Microsoft Layoffs: Profits, CEOs, and a Culture of Fear?
This will be a rant, but a rant with roots in the belief that employee experience fosters customer experience. As it should be well-known by now, Microsoft fired around 9,000 employees in July, after doing some smaller layoff rounds already in 2025, totaling more than 15,000 employees according to the TechCrunch comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs. This continues a trend from 2023 and 2024. Now, I get it. Companies need to be and stay profitable, reorganize and, if needed, lay off employees. As such, there is nothing wrong with this. Where things start to get wrong is when at the same time two other things can be observed: strong and successful growth in revenues as well as profits, and very generous payments to the C-suite. Microsoft is immensely successful. For a long time now, we see record revenue and profits every quarter, which means strong growth. Looking at the most recent Q4/25 numbers, this is poised to continue and made Microsoft the second $4 trillion company after Nvidia. Consequently, Satya Nadella as the company CEO, receives an enormous total compensation ($ 79.1M in 2024). To compare this number, the average total compensation of a Microsoft employee is $220k with a median compensation of around $192k. This is a factor of 400. And no, this is not me being jealous. Microsoft’s written down corporate values are respect, integrity, and accountability. What triggered this text is the dissonance between all this that is also evident in Satya Nadella’s mail to the employees titled “Recommitting to our why, what, and how” that got published on the corporate blog on July...
Zoho goes all in with AI – bold or inevitable?
The news On July 17, 2025 Zoho launched Zia LLM and deepened its AI portfolio with agents, an agent builder, MCP support and an agent marketplace. Key announcements from the press release include: In-House LLM: Zoho has developed its own large language model, Zia LLM, which comes in three sizes (1.3B, 2.6B, and 7B parameters) to optimize for different business use cases. This allows customers to leverage AI while keeping their data within Zoho’s ecosystem, ensuring privacy. The three models allow Zoho to always optimize the right model for the right user context, striking the proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. Speech-to-Text Models: The company also unveiled two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for English and Hindi, with plans to support more languages in the future. Prebuilt AI Agents: To facilitate immediate adoption, Zoho has introduced a range of AI agents that are integrated directly into its products. These agents are designed to automate tasks for various business roles such as sales development, customer support, and account management. Global and Private Cloud Deployment: The new Zia LLM will be deployed across Zoho’s data centers in the US, India, and Europe. Continued Support for Other Models: While promoting its own AI, Zoho will continue to support integrations with other popular large language models like ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek. Zoho will continue to scale Zia LLM’s mode sizes. A2A capabilities are on the roadmap. The bigger picture Enterprise software has been a platform game for a long time. AI, in particular generative and agentic AI, have...
Creatio goes agentic but adds an interesting twist
The news On June 25, Creatio announced the launch of version 8.3 of its platform, dubbed as the “Twin release”. The release features new prebuilt role-based AI agents, a unified conversational interface, and AI-powered no-code development tools. These new capabilities are natively embedded into the core of the platform. According to Creatio, the “Twin” release reflects the company’s vision of AI as a collaborative force within the enterprise. Katherine Kostereva, CEO at Creatio, stated, “Our approach is human-centric. With this release, we continue to expand our AI-native platform, placing unified, actionable, and composable AI automation at the very core of Creatio. The 8.3 release takes our AI automation to a new level, empowering organizations to transform processes and deliver results like never before.” Key innovations in this release include Natively Embedded AI and a Unified Conversational Interface: The 8.3 “Twin” Release advances Creatio’s AI-native strategy by embedding Creatio’s AI deeper into and across every layer of the platform. Creatio.ai is designed to power real-time automation, provide grounded recommendations, and offer a seamless natural language experience. Users can now interact with Creatio using natural language as the default mode through a refreshed, AI-optimized interface. The assistant utilizes retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide responses based on company-specific context. These conversational capabilities are natively available across Creatio’s web and mobile applications, as well as within productivity tools such as MS Outlook and MS Teams. Prebuilt, Role-Based AI Agents: The release introduces new prebuilt, role-based AI agents that cover sales, service, marketing and development. These agents are designed to help employees and customers achieve business results faster. AI-Powered No-Code Development: Creatio 8.3 enhances...
Agentforce 3 – finally ready for the enterprise?
The news On June 23, 2025, Salesforce announced Agentforce 3, the third iteration of its Agentforce platform. Agentforce 3 is a major upgrade to Salesforce’s digital labor platform. It gives customers the visibility and control that is needed to scale AI agents that already have proven useful at many companies. The release covers several additional capabilities. Salesforce has introduced the Agentforce Command Center, an observability console designed for managing AI agents. This tool allows businesses to track and scale AI agent activities. It is built into Agentforce Studio and includes features for monitoring performance metrics such as latency and error rates through live analytics. The update also brings native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which enables Agentforce to connect with any MCP-compliant server without requiring custom coding. The platform’s Atlas architecture has been enhanced to improve latency, accuracy, and resiliency. Support for additional Large Language Models has been added, including Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet via Amazon Bedrock, with future support planned for Google Gemini. Agentforce 3 includes over 200 pre-built industry actions, with half of these being new additions. The agents are now capable of performing web searches and providing citations for the information they retrieve. The platform’s availability has been expanded to Canada, the U.K., India, Japan, and Brazil, adding support for six new languages. More than 30 new partners have been added to the AgentExchange marketplace. These include companies such as AWS, Box, Cisco, Google Cloud, IBM, PayPal, and Stripe. Salesforce has also introduced new pricing options, including per-user plans for its Sales, Service, and Industry Clouds that provide unlimited usage of actions for employee-facing agents....