The theme of NTT Research Inc.‘s annual user event, Upgrade, in San Jose this week was “Research to Reality,” a reflection of NTT’s desire to balance the academic nature of research with the practicality of ensuring the outcome is something customers can use and benefit from.
Zscaler Inc.‘s new partnership with OpenAI Group PBC has the potential to transform the security firm’s cloud-native zero-trust platform into an engine that can both harden its own stack and help customers deploy artificial intelligence with confidence at large scale.
For years, the promise of “no-code” artificial intelligence has felt a bit like a “some assembly required” IKEA desk — sure, you aren’t sawing the wood yourself, but you’re trying to decipher how to assemble dozens of parts, many of which seem to fit poorly. With communications, low-code often had a nice user interface, but information technology pros were still knee-deep in complex flowcharts, Session Initiation Protocol trunk configurations and professional services.
I had been waiting for the 2026 edition of Zoom Communications Inc.‘s Perspectives, its recently held annual get-together for industry analysts, because I find Zoom to be the most interesting vendor in the communications business today. Though it has many competitors, its product roadmap has been markedly different.
Over the past 18 months, the enterprise technology narrative has been dominated by a singular, persistent theme: artificial intelligence, more specifically agentic AI. From CES to NRF to the World Economic Forum, every vendor, service provider and analyst firm has been preaching the gospel of AI.