TNB Tech Minute: IBM Finalizes $11 Billion Deal for Data-Streaming Company Confluent

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Thanks for watching! Here's your afternoon TNB Tech Minute for Tuesday, March 17th. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. International business machines said it would close its roughly $11 billion acquisition of the data streaming company Confluent today. The deal is intended to help businesses access their data for AI agents or bots that can take action on their own.

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IBM's CEO said Confluent's technology will become the backbone of its platform for helping clients access their data for various AI uses. IBM has integrated AI agents into its internal operations over the last three years, which the CEO said resulted in a productivity increase of roughly $4.5 billion.

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Microsoft is reorganizing its Microsoft 365 co-pilot teams to unify its commercial and consumer versions.

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This change aims to address customer confusion caused by multiple versions of co-pilot, as previously reported by the journal. According

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According to a company memo, Jacob Andreu will now lead Copilot as its executive VP, Mustafa Suleiman will focus on proprietary AI models, and the Microsoft 365 apps will be led by a group of executives that include the CEO of LinkedIn and an executive VP at Microsoft. The shift moves Microsoft toward a single Copilot experience across all applications.

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Finally, NVIDIA and Uber are expanding their partnership to launch a global fleet of robotaxis. The companies will begin launching vehicles in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the first half of next year, then expand to cities across Europe, Australia, Asia, and North America by 2028. The vehicles will use NVIDIA's Alpameo, an AI model designed to handle complex driving scenarios.