RingCentral adds Shopify, Calendly, and WhatsApp to AI Receptionist

Meta is planning to pump billions more into AI investments this year, despite noting that millions of users have seemingly started to abandon its platforms. In an earning call on Wednesday, Meta reported that figures for "Family daily active people" - the term Meta has coined for all collective users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger - declined by 20 million this quarter compared to the previous three months. Meta attributes this fall to "internet disruptions in Iran, as well as a restriction on access to WhatsApp in Russia." It's up to you whether you take Meta on its word, given that by bundling the user stats together across … Read the full story at The Verge.

Beijing says domestic tech companies must seek explicit government approval for accepting US investment Business live – latest updates China has blocked Meta’s $2bn (£1.5bn) acquisition of an AI startup as it cracks down on US investments in domestic tech companies. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced the acquisition of Manus, a developer of autonomous AI agents, in December. Continue reading...

For all the progress made in AI agent development over the past few years, one fundamental problem has remained largely unsolved: most people never actually interact with agents. They live behind developer dashboards, inside specialized apps that users are asked to download, and within chat interfaces that the majority of the world’s population will never […] The post Photon Releases Spectrum: An Open-Source TypeScript Framework that Deploys AI Agents Directly to iMessage, WhatsApp, and Telegram appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Agentic AI has emerged as the software industry’s latest shiny thing. Beyond smarter chatbots, AI agents operate with increasing autonomy, making them poised to drive efficiency gains across enterprises. “Agentic refers to AI systems that can take actions on behalf of users, not just generate text or answer questions,” says Andrew McNamara, director of applied machine learning at Shopify. Agentic systems run continuously until a task is complete, he adds, citing Shopify’s Sidekick, a proactive agent for merchants. Development of agentic AI now spans many business domains. According to Anthropic, a provider of large language models (LLMs), AI agents are most commonly deployed in software engineering, accounting for roughly half of use cases, followed by back-office automation, marketing, sales, finance, and data analysis. “A concrete example is in IT incident resolution,” says Heath Ramsey, group VP of AI platform outbound product management at ServiceNow. In this context, AI agents sur

Emergent's Wingman lets users manage and automate tasks through chat on platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram.

Clear's CTO Suvesh Malhotra highlights the importance of cultural commitment and infrastructure in achieving AI success. After two years of development, the company launched AI tools, including a WhatsApp tax-filing service, demonstrating that genuine utility in AI requires more than just hype.

Google has made a big step forward by extending end-to-end encryption to Android and iOS devices for Gmail client-side encryption (CSE) users, says an expert. “All in all, this is a welcome update, especially in light of recent concerns surrounding WhatsApp’s encryption methods,” said Gartner analyst Avivah Litan. “Google’s approach offers verifiable customer-managed keys and ensures the provider does not have access to encrypted content.” This, she said, addresses allegations raised in the January 2026 lawsuit against Meta regarding their internal access to customer encrypted message data. Meta has reportedly said the claims are false, and that WhatsApp messages remain protected by default. The suit’s allegations have not been proven in court. Litan noted that Google’s encryption update is only for organizations subscribing to its Enterprise Plus with Assured Controls edition. Messages and attachments are encrypted directly on-device, with encryption keys managed externally by the cus

Meta’s new “small and fast” AI model, Muse Spark, is an acknowledgement that as enterprises scale AI systems beyond millions of users and for use on a greater variety of devices, they must make things more efficient and more application-specific. Muse Spark now powers the Meta AI assistant on the web and in the Meta AI app, and the company plans to roll it out across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and the company’s smart glasses. It will also offer select partners access to the underlying technology through an API, initially as a private preview.  “We hope to open-source future versions of the model,” it said in a blog post announcing Muse Spark. While Meta did not disclose the model’s size or much about its architecture, it described Muse Spark as being capable of balancing capability with speed. That positioning, even without explicit enterprise deployment guidance, aligns with priorities CIOs and developers are increasingly grappling with as they move generative AI from p