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  • OpenAI Launches a ChatGPT Version for Personal Finance, Which “Securely” Connects to Bank Accounts

    OpenAI Launches a ChatGPT Version for Personal Finance, Which “Securely” Connects to Bank Accounts

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI released this month a pilot of a personal finance tool for Pro users, available on the Web and iOS, that “securely” connects and syncs accounts to a reasoning ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking model, showing a dashboard with portfolio performance, spending, subscriptions, upcoming payments, and more.

    According to the company, “ChatGPT guides users through securely linking accounts through Plaid, with Intuit support coming soon. After you authenticate, ChatGPT will begin syncing and categorizing your data, which may take a few minutes.”

    “Managing finances today often means piecing together accounts, apps, cards, loans, and spreadsheets just to know where things stand. Even then, it can be hard to see the full picture or know what to do next.”

    The tool is supported by more than 12,000 financial institutions, including Schwab, Fidelity, Chase, Robinhood, American Express, and Capital One.

    OpenAI said that its vision for ChatGPT is to go beyond answering questions to help users take action to improve their financial lives and connect with local experts in real time.

    In terms of security, the company ensured that once accounts are connected, ChatGPT can access users’ balances, transactions, investments, and liabilities to help visualize finances or answer questions. It cannot see full account numbers or make any changes to your accounts.

    Once disconnected, synced account data will be deleted from OpenAI’s systems within 30 days.

    OpenAI said that over 200 million people use ChatGPT⁠(opens in a new window) for budgeting, questions about their investments, comparing different paths, planning for future goals, and more.

    The new product comes one month after OpenAI acquired the team behind the personal finance startup Hiro, which was backed by firms such as Ribbit, General Catalyst, and Restive.

    AI companies are enhancing generalized chatbots to answer questions about data-sensitive topics such as health, finance, and personal life.

    Both OpenAI and Anthropic have launched health-related tools. Also, Perplexity launched this month its own financial research product based on its Computer agent.

  • Anthropic Releases Claude for the Legal Industry, with 20+ New MCP Connectors and 12 Plugins

    Anthropic Releases Claude for the Legal Industry, with 20+ New MCP Connectors and 12 Plugins

    IBL News | New York

    Anthropic announced this month the launch of over 20 new MCP connectors and 12 plugins tailored to specific legal work and practice areas, for paying attorneys, law students, and others in the legal sector.

    These tools link Claude to dedicated legal software to tackle specific workflows. They are intended for handling day-to-day legal document work, including contract review, drafting, redlining, extraction, and comparison. o

    One feature, called “Commercial Counsel”, reviews vendor agreements, while another tool is intended to help with studying for the bar exam.

    This setup connects to third-party software services commonly used in law, such as DocuSign, Thomson Reuters, and even a competing AI legal service like Harvey.

    Each agent template can be installed in Cowork or Claude Code with a click and produces outputs that match institutional drafting standards.

    The plugin and skill ecosystems are open protocols, and early contributors, including Box, Legal Quants, Lawve AI, and Thomson Reuters, have already shipped their own skills, plugins, and style conventions. Any partner can submit connectors and skills through the Directory. ‍

    Anthropic is also competing with OpenAI in other industries, such as financial services and health care.

    Both AI companies are trying to convince potential customers of their offering on security, data privacy, and questions related to IT teams.

     

     

  • Google Issues “Gemini Omni:”, a New Model that Can Create Anything from any Input

    Google Issues “Gemini Omni:”, a New Model that Can Create Anything from any Input

    IBL News | New York

    Google’s new Gemini Omni model was officially released yesterday at the company’s annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California, a single foundation model with a single editing surface, going far beyond the multimodal generative stack — text-to-image, image-to-video, video-to-video, audio generation, as well as the image-generation and editing model Nano Banana.

    Google presented it as “the first truly native model that can create anything from any input — starting with video.”

    This model is available only to individual users through Google’s AI subscription plans, starting with the $ 20-per-user-per-month “AI Plus” plan. It can currently be accessed on the Gemini website and mobile apps, Google’s web-based Flow AI image and video editing suite, and YouTube Shorts.

    The API — which many enterprises rely on for their AI needs — is not ready yet.

    The first model in the family, Gemini Omni Flash, accepts any combination of text, images, audio, and video as input and produces high-quality output across the same modalities.

    Google says the model is “natively multimodal from the ground up.”

    For “marketing video,” Omni’s value proposition for enterprises is programmable video and media engine rather than a creative app:

    • Sales and marketing: rapid generation of variant ads, localized creative, and product demos without per-asset agency cycles.
    • Internal communications, learning and development (L&D): explainer videos, onboarding modules, and policy walkthroughs produced by non-specialists.
    • Customer support and documentation: dynamic, query-conditioned visual explainers attached to help articles.
    • Product and engineering: visualization of simulations, UI walkthroughs, and concept videos for spec reviews.
    • Field operations: short, situation-specific instructional clips generated on demand.

    The competitive landscape is crowded with Synthesia, TikTok’s Seedance model, Kuaishou Technology’s Kling AI models, and the fast-improving open-source field

    We’re dropping Gemini Omni: our first step towards a model that can create anything from anything – starting with video. It combines Gemini’s intelligence with our generative media systems – representing a leap forward in world understanding, multimodality, and editing

  • 442 of the Nation’s 1,700 Private Nonprofit Universities Are at Risk of Closing

    442 of the Nation’s 1,700 Private Nonprofit Universities Are at Risk of Closing

    IBL News | New York

    A forecast by Huron Consulting Group projects that 442 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities (25% of the sector), with a combined enrollment of 670,000 students, are at risk of closing or merging within the next 10 years. More than 120 institutions are at the very highest risk.

    For its assessment, the consultancy company analyzed enrollment trends, tuition revenue, assets, debt, cash on hand, and other measures.

    The crisis is driven by declining enrollment, financial deficits, and pandemic-era pressures. Smaller, tuition-dependent institutions in the Northeast and Midwest are most vulnerable.

    Colleges Closing or Announcing Closures (2025-2026)
    • Siena Heights University (MI): Closing after the 2025–2026 academic year.
    • Lourdes University (OH): Announced closure.
    • Fontbonne University (MO): Closing after summer 2025.
    • Limestone University (SC): Closing after Spring 2025.
    • St. Andrews University (NC): Ceased operations in May 2025.
    • Sterling College (VT): Closing after spring 2025.
    • Eastern Nazarene College (MA): Closing by the end of 2025.
    • Queens University of Charlotte (NC): Cited in 2026, though status varies.

    Schools Facing Financial Peril
    • Anna Maria College (MA): Flagged for closure risk.
    • Portland State University (OR): Experiencing high restructuring risk and debt.
    • Southern Oregon University (OR): Addressing significant fiscal issues.
    • Wells College (NY) and Northland College (WI): Cited among recent closures or high-risk institutions.

    Factors Influencing Risk

    Small, private, non-profit schools with declining enrollment (e.g., falling below 1,000 students) and small endowments are at the highest risk. A “perfect storm” of low enrollment, high debt (e.g., $30M debt at Limestone), and rising operating costs is causing institutions to fold, even after attempting cost-cutting measures.

    There are about 3,700 two- and four-year public and private degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States. That’s already down from a peak of 4,726 in 2012. Almost all that have closed since then were private, for-profit schools, which enjoyed a brief boom before crashing under the weight of consumer discontent and increased regulation.

    There are already 2.3 million fewer students than there were in 2010. A drop in the birthrate that began around the same time means there is about to be a further downward slide in the number of 18-year-olds through at least 2041.

    The proportion of high school graduates who go on to college is also down, from 70% in 2016 to 61% in 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available.

    The number of visas issued to new full-tuition-paying international students entering the United States plummeted by nearly 100,000 this year, a 36% decline.

    Looming caps on federal loans for graduate study, which take effect in July, threaten to reduce demand for yet another crucial revenue source.

    Community colleges, too — which enroll nearly 5.6 million students — are suffering financial squeezes that leave them less able to adapt or respond to change.

  • Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Cloud Moving Downward into the Enterprise Implementation Business

    Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Cloud Moving Downward into the Enterprise Implementation Business

    IBL News | New York

    AI frontier models are seeking to move beyond infrastructure, software licensing business, and API services in an AI-first world.

    They are launching private equity firms backed by institutional capital and are willing to enter the enterprise workflows business by moving closer to implementation, orchestration, and transformation work — an area that has long been dominated by IT outsourcing firms.

    These AI-native companies increasingly want to own more of the enterprise workflow layer, while enterprises themselves want greater control over strategic technology capabilities, specifically execution, governance, and accountability.

    On May 4, Anthropic unveiled a $1.5 billion venture backed by investors, including Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hellman & Friedman, and Sequoia Capital.

    On the same day, it was disclosed that OpenAI was raising over $4 billion for its own initiative, “The Development Company,” at a reported valuation of $10 billion.

    Weeks earlier, Google Cloud announced strategic partnerships with Vista Equity Partners and CVC. It is also reportedly exploring arrangements with Blackstone, KKR, and EQT.

    Analysts say this approach increasingly resembles the “forward-deployed engineer” model popularised by Palantir, where software companies move beyond selling technology and embed themselves deeply within enterprise operations.

    The model is based on deploying forward-deployed engineers — a kind of AI deployment engines — to work side by side with portfolio companies of private equity firms, helping them build and optimize AI solutions on top of its models and broader AI stack.

    Karthik Narain, Chief Product and Business Officer at Google Cloud, said that these partnerships would accelerate AI adoption across sectors and drive industry-wide digital transformation. Anthropic is targeting mid-sized companies in sectors like healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, retail, real estate, and infrastructure.

    “Demand for hands-on AI implementation in sectors is significantly outpacing what is available across the industry today,” he said.

    Krishna Rao, chief financial officer at Anthropic, said this month that the company’s partnerships remain central to how Claude reaches large enterprises, and that it continues to “invest deeply” in those relationships.

    Currently, enterprises need engineers to migrate infrastructure, modernize applications, integrate systems, and manage increasingly complex digital estates. At the same time, implementation work, coding, testing, support, maintenance, and orchestration are increasingly becoming automatable.

    Boosting AI adoption among enterprises is a strategic necessity for Anthropic and OpenAI as they seek to bolster revenue growth and justify their sky-high valuations ahead of their highly anticipated initial public offerings, which can come this year.

    For Google, the move is equally crucial to maintain the rapid growth momentum at Google Cloud, which is emerging as a key growth engine for the tech giant’s revenues and profits.

    During the company’s earnings call this month, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that enterprise AI solutions became the primary growth driver for Google Cloud for the first time in the past quarter.

     

  • SUNY Sets a Framework to Scale AI Tools Across Its 64 Campuses

    SUNY Sets a Framework to Scale AI Tools Across Its 64 Campuses

    IBL News | New York

    SUNY leaders outlined a framework to scale AI use across the system’s 64 campuses. During a Board of Trustees meeting this month. Their goal was to establish a policy to expand the use of AI tools while setting guardrails on how they shape students’ learning, support services, and academic outcomes.

    This framework requires training AI in responsible use, embedding literacy into the general education curriculum, and expanding student access to research and learning opportunities.

    Some of those efforts are already underway. Twenty SUNY faculty and staff members participating in a cohort for the Public Good Fellows plan to work with colleagues to integrate AI into coursework and help students build skills to evaluate and use the technology responsibly.

    At the same time, initiatives like the Empire AI consortium and a new independent AI research center at State University of New York at Binghamton aim to connect students to advanced computing resources, research experiences, and workforce pathways tied to AI.

    The policy also calls for institutions to evaluate AI tools for bias, strengthen data-privacy protections and apply greater oversight to AI systems used in processes affecting students, such as tracking their academic progress or accessing campus resources.

    “We’re not seeking to replace faculty, but to augment what they’re able to do and give students more academic assistance tools, and to better understand over time where interventions may be necessary or where a student may be struggling,” said Jesse Sloman, SUNY’s Chief Information Security Officer.

    “One of our major concerns is making sure that SUNY data—including students’ personal information and academic records—is protected,” he said. “We don’t want a SUNY student using a SUNY AI tool and have that data used to train external models outside of narrow, contractually defined terms.”

    SUNY chancellor John B. King Jr. said in a statement that the framework is designed to expand the use of AI in ways that support students while maintaining oversight.

  • Instructure Paid Ransom to Cybercriminal Group Who Hacked Canvas LMS

    Instructure Paid Ransom to Cybercriminal Group Who Hacked Canvas LMS

    IBL News | New York

    Instructure, the maker of Canvas LMS, used by half of all colleges and universities in North America, struck a deal on Monday with the hacking criminal group ShinyHunters to return the stolen data and destroy any copies, although the company didn’t say what it had given in exchange, not disclosing the monetary value.

    The company announced made the announcement this way:

    “Instructure reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident. As part of that agreement:

    • The data was returned to us.
    • We received digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs).
    • We have been informed that no Instructure customers will be extorted as a result of this incident, publicly or otherwise.
    • This agreement covers all impacted Instructure customers, and there is no need for individual customers to attempt to engage with the unauthorized actor.

    While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cyber criminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible. We continue to work with expert vendors to support our forensic analysis, further harden our environment, and conduct a comprehensive review of the data involved. We will continue to provide updates as that work progresses.”

    We are currently organizing a webinar with Instructure leadership to detail information about the cyber attack and our activities to harden the system. We currently believe it will be on May 13 and will be done in multiple time zones.”

    Canvas has more than 30 million active users worldwide, according to Instructure. The platform is used by teachers and students for coursework management and communications. Instructure said the data compromised in the hack included usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information, and messages.

    ShinyHunters warned that it would leak an unspecified amount of data on May 12 if it did not receive a response from Instructure. In its May 3 ransom note, the group had threatened to leak “several billions of private messages among students and teachers.”

    Not much is known about ShinyHunters, which is believed to have been formed around 2020. Its goal appears to be to obtain and sell personal records. One of its high-profile attacks was against Ticketmaster in 2024, when the hackers said they had stolen the user information of more than 500 million customers.

    Instructure did not immediately respond to questions about whether any law enforcement agencies were involved in its dealings with the hackers. The F.B.I. advises against paying ransom to hackers, saying it does not guarantee data security and encourages attackers to target more victims.

  • At Least 18 Class-Action Lawsuits Against Instructure After Being Hacked

    At Least 18 Class-Action Lawsuits Against Instructure After Being Hacked

    IBL News | New York

    At least 18 federal class-action lawsuits have been filed against Canvas LMS’s parent company, Utah-based Instructure, following last week’s data breach, while the company issued an apology after final exams at numerous universities were halted.

    “Over the past few days, many of you dealt with real disruption. Stress on your teams. Missed moments in the classroom. Questions you couldn’t get answered. You deserved more consistent communication from us, and we didn’t deliver it. I’m sorry for that,” Instructure CEO Steve Daly wrote in a new post.

    The hacking group behind the outage, ShinyHunters, also stole data on potentially tens of millions of students across nearly 9,000 schools.

    The company’s ongoing investigation found that “usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information, and messages” were exposed. That’s slightly different from Instructure’s initial findings, which said that “names, email addresses, student ID numbers” had been affected. That said, usernames and email addresses can still expose a student’s full name.

    Daly added: “We’re still validating all findings, but we want to be clear about what we understand was and wasn’t affected.”

    Instructure’s CEO also revealed that hackers exploited a “vulnerability regarding support tickets in our Free for Teacher environment,” a service that enables teachers to use some Canvas services at no cost.

    In response to the hack, Instructure has temporarily shut down the Free-for-Teacher service.

    • The great 2026 Canvas-ocalypse by Bryan Alexander

    • Instructure Is Risking the Trust That Built Canvas by Phil Hill

  • The AI Agent Conference Unveiled “The Agentic List 2026,” Signifying the Experimentation Is Over

    The AI Agent Conference Unveiled “The Agentic List 2026,” Signifying the Experimentation Is Over

    Mikel Amigot, IBL News | New York

    The AI Agent Conference 2026, curated by Firsthand VC in partnership with NYSE Wired, Bright Data, and theCUBE, drew over a thousand senior executives, AI engineers, and investors to Midtown Manhattan, May 4–5, 2026, for two days, who effectively declared the experimentation phase of agentic AI over.

    The message from the stage and the hallway alike was the same: the conversation had moved from “should we deploy agents?” to “how do we govern, secure, and scale them without getting fired?”

    However, one of the most telling figures of the conference was this: while 79% of organizations report some level of agent adoption, only 11% are running agents in production.

    Another cautionary figure indicated that 40% of projects are at risk of cancellation, and only 6% of organizations qualify as true AI high performers. Closing that gap was the conference’s defining theme.

    Organized around three interconnected tracks — Agentic Enterprises, Agentic Engineering, and Agentic Industries — plus a specialized Web Discovery & Execution track, the conference landed at the exact inflection point where enterprise adoption is crossing from pilot programs into operational commitment.

    Alongside it, The Agentic List 2026 was unveiled: a curated ranking of 120 companies across three themes (Enterprises, Engineering, Industries), selected from over 5,000 nominations across nearly 2,000 screened companies, collectively backed by billions in funding.

    Notable inclusions were:

    Agentic Enterprises: Glean ($765M raised), Perplexity ($976M), Ramp ($2.8B), Apollo ($251M), Clay ($202M), Sierra ($635M), Decagon ($481M)

    Agentic Engineering: Mistral AI ($3.2B), Cohere ($1.5B), n8n ($254M), Cognition ($596M), Augment Code ($252M), CrewAI ($18M), LangChain ($160M), Tavily ($25M, recently acquired by Nebius)

    Agentic Industries: AlphaSense ($1.4B), Hippocratic AI (healthcare), Hebbia (legal), Harvey (legal)

     

    The Numbers That Framed Sessions

    The conference leaned hard on data, and speakers referenced these staggering figures throughout both days:

    • $10.8–12 billion: Projected global agentic AI market size in 2026, growing at a 43.8–46% CAGR toward $139–196 billion by 2034 (Grand View Research, Precedence Research, Allied Market Research)
    • $301 billion: Total global AI spending in 2026, with agentic AI representing 10–15% of enterprise IT budgets (IDC)
    • 40%: Enterprise applications that will embed task-specific AI agents by year’s end — up from under 5% in 2024 (Gartner)
    • 171%: Average ROI from enterprise agentic AI deployments globally; 192% for U.S. enterprises specifically (Deloitte 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise)
    • 5.8x: Average ROI on AI investment within 14 months of production deployment (McKinsey)
    • $4.6 million: Average annual savings per enterprise from AI-driven process automation across 3+ departments (McKinsey / IDC)
    • 88%: Organizations now using AI in at least one function, up from 78% the prior year (McKinsey / Gartner)
    • 100%: Of surveyed enterprises planning to expand agentic AI usage in 2026 (CrewAI survey of 500 C-level executives at $100M+ revenue organizations).”
    • 6%: Organizations that qualify as true AI high performers with more than 5% of EBIT attributable to AI (McKinsey)

     

    Day 1: Vision Meets Infrastructure

    Opening keynotes set the tone with two back-to-back sessions spanning the full arc of the enterprise agent story.

    Ameet Talwalkar, Chief Scientist at Datadog, kicked off the event, presenting how Datadog is rebuilding its observability platform to treat agents as first-class citizens alongside human users and traditional applications.

    Arvind Jain, Founder and CEO of Glean — which surpassed $200 million in ARR at a $7.2 billion valuation after its $150 million Series F — took the stage alongside Sapphire Ventures’ Jai Das, defending that enterprise agents need a unified context layer connecting LLMs to internal business data, and saying that this approach has become the blueprint for how many large organizations when dealing with an agentic deployment.

    “The real bottleneck is not the models themselves but connecting their reasoning power to the context inside your company,” he said.

    Joe Moura, Co-Founder and CEO of CrewAI, said, “Enterprise adoption of agentic AI is accelerating faster than anyone anticipated. Organizations aren’t just experimenting — they’re building, shipping, and scaling agents into production.”

    UiPath’s Raghu Malpani, Chief Product and Technology Officer, stated: “We’re at a pivotal moment where AI, deterministic automation, and orchestration are coming together to reshape how work gets done.”

     

    Day 2: No Protocol War

    During the Agentic Engineering track, a consensus emerged around two interoperability protocols that are rapidly becoming the backbone of enterprise agent infrastructure.

    1. MCP (Model Context Protocol), created by Anthropic in November 2024 and donated to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation, has become the standard interface connecting agents to external tools, databases, and APIs. By early 2026, MCP had crossed 97 million monthly SDK downloads, with adoption from every major AI provider, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Its architecture is client-server via JSON-RPC 2.0.
    2. A2A (Agent2Agent Protocol), launched by Google in April 2025 and now governed by the same Linux Foundation body, handles the other half — how agents communicate with each other across organizational and platform boundaries. Google announced at Cloud Next 2026 that A2A has reached version 1.2 and is running in production at 150+ organizations, including Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow. Its architecture is peer-to-peer via HTTP and Server-Sent Events.

    Multiple panelists emphasized that these are not competing standards. MCP handles vertical integration (agent-to-tool), while A2A handles horizontal coordination (agent-to-agent). The dominant question was how fast developers can implement both.

    Google’s broader moves were discussed. The rebranding of Vertex AI to the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, the launch of Workspace Studio as a no-code agent builder, and the introduction of Agentic Data Cloud collectively represent Google’s bid to own the full stack from chip to inbox.

    Salesforce’s Agentforce loomed over many conversations. It has reached $540 million in ARR with 18,500 enterprise customers. Speakers shared that Agentforce already autonomously resolves 70% of customer chats for clients like 1-800Accountant during peak seasons.

     

    Dominant Theme of Security and Governance

    CrewAI’s survey found that security and governance ranked as the #1 priority (34%) when enterprises evaluate agentic AI platforms. Ease of integration came second at 30%, and reliability came third at 24%.

    Enterprises question whether agents can be deployed safely at scale without exposing unacceptable risk. Data backed this concern:

    • 40%+ of agentic AI projects are at risk of cancellation by 2027 due to governance and ROI gaps (Gartner)
    • 25% of enterprise breaches by 2028 will be traced to AI agent abuse (Gartner)
    • 76% of enterprises cite data privacy and security as their top AI risk concern (IDC)
    • 68% cite lack of identity security controls for AI specifically (IDC)
    • Only 21% of organizations have a mature governance model for autonomous AI agents (Deloitte)
    • 64% of CEOs acknowledge that FOMO drives AI investment before fully understanding the value (IBM)
    • $2.1 billion in regulatory fines related to AI misuse were issued globally in 2025 — a 7x increase from 2023

    CrowdStrike’s Atul Tulshibagwale and AgentCloak’s Peter Yared presented on agentic identity and the real attack surface of connecting agents to thousands of external MCP servers — including tool-poisoning attacks and data-exfiltration risks.

    The concept of “Guardian Agents” — autonomous systems whose sole purpose is to monitor, oversee, and constrain the behavior of other agents — drew both enthusiasm and skepticism. Gartner projects 40% of CIOs will demand Guardian Agents by 2028.

     

    Finance and Healthcare Lead Industry Deployments

    • Steve Hasker, President & CEO, Thomson Reuters, demonstrated that many legacy information giants are betting their futures on autonomous workflows, not incremental copilot features.

    • Rob Wisniewski, CTO of Credit & Insurance, Blackstone, discussed how agentic AI is moving beyond back-office automation into core deal-making and underwriting.

    • Sirisha Kadamalakalva, MD, Global Head of AI/ML Investment Banking at Citi, covered agent deployment in regulated financial workflows.

    • Karun Appapogu, Head of AI Technologies Architecture, Vanguard, and Kevin Hearn, SVP, Axos Bank, added retail and digital banking perspectives.

    • Shipali Jangra, Director of Global Digital Product Management at American Express, spoke to operational scale.

     

    Over 78% of financial services organizations have adopted AI agents.

    • Commerzbank’s Microsoft-powered banking assistant resolves 75% of customer requests across 30,000+ monthly conversations.

    • Allianz Partners is targeting 90% autonomous operations across claims and invoice processes spanning 1,000+ FTEs.

    Healthcare showed equally compelling results.

    • AtlantiCare‘s agentic AI clinical assistant achieved an 80% adoption rate among test providers, cut documentation time by 42%, and freed approximately 66 minutes per clinician per day.

    • AI-powered imaging solutions are expected to prevent up to 2.5 million diagnostic errors annually. At the enterprise level, around 65% of healthcare organizations have adopted AI agents.

    Commerce had its own dedicated sessions featuring Felipe Romano (PayPal), Robin Chiang (OpenTable), and Richard Cohene (Lightspeed Commerce).

    In manufacturing, Samsung has committed to transforming all its facilities into AI-driven factories by 2030. Fujitsu’s AI development platform, launched in early 2026, reduces software modification time from three months to four hours, according to the company.

    Seven Trends That Defined the Conference

    1. Multi-Agent Orchestration Goes Mainstream
    66.4% of the agentic AI market now focuses on coordinated multi-agent systems rather than single-agent solutions. LangGraph, CrewAI, and Google’s ADK are converging around graph-based and role-based orchestration models. Multi-agent systems are projected to grow at a 48.5% through 2030.

    2. Context Engineering Replaces Prompt Engineering
    Salesforce and others emphasized that agent performance depends less on how you ask a question and more on the information architecture surrounding the agent — which data sources it can see, how context is structured, and what gets retrieved when.

    3. Agent Identity Becomes a Product Category
    CrowdStrike, AgentCloak, Descope, C1,     and others are building standalone products for authentication, authorization, and audit trails specifically for autonomous agents.

    4. Headless AI and API-First Architectures
    Salesforce’s Headless 360 and Google’s agent platform signal a shift from traditional UI-driven software to API-first architectures where agents access platforms programmatically rather than through dashboards. By 2028, one-third of user experiences will shift from native apps to agentic front ends.

    5. The Agent Framework Landscape Consolidates
    Framework adoption nearly doubled, rising from 9% to 18% of organizations (Datadog). LangGraph, CrewAI, and OpenAI’s Agents SDK are emerging as the dominant choices.

    6. The Workforce Transformation Is Real
    McKinsey estimates 44% of U.S. work could be performed by AI agents with current capabilities. 66% of enterprises are reducing entry-level hiring as they deploy AI. 77% of employers plan to upskill workers. AI/ML engineers’ salaries reached a median of $185K in the U.S., with demand up 74%.

    7. The Governance Gap Is Existential
    Over 40% of agentic AI projects risk cancellation by 2027. Only 21% of organizations have mature AI governance. $2.1B in AI-related regulatory fines were issued in 2025 alone. The EU AI Act is already forcing 42% of global enterprises to adjust practices.

     

    What Enterprise Should Do

    Several sessions converged on a practical playbook:

    1. Audit your current agent deployments — move beyond pilot metrics to production-grade KPIs, including completed tasks, escalation rates, and resolution speed
    2. Implement both MCP and A2A protocols to future-proof agent infrastructure for cross-vendor interoperability
    3. Establish an agent governance framework now — define identity, scope, audit trails, and escalation thresholds before scaling
    4. Prioritize context engineering over prompt engineering — invest in retrieval quality, data architecture, and information design
    5. Start where ROI is clearest: customer service, eCommerce, finance automation, and software engineering are the proven winners
    6. Budget for agentic AI security — tool poisoning, prompt injection, and data exfiltration are real attack surfaces
    7. Fix data foundations first — 52% of organizations cite data quality as their primary blocker, and IDC predicts a 15% productivity loss by 2027 for companies that fail to establish AI-ready data foundations

     

  • Criminal Group ShinyHunters Breached Instructure’s Canvas LMS Again

    Criminal Group ShinyHunters Breached Instructure’s Canvas LMS Again

    IBL News | New York

    One day after Instructure said yesterday it had resolved the data breach to its Canvas LMS, extortion hacking group ShinyHunters accessed the platform again.

    On Thursday, students and faculty who use Canvas LMS reported receiving a message from the criminal extortion group ShinyHunters, which earlier this week claimed to have compromised the personal identifying information of 275 million people across 9,000 institutions, including students, teachers, and staff.

    “ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some ‘security patches,” read a message multiple Canvas users received when they tried to log in to the platform on Thursday.

    “If any schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately at TOX to negotiate a settlement. You have till the end of the day by 12 May 2026 before everything is leaked. Instructure still has until EOD 12 May 2026 to contact us.”

    Holy shit. I was in Canvas and then all of a sudden, this showed up!

    [image or embed]

    — Katy Pearce (@katypearce.bsky.social) May 7, 2026 at 4:03 PM

    The group had previously given Instructure until Wednesday to pay a ransom, threatening to leak all the data if the company didn’t pay by the deadline.

    According to ShinyHunters—which is also linked to recent data breaches at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Harvard Universities—Instructure didn’t respond to those demands in time.

    Instead, the company said earlier this week that it had addressed the breach by deploying security measures, including revoking privileged credentials and access tokens associated with affected systems; deploying patches to enhance system security; rotating certain keys, “even though there is no evidence they were misused”; and implementing increased monitoring across all platforms.

    Instructure posted on Wednesday that “Canvas is fully operational, and we are not seeing any ongoing unauthorized activity.”

    But by Thursday afternoon, Instructure acknowledged there was trouble again: “Canvas, Canvas Beta, and Canvas Test are currently unavailable,” the status update read. “We are currently investigating this issue.”

    It’s unclear whether Instructure plans to pay the ransom by the May 12 deadline.

    ShinyHunters criticized Instructure’s lack of communication to date.

    “Instructure has not even bothered speaking to us to understand the situation or to even negotiate with us to prevent the release of this data. Our demand was not even as high as you might think it is,” reads one version of the cybergang’s ransom letter posted on RansomLook, a website that tracks cybercrime activity.

    Many U.S. colleges and universities postponed final exams and assignment due dates after Canvas LMS, the learning platform used by 41 percent of North American institutions, temporarily went offline due to a hack.

    • On Thursday night, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Provost John Coleman wrote to students and employees, communicating that the institution postponed “all final exams and assignments, including papers, projects, etc., scheduled for Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.”
    • Arizona State University canceled all exams scheduled to be held on Canvas on Friday and Saturday, adding that instructors will update students on grade adjustments.
    • The University of California System said in a statement Thursday that “out of an abundance of caution, the president’s office has instructed all UC locations to temporarily block or redirect Canvas access, and Canvas access will not be restored until we are confident the system is secure.”
    • Nationally, campuses including Harvard, Duke, and the University of Pennsylvania reported similar outages.

    Canvas’s disruption caused widespread uncertainty.

    Cliff Steinhauer, the National Cybersecurity Alliance’s information security and engagement director, said the “breach underscores how deeply schools now depend on centralized digital platforms to keep day-to-day academic operations running.”

    “Even if highly sensitive financial information was not exposed, educational records, communications, and identity data can still be valuable to cybercriminals for phishing, impersonation, and future attacks,” Steinhauer said.

    “Cybercriminals are increasingly incentivized to target large technology vendors and shared service providers because compromising a single platform can provide access to thousands of organizations at once, making it far more efficient and profitable than attacking individual schools one by one.”

    Earlier this week, the criminal extortion group ShinyHunters claimed its attack on Instructure compromised personal identifying information for 275 million people, including students and employees, across 9,000 K-12 and higher ed institutions worldwide.

    Instructure said it notified law enforcement, including the FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, about the hack that included names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages among Canvas users.

    The KrebsOnSecurity website reported that several universities had already approached the cybercrime group about paying. Data extortion groups like ShinyHunters typically remove victims from their leak sites only after receiving an extortion payment or after a victim agrees to negotiate.

    Schools and universities use Canvas LMS to manage nearly all aspects of instruction. The platform acts as a gradebook, a hub for digital lectures and course materials, a discussion board for classroom projects, and a messaging platform between students and instructors. Some courses also offer quizzes and exams on the platform, or use it as a portal for submitting final projects and papers on time.

    ShinyHunters is a cybercriminal group that specializes in data theft and extortion. They typically gain access to companies through voice phishing and social engineering attacks, often by impersonating IT personnel or other trusted members of the targeted organization.