plans and predicts, helping customers anticipate their needs,” according to Walmart. The transition is expected to take place over the next few months, allowing customers to purchase nearly every product on the Walmart and Sam’s Club websites through the chatbot, except for fresh food. Benefits like points and free shipping will continue to apply. Read more

Visa is rolling out a foundational framework for agentic commerce. Called the Trusted Agent Protocol, Visa says it enables secure communication between AI agents and merchants during every step of an agentic AI e-commerce transaction. The launch comes as AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail websites has grown by more than 4,700 percent this past year, Visa says, citing Adobe Research data. Visa is making the protocol, which was developed in concert with Cloudflare, available to others using an “open, ecosystem-wide approach” that aligns with global standards bodies including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), OpenID Foundation and EMVCo. Read more

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) will be a launch partner for the first publicly available AI supercluster powered by AMD’s upcoming Instinct MI450 Series GPUs — with an initial order of 50,000 of the chips to be deployed starting in Q3 2026 and expanding in 2027. The resulting Oracle installations will feature Instinct MI450s configured with AMD-designed CPUs in AMD’s new Helios server rack systems, positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL144 CPX racks when both platforms are mass-released next year. Oracle is challenged to rapidly scale its data center capacity due to massive compute commitments made this year to OpenAI. Read more

DirecTV is bringing user interaction to its screensavers, which will offer things like shoppable ads, powered by generative AI shopping platform firm Glance AI. The experience will begin rolling out next year to DirecTV subscribers using Google Gemini TV devices. Glance AI says it developed the technology in conjunction with Google. Among the uses are “creating an AI feed of your favorite sports leagues on your idle-screens or helping your kids discover their next dream vacation.” Overall, Glance AI on TV will offer users the opportunity “to engage with content from hundreds of top American brands and millions of catalogs.” Read more