Kevin McLaughlin

Brian Landsman, a 14-year Salesforce executive vice president overseeing global partnerships and the app store business, has joined OpenAI as vice president of global partnerships. The hire signals OpenAI's continued focus on building enterprise relationships and distribution channels. Landsman's appointment follows OpenAI's earlier recruitment of business-focused executives to expand commercial operations.

Salesforce is acquiring Contentful, a content management software provider, as part of a broader effort to make customer data more accessible to AI agents. The deal value falls between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, though exact terms were not disclosed. The acquisition reflects Salesforce's strategy to integrate AI capabilities across its platform by connecting content management with its existing customer data infrastructure.

Lowe's is using semantic layers and knowledge graphs to improve its AI agents that assist customers with orders and help store managers coordinate daily operations. Semantic layers, which standardize business metric definitions across enterprises, are becoming a competitive battleground among AI software providers including Microsoft, Databricks, and SAP. Lowe's has deployed multiple AI agents developed with OpenAI, including a shopping assistant, sales coach, and invoice verification tool for finance teams.

Microsoft is restricting Databricks from connecting its data management platform to Power BI, Microsoft's widely-used business intelligence tool. The move reflects growing competition over data access in the AI agent era, where control of data pipelines has become strategically important. Databricks, a longtime Microsoft partner, began testing a feature in early March that would simplify customer connections between its platform and visualization tools, prompting Microsoft's defensive response.

SAP has announced a deepened partnership with Anthropic that will integrate Claude into its business AI platform, marking a significant move to catch up with competitors in AI agent adoption. The German enterprise software giant used its annual customer conference to showcase this agreement and a broader AI product bundle aimed at addressing what executives acknowledged was slower adoption of AI agents compared to rival software vendors. The deal makes Claude more accessible within SAP's existing customer base and product ecosystem.

Amazon has hired Steve Molloy, a seven-year Google veteran, as vice president of AI silicon in a newly created role. Molloy's appointment signals Amazon's intensifying effort to build proprietary AI chip capabilities in-house rather than rely solely on third-party suppliers. The move reflects broader competitive pressure in the AI infrastructure space, where companies like Google, Meta, and others are developing custom silicon to reduce costs and improve performance for large language models and other AI workloads.