IBM goes Frankenstein

IBM Drops $11B to Solve AI’s Biggest Bottleneck

IBM is making one of its biggest bets of the AI era. The company is acquiring Confluent for $11 billion in cash, paying about a 50% premium to lock in one of the most important players in real-time data streaming…AKA the backbone of every modern AI system.

What Confluent does: It powers the “data streams” that move information in and out of AI models in real time. As companies deploy more agentic systems and inference pipelines, this type of infrastructure is becoming as critical as GPUs.

Why IBM wants it: IBM says Confluent plugs directly into its AI, automation, and consulting stack. It also gives IBM more control over the data layer, which is increasingly the holdup for enterprise AI adoption (as opposed to the models themselves).

Here’s where the deal puts IBM in the AI race:

• Stronger enterprise moat. IBM already leans hard into “trusted AI.” Confluent adds the real-time data capabilities enterprises care about.

• Bigger revenue upside. IBM says the deal will add to EBITDA and free cash flow within two years.

• Clearer competitive posture. After acquiring HashiCorp in 2024 and Seek AI in 2025, plus partnering with Claude and AMD, IBM is positioning itself as the company that can stitch enterprise AI infrastructure together end-to-end.

Anthropic Plugs Claude Code Straight into Slack

Anthropic just pushed coding directly to the space where engineering teams already live: Slack. Starting this week, tagging @Claude in Slack turns the workplace messaging platform into a lightweight IDE—Claude automatically checks whether a message is a coding task, grabs the full thread context, and pulls from any repos you’ve connected to Claude Code.

This integration lands just weeks after Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.5, a model that they claim outperforms Gemini 3 specifically on coding tasks. The Slack tie-in effectively routes that strength directly onto the platform where engineers already coordinate fixes. 

• But there’s a tradeoff: Early evaluations found Opus 4.5 still has notable safety gaps, refusing only 78% of requests to generate malicious code. 

• In other words, Anthropic’s best model is also its loosest one—and Slack brings that directly into corporate workflows.

OpenAI Drops New Enterprise Stats Right After Calling ‘Code Red’

One week after Sam Altman told employees that Google’s Gemini surge triggered an internal “code red,” OpenAI released new enterprise usage data—and the numbers are meant to reassure both the market and customers that ChatGPT is still the default AI platform inside companies.

The shift: Enterprise customers are increasingly building custom GPTs, with usage up 19× this year and now representing 20% of all enterprise messages, OpenAI said. BBVA alone reportedly uses over 4,000 custom GPTs.

The tension: OpenAI needs enterprise revenue to scale. The company has $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments coming, and consumer subscriptions remain vulnerable as Google aggressively pushes Gemini across Android, Chrome, and Workspace. Anthropic, meanwhile, is still more enterprise-leaning, with steadier B2B revenue.

AWS Just Dropped the Next Wave of AI Power

AWS re:Invent 2025 unleashed a full-stack AI upgrade: from next-gen chips to frontier agents that transform how you build, secure, and ship software.

These new AI tools let you:

• Train AI models 4.4x faster with Trainium3 UltraServers—purpose-built chips delivering higher performance for massive, efficient AI workloads

• Scale gen AI apps on Amazon Bedrock and new Amazon Nova 2 family with new models, multimodal knowledge bases, and powerful fine-tuning on your own data

• Turn agents into teammates using Bedrock AgentCore and Nova Act plus frontier agents like Kiro, Security, and DevOps for end-to-end SDLC automation

• Modernize codebases with AWS Transform

Build full apps from plain English

AppWizzy is an AI-driven builder that turns simple text specs into production-ready full-stack apps. It spins up real dev VMs, auto-generates architecture and schemas, and uses AI to safely commit code changes directly to your repo.

How you can use it:

• Generate full app scaffolds and data models from a prompt

• Edit live repos through AI with Git-native commits

• Spin up staging environments

Pricing: free and paid

Turn your website into a brand ecosystem

Bloom scans your live site to extract colors, fonts, logos, imagery, and tone—then uses those signals to build a dynamic brand system and instant assets. 

How you can use it:

• Auto-generate brand kits and reusable design templates

• Produce on-brand social posts, ads, and graphics in seconds

• Refresh or realign visual identity using real website cues

• Help non-designers create consistent, professional content

Pricing: paid with a free trial