AI answer engines are becoming a default step in B2B discovery. Instead of scanning ten blue links, buyers now ask one complex question in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews — and get a single synthesized recommendation. If your brand isn’t part of those answers, you risk disappearing at the exact moment buyers decide. Databox’s latest research shows this shift is already happening.

When I talk to customers about privacy and their data, the topic is data sovereignty. More and more organisations want their data to stay in a specific jurisdiction, with no transfer to, or access from, another region. A few years ago, this was something for lawyers and compliance teams to worry about. Now it is a regular item on the C-suite agenda because it touches cloud strategy, innovation projects, and how you run the business day to day.

We are excited to announce that Confluent has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by IBM. After the transaction is closed (subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals), together, IBM and Confluent will aim to provide a platform that unifies the world’s largest enterprises, unlocking data for cloud/microservices, accelerating time-to-value, and building the real-time data foundation required to scale AI across every organization.

Snowflake Intelligence brings enterprise insights to every employee’s fingertips, helping users answer complex questions in natural language with their own personalized enterprise intelligence agent. But for these agents to deliver truly accurate, contextually aware results within Snowflake’s Cortex framework, they need more than access to static or batch data—they need a continuous, trustworthy view of everything happening across the business right now.

Finance teams are smart, but not infallible. Even the most talented and dedicated finance professionals, like the ones on your team, are bound to make a mistake from time to time. But some mistakes are more costly than others. Have you ever been in the middle of a presentation and realized that you were talking about the wrong data? Or have you had an executive ask for data that you simply couldn’t find? With the right tools and automation, you can avoid these embarrassing moments.