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How Salesforce Built an Agentic Engineering Enablement Strategy for Thousands of Software Engineers
Salesforce addressed the challenge of scaling agentic engineering across thousands of software developers by focusing on organizational learning rather than tooling. While individual engineers initially developed disparate, uncoordinated workflows, the Technology, People, Innovation, and Learning (TPIL) team unified these approaches into the Proficiency Level (PL) Framework. The framework maps developer growth across four mindset-driven stages: AI-Assisted, AI-Validating, AI-Orchestrating, and AI-Native. To facilitate progress across these stages, TPIL introduced global AI camps, weekly working sessions, and manager coaching guides. Rather than tracking course completions or telemetry scores, Salesforce measured transformation through behavioral indicators, such as shifts toward validating agent output, designing multi-agent workflows, and asking higher-level questions regarding human judgment.
The Future of Agentic AI Depends on Openness and Trust. That’s Why Docker Is Joining Nvidia’s Open Secure AI Alliance.
Modern discussions surrounding agentic AI increasingly center on whether autonomous systems can be trusted and securely placed at the core of enterprise workflows. While intelligence is generated by underlying models, operational trust depends on the surrounding execution runtime, identity frameworks, governance models, and security boundaries. To address these challenges across an open ecosystem, Docker has joined NVIDIA's Open Secure AI Alliance. This initiative aims to ensure developers can seamlessly route tasks between open-weight and frontier models without rewriting their application architectures or sacrificing control. By extending security and governance into the agent execution environment, the alliance seeks to deliver predictable control as AI agents become fundamental components of software stacks.
Foundations for an AI-forward healthcare organization
Healthcare organizations adopting AI face fragmented data, mismatched governance, and no repeatable operating model, rather than a shortage of ideas or vendors. The piece defines an AI-forward organization as one where AI can be built, trusted, and scaled through a foundation of unified data, visible guardrails, and an operating model that helps teams prioritize and move pilots into production. It describes patient identifiers differing across source systems, requiring manual reconciliation and creating recurring integration costs. Governance must avoid both untrusted outputs and approval processes so rigid that nothing leaves the sandbox, while self-service users need controlled access to clinical, operational, and financial data. The source says modern tooling can centralize permissions and enable a governed first-use case in days rather than quarters when scope and data are ready.
Agentic media buying cannot scale without the right foundation. See how buyers and sellers get there on Databricks.
Media buying remains slowed by fragmented coordination across emails, spreadsheets, PDFs, and phone calls, leaving teams to research inventory, compare pricing, negotiate, and issue orders manually. The post presents an agentic workflow in which buyer and seller agents discover inventory, negotiate prices, and book deals through IAB Tech Lab’s AAMP standards, including AdCOM, OpenDirect, OpenRTB deals, and registry-based discovery and trust. Its Databricks implementation runs self-contained applications on Databricks Apps, with CrewAI agent crews using Databricks Foundation Model APIs and Claude models, Lakebase providing transactional Postgres state, and MLflow tracing capturing decisions and tool calls. The example processes a $200,000 Q3 Brand Launch across CTV and Linear TV with a $38 CPM ceiling, and is packaged as a Databricks Automation Bundle accelerator deployable with a single command.
amazon.science
How controllers from industrial machinery can coordinate multitask machine learning
Multitask machine learning often suffers from gradient conflicts, drift, and drought when blending multiple objective gradients in single update steps. To address this in graph self-supervised learning, researchers developed ControlG, a framework that allocates discrete computational blocks to individual objectives over time. ControlG operates across three coupled loops: sensing objective difficulty via spectral demand and gradient interference, planning target compute allocations using log-hypervolume Pareto sensitivities, and executing the schedule via a proportional-integral-derivative controller. Evaluated across homophilic and heterophilic graph benchmarks, the approach outperforms traditional multitask gradient-manipulation baselines while incurring low computational overhead. The framework also produces interpretable training timelines and deficit traces.
NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud: Lessons for Unlocking Full Performance on AI Infrastructure
Identical AI computing clusters can exhibit 8% to 12% training throughput deficits compared to NVIDIA reference architectures due to compounded configuration choices across kernels, hypervisors, BIOS, and NCCL settings. Profiling with Linux perf, turbostat, and NCCL tests uncovers performance degradation across multiple layers of the compute stack. In virtualized Grace deployments, enabling Arm SMMU Virtual Command Queue support eliminates invalidation serialization bottlenecks on memory-heavy workloads. On x86 systems, adjusting BIOS C-states to allow idle cores into C6 frees thermal headroom for active cores to achieve rated turbo frequencies, while cpuset isolation resolves NUMA contention. Further gains stem from tuning NCCL queue pairs per connection and properly bind-mounting topology files inside workload containers.
Scaling Exact COUNT(DISTINCT) for High-Cardinality Non-Rollup Metrics in Distributed Data Pipelines
Uber needed exact COUNT(DISTINCT) for high-cardinality non-rollup metrics such as monthly active users and quarterly retention, where daily or monthly counts cannot be combined and quarterly processing involved 3.6 billion UUID-valued identifiers. RoaringBitmap was exact but failed when a merged bitmap exceeded the JVM’s roughly 2 GB array limit, while HyperLogLog’s 1–5% error was unacceptable for financial reporting. The implemented chunked aggregation buffer hashes each UUID with xxHash64, routes it by the top 16 bits into one of 65,536 Roaring64Bitmap chunks, serializes chunks independently, and returns the final cardinality as an 8-byte long. Across 75 metric families, the deployment reduced two-year backfill time by 65% on average, improved daily runtime by 23%, and recorded no post-deployment OutOfMemoryError failures while retaining exact distinct counts.
Your trusted knowledge layer: Introducing Stack Internal's new platform experience
Organizations face growing challenges managing fragmented institutional data as AI agents and human workers operate across disparate tools. When agents consume stale or conflicting information, they produce confident errors that require costly human verification. Stack Internal has introduced an AI-native knowledge platform that ingests raw data across sources—including Google Docs, Slack, and Stack Internal communities—and evaluates it for trust, freshness, and authority. The updated platform adds a chat interface featuring response-level confidence labels and provenance cards, along with API and MCP server integrations that enforce identity-aware permission boundaries for AI agents. Engineering leaders can also track internal knowledge usage and high-traffic dependencies across versions via new Swagger API v3 endpoints.
GPU Management: Why Idle GPUs Are the New Grounded Aircraft
Enterprise AI is shifting from a primary focus on model capability to the utilization of scarce, expensive GPU capacity. Like aircraft, GPUs accrue financing, depreciation, power, and cooling costs by calendar hour, while producing value only during useful compute hours; unlike aircraft, they cannot freely absorb workloads with different memory, latency, and duration profiles. The article explains how peak-sized clusters, mixed workloads such as training, fine-tuning, quantization, real-time and batch inference, embeddings, and evaluation can leave capacity stranded even when dashboards show high occupancy, and argues that API pricing can motivate enterprises to own infrastructure. It presents specialized models and GPU orchestration as complementary levers: specialization reduces each workload’s footprint, while management reallocates freed capacity across workloads and queues. The conclusion is that installed capacity alone does not determine returns; enterprises need both strategies to close the gap between GPUs owned and useful output.
How we set up our cloud agent environment
Setting up a cloud-agent environment for the Cursor monorepo required treating development infrastructure as a product for agent users. The team aligned cloud VMs with local development by adapting utilities and setup scripts for Ubuntu, adding dependencies to a Cursor-defined Dockerfile, and introducing security controls for secrets and network access. To make the repository easier to operate, it built anydev to start services, route utility scripts, explain subcommands, and supervise long-running builds. Cursor Cloud MCP and Cloud Doctor then inspect environments, distinguish transient from salient failures, perform root-cause analysis, open high-confidence fixes, and improve workflows using traces. The resulting end-to-end testing and recorded demos helped cloud agents grow from about one in ten merged PRs in December to more than half, with the post identifying tool parity, documented skills, and core-workflow verification as readiness checks.
Convert proprietary code to open ANSI SQL with Genie Code
Databricks introduces an agentic converter in Genie Code to translate proprietary warehouse dialects into open ANSI SQL, initially supporting T-SQL, Snowflake, Redshift, Oracle, BigQuery, and Teradata. Migration projects provide a workspace hub for source files, conversion status, complexity scoring, dependency lineage, and collaboration, helping teams prioritize work and identify scripts that can move independently. When launched, swarms of subagents convert files in parallel, iteratively fixing errors and validating syntax and semantic intent; in the proof-of-concept, six of eight files converted successfully. Two files required review because stored procedures needed three-part Unity Catalog names, which could be fixed manually or encoded as a custom Genie Code skill for reuse across the codebase. The post also notes that Databricks supports multi-statement transactions, temporary tables, and stored procedures, while planned additions include legacy ETL sources, new target dialects, data migration, and reconciliation.
Welcoming Phil Nash, our new Developer Experience Engineer
Phil Nash is joining Resend as a Developer Experience (DX) Engineer after eight years at Twilio and subsequent work at IBM. He has taught developers through talks, articles, and live coding, and will focus on helping developers become more productive. His path into software began with building an HTML page at 13, continued through maths and computer science studies, and led to front-end development after creating a WordPress blog and writing about what he learned. Nash says he joined because he had used Resend for a personal-site contact form, built a simple TypeScript API client, and wanted to help make email a better experience for developers. He recommends sharing new learning through writing, presentations, videos, or other community contributions.
How to use Google microbenchmarks for evaluating TPU performance
Evaluating TPU performance requires measurements beyond product specifications, because real-world behavior depends on architecture and workload constraints. The suite measures network collectives, compute, HBM bandwidth, host transfers, and Ragged-Paged Attention primitives, using metrics such as GB/s, latency, TFLOPs, MFU, and TTFT-related throughput. Its src and configs directories provide implementations and tunable parameters, while sample Kubernetes recipes connect measurements to TPU architecture and runtime behavior. Roofline analysis uses peak MXU throughput and HBM bandwidth to distinguish compute-, memory-, and network-bound workloads and guide kernel, sharding, or rematerialization choices. In a 110B MoE workload on a 4x4x4 TPU 7x configuration, microbenchmark-guided changes addressed ICI stalls and memory-bound attention, reducing training step time by 21.2%.
Meet Stripe's Knowledge AI Platform
Stripe built Kai, a knowledge AI platform for non-engineering work that existing no-code and coding agents could not support with Stripe’s required data security and workflow specificity. It serves tasks including account research, incident triage, revenue modeling, compliance reviews, and data-warehouse queries, while adapting to different tools, data sources, outputs, and definitions of completion. Kai is organized into surface-agnostic APIs, AgentStudio for domain teams to build and govern agents, and shared execution environments with per-session Kubernetes sandboxes, multi-tenant virtual filesystems, access controls, and long-session state management. The platform connects to more than 1,000 skills and tools and supports web, Slack, embedded, and custom application experiences. Within two weeks of its April launch, most of Stripe was using Kai; it now has 83% weekly active users, and reported effects include 25,000 annual hours shifted from administrative work and higher sales activity and deal creation among Account Executives.
Crowdsourced taxonomy verification: A feedback-driven framework for refining knowledge graph relationships via online search interactions
Dynamic catalogs in food delivery and e-commerce make knowledge-graph (KG) maintenance difficult: LLM- or scraper-generated relationships can be semantically wrong, manual review does not scale, and bad edges can degrade query expansion, CTR, and trust. The proposed feedback-driven verification engine treats unverified edges as hypotheses and uses the search interface as a validation environment. It separates verified and candidate edges, injects a limited number of candidates into lower-risk interface positions through an exploration-versus-exploitation policy, and records context-anchored user interactions with weighted positive and negative signals. An offline engine aggregates exposure and engagement into a confidence ratio, promoting candidates above a verification threshold and pruning those below a failure threshold. The framework is presented as a continuous human-in-the-loop method for validating parent-child and sibling relationships at scale; planned extensions add confidence tiers and defenses against spam, bots, and Sybil attacks.
NBCUniversal’s Seamless Migration: Unlocking Scalable Analytics with Databricks
NBCUniversal sought to modernize its data infrastructure as growing data volumes, evolving analytics demands, and slot-based compute reservations created cost, contention, and flexibility concerns. Working with EXL and Databricks, it migrated workloads to a Databricks lakehouse architecture that unifies data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and business intelligence. The phased, risk-based program assessed workloads and dependencies, designed workspaces and governance with Unity Catalog, and used four custom accelerators for SQL translation, DAG migration, data transfer, and validation. Job-specific compute, autoscaling, Delta Lake layouts, MLflow, and Lakeflow Jobs supported workload-specific execution and operations. The reported outcome was a 30% reduction in data infrastructure costs, elastic scaling for high-traffic events, unified ML operations, and the onboarding of approximately 300 analysts to Databricks SQL.
Quality care is the mission. Finance protects the margin.
Healthcare finance teams must protect margins amid rising medical costs, denied or underpaid claims, complex payment arrangements, and cash trapped in receivables, while fragmented systems and delayed information increase decision risk. The post presents ontology as a way to preserve the business meaning behind figures, linking numbers to service lines, payers, contracts, and changing context rather than treating accuracy alone as correctness. Databricks Genie is described as a governed, data-smart AI coworker that answers finance questions with sourced figures, traces them to their origins, respects permissions, and keeps a person in the loop. It applies this model to care costs exceeding reimbursement, revenue lost to denials and underpayments, and aging or unbilled receivables, with the intended actions of renegotiating rates, preventing claim errors, accelerating collections, and protecting margin.
Manufacturing runs on capital. Finance protects the margin.
Manufacturing finance must protect margin by keeping capital moving through inventory, receivables, and plant equipment. The post argues that volatile supply chains, shifting demand, rising costs, and increasingly influential agents make that work faster and more complex, while an estimated $1.7T remains trapped in excess working capital across large US companies. It presents ontology as a way to preserve the meaning and context behind figures, including plants, SKUs, customer terms, and changing business conditions. Databricks Genie is described as a data-smart AI coworker whose ontology learns from business systems and questions, produces sourced and governed answers, and helps finance identify trapped inventory cash, aging receivables, and underperforming assets. It readies actions such as releasing inventory, accelerating collections, or redeploying capital, while a person remains responsible for the decision.
Energy runs on volatile markets. Finance protects the margin.
Energy finance must protect margin as hourly power and fuel prices, shifting forward curves, contract settlements, hedges, and major grid and generation investments make business conditions more complex. The post argues that accurate figures are not necessarily correct unless they retain context about the underlying asset, market, and contract, motivating a live ontology that keeps business meaning current. It presents Databricks Genie as a data-smart AI coworker that learns from enterprise systems and questions, returns sourced answers, preserves permissions, governs AI cost, and shows its work. The proposed uses cover live margin, revenue risk across PPAs and hedges, and funding AI-driven buildout, with a person making trading, dispatch, hedging, or capital decisions. Genie is described as helping finance identify risks early and prepare actions while keeping human owners accountable.
Bringing real-time fraud prevention to government benefits
Federal benefits programs face an estimated $233 billion to $521 billion in annual fraud losses and roughly $186 billion in improper payments in fiscal 2025, while pre-payment vetting can delay legitimate aid. The post presents real-time detection as an alternative to “pay and chase,” combining rules engines, machine learning, adaptive and generative AI, entity resolution, behavioral analysis, and graph analytics to score claims before disbursement. It says Databricks can unify these layers and enable cross-agency sharing through OpenSharing, data masking, and Clean Rooms while retaining governance and data ownership. When fraud is detected, the platform can hold payments, add confirmed fraudsters to Do Not Pay, and assemble statute-linked evidence packets with digitally signed audit trails, while designated personnel authorize referrals. The source concludes that this model is ready for implementation at national scale, citing Databricks’ stated processing of 160 billion card payments annually in milliseconds.
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