IT, AI & Telecommunications

Global – October 27, 2026 -- Dust, a collaborative AI platform, is targeting three forms of enterprise AI dependency: reliance on a single model provider, loss of control over agent-generated data, and limited visibility into costs and behavior, according to Co-Founder and CTO Stanislas Polu.

Dust builds a shared layer between staff, company data and multiple models

Polu said Dust lets teams work with AI, switch among supported frontier and open source models, and govern the context, agents and traces their work generates. The platform is multimodel by design, so companies can change models without rebuilding their context and workflows.

Polu argues that agent traces, which record instructions, context, model and tool choices, outputs and human feedback, may become one of a company's most valuable AI assets. He said that corpus could later help companies evaluate or train models for their specific work.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- Snowflake is built around three pillars, Ground, Analyze and Act, wrapped in a governance layer it calls Assure, to let AI agents run open-ended business investigations on enterprise data without copying that data into each agent platform.

The model targets agents that decide which data to examine, learn from each result and choose the next step. A churn probe, for example, could compare customer segments, product usage and support issues, then feed a recommended response into a retention workflow.

North America – October 27, 2026 -- Snowflake's product data science team cut the time from pipeline incident to a tested, reviewable fix to under 16 minutes using its CoCo agentic AI assistant. Before CoCo, diagnosis took a skilled engineer about 30 minutes per case. The result comes from a four-part framework that Snowflake built to measure AI value beyond license counts and prompt volumes.

Snowflake sorts AI work into three levels instead of counting prompts

Dashboards built on access and activity score an organization running 1,000 explanations the same as one running 1,000 pipeline builds and anomaly investigations. Snowflake's framework separates foundational work (explaining code, answering questions), applied development (writing code, exploring data, building reports) and agentic work (multistep processes where AI uses tools to finish an outcome). Real capacity gains should appear in the agentic tier.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- Snowflake's sales finance team has cut its monthly forecast and variance analysis from more than a week to a few hours. It did so by giving its CoCo AI standing context about company data, terminology and workflows.

Profile cuts steps per answer from 3.0 to 1.3

Across 44 finance users, those with a 'GTM Finance' profile reached an answer in about 1.3 steps, against about 3 steps for those without one (Snowflake internal CoCo usage, February to May 2026). Without the profile, the AI spent roughly three steps per session finding the right data source and resolving terminology.

Each extra step adds about 0.05 credits, roughly 10 cents at US$2 per credit. A five-step session therefore costs about three and a half times a one-step session. At every step count in the data, sessions with the profile cost less than those without.

Louisville – October 27, 2026 -- Eagleview has named Gregory Robinson, former director of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Program, as keynote speaker for Futureview East 2026, which runs September 22–25, 2026, at the Louisville Marriott Downtown.

Robinson is a 33-year NASA veteran. NASA announced in 2022 that he had been named to the TIME100 list for his leadership of the Webb program.

Robinson led Webb through delays and cost challenges

Before its launch and deployment, the Webb program faced intense scrutiny over delays, cost challenges and operational complexity. Robinson is credited with helping turn the program around and improving its efficiency. His keynote will address leadership, innovation and resilience in guiding complex missions through change.

Louisville – October 27, 2026 -- Eagleview is asking customers to redeem existing Futureview passes for Futureview East 2026, which runs September 22–25 at the Louisville Marriott Downtown.

Many customers already hold tickets through existing agreements, according to the company. Organizations can confirm their pass balance and obtain discount codes through their Eagleview District Manager.

Former NASA Webb telescope director Gregory Robinson to keynote

Gregory Robinson, former director of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Program, will give the keynote. Eagleview ties his address on leading complex, technology-enabled missions to its customers' use of high-resolution aerial imagery in property assessment, GIS, public safety and public works.

Agenda targets government workflow modernization

The program covers training, product education, customer stories and peer networking. Eagleview lists seven focus areas for attendees:

Global – October 27, 2026 -- Unstructured text makes up an estimated 70% to 90% of organizational data, according to Gartner analysts speaking at the Data & Analytics Summit in London this year, and Alteryx is pitching workflow-embedded text mining as the way to put it to use.

Three paths compete for the same text-analysis budget

Enterprises can write custom code, license a dedicated text-analytics tool, or run text mining inside the workflow platform that already handles blending, joins, and reporting. Alteryx argues the deciding factor is which approach keeps running unsupervised after its creator moves on.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- No single tool replaces an Excel macro end to end: six options (Power Query, Office Scripts, Power Automate, Python, RPA and Alteryx One) each cover a different slice of the work, according to a new comparison of automation approaches.

Power Query and Office Scripts cover data preparation and workbook tasks

Power Query suits macros that mainly import files and cleanse data, and it can reshape and aggregate data before loading it. It handles button clicks, workbook events and precise output formatting poorly.

Office Scripts is the closest native Microsoft 365 option. It runs recorded or edited TypeScript in Excel for the web or the desktop app on Windows or Mac. It has no Excel-level events, and Microsoft documents that VBA offers broader desktop coverage.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- Poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million a year, according to Gartner estimates cited in an Alteryx analysis that frames recurring, multi-source reporting as the point where Excel stops being the right tool.

Repeatability, not row capacity, is where Excel breaks

Excel holds more than a million rows per sheet and rarely reaches that limit. The failure comes when source data changes shape, such as a renamed column, a new region added mid-quarter or an extra week in a date range. The manual process then gets rebuilt from memory instead of re-run.

Industry studies cited in the analysis found that 90% of spreadsheets with more than 150 rows contain at least one major mistake. The analysis attributes this to the format, which has no built-in error control, rather than to analyst skill.

Global – October 27, 2026 -- A Monday inventory consolidation that took 90 minutes of manual cleanup and cross-checking now runs unattended overnight, after its logic was moved out of one analyst's head and into documented workflow steps.

The case illustrates a point Alteryx makes in guidance for spreadsheet users: slow, error-prone reporting is rarely caused by wrong logic. It is caused by logic that exists only in formulas, tab names and one person's habits. The recommended fix is to capture the steps first and choose the tool afterward.

Key-person dependency, not formula errors, is the main failure point

Typical breakages include a renamed column that disrupts a position-based formula, a data set that outgrows a row limit, and two people editing one file so that one set of changes is lost. When the analyst who built the process changes teams or leaves, the successor must reverse-engineer each tab, often at report deadline.