Agentic AI Platform Providers

Ema closed a $77 million Series B round led by Bengaluru-based Creaegis, with Accel, S32 and Prosus also participating. The company says total funding now stands near $140 million. It plans to use the capital to build out go-to-market teams and expand into APAC and EMEA, and cites Wipro, Hitachi and NTT Data as customers of its agent platform.

Buyer takeawayBuyers evaluating Ema gain more confidence in its funding runway and should expect broader regional sales and support coverage in APAC and EMEA.

At its Dreamforce keynote, Salesforce introduced AIforce, an interface layer that exposes its data, workflows and permissions to outside AI tools. It includes Claudeforce, built with Anthropic and now in open beta, Slackforce and Agentforce Coworker. The company also previewed Koa, a CRM reasoning model post-trained on NVIDIA Nemotron, with general availability expected in winter 2026.

Buyer takeawaySalesforce customers can increasingly reach CRM data and agents from Claude and Slack, so buyers should review governance, licensing and permission models before opening these channels.

ServiceNow acquired Sweep, a Tel Aviv and New York company whose agentic workspace monitors and governs metadata across ServiceNow, Salesforce and HubSpot. Terms were not disclosed, though Israeli press estimated the price in the hundreds of millions of dollars. ServiceNow said the deal strengthens AI-native development and agentic deployment for CRM, following its earlier purchase of ai.work.

Buyer takeawayThe deal signals that ServiceNow is pushing harder into CRM, so buyers running Salesforce alongside ServiceNow should watch how Sweep support for rival platforms evolves.

Sierra became a launch partner on OpenAI's new business marketplace. Eligible OpenAI customers can apply part of their existing OpenAI spending commitment to building customer-facing agents on Sierra's platform. The move extends Sierra's earlier involvement with OpenAI Frontier and pairs the marketplace route with Sierra's outcome-based pricing, where customers pay for results such as a retained subscriber or a completed sale.

Buyer takeawayEnterprises with committed OpenAI budgets can now fund Sierra agent projects from that commitment instead of opening a separate procurement line.

Sierra announced a major update to Ghostwriter, its agent-building tool, which now works as a team member in Slack and Microsoft Teams. Teams can mention it in a channel or let it raise issues on its own. It flags problems, proposes improvements and experiments, and tracks A/B tests until results are statistically significant. Sierra said a broader rollout would begin the following week.

Buyer takeawayCustomer experience teams running Sierra agents can push routine tuning and monitoring work into the chat tools they already use, though wide availability only starts in October.

NiCE made Cognigy generally available in India, offering AI agents across voice, text, image and WhatsApp with local speech support for Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and code-mixed Hinglish. The service runs from a Mumbai environment with Hyderabad as the disaster recovery site, supports more than 30 channels and can be deployed on NiCE CXone or as a standalone product.

Buyer takeawayIndian enterprises can now deploy Cognigy agents with in-country hosting and native language support, which eases data residency and adoption concerns for local customer service.

Sierra achieved AIUC-1 certification, a standard for AI agents that tests behaviour under manipulation attempts, data access probes and authorisation limits. The Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company tested its chat and voice agents in normal and adversarial scenarios, and Schellman audited its technical, legal and governance controls. Testing repeats at least quarterly, with a full audit each year.

Buyer takeawayRisk and procurement teams gain third-party evidence on agent safety controls that sits alongside Sierra's SOC 2, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 credentials.

The Adecco Group announced a global rollout of Salesforce Agentforce Coworker across more than 40 countries, covering about 27,000 employees after pilots in the UK and France. Sales staff and recruiters will use the assistant to prioritize prospects, prepare briefs, track leads and launch screening and onboarding agents. The deployment builds on an unlimited Agentforce enterprise agreement signed earlier in 2026.

Buyer takeawayA staffing firm at this scale moving from pilot to global use gives buyers a reference case for assistant adoption in sales and recruitment workflows.

Freshworks published its September innovation update, which lets admins describe a process in plain language and have Freddy AI Agent Studio turn it into executable workflow logic. The release also brings a Freddy AI Agent for email, better handling of attachments and screenshots, filtered knowledge sources for agents, a more proactive Copilot and an MCP Gateway for Freshservice. Some features are limited to early access customers.

Buyer takeawayService teams on Freshdesk or Freshservice can build and govern agent workflows with less configuration effort, though they should confirm which features are generally available before planning rollouts.

ServiceNow and T-Systems announced that T-Systems is now certified as a Sovereign Partner Cloud Provider, running the ServiceNow AI Platform on its T Cloud infrastructure in a sovereign setup. The offer targets regulated European industries and lets customers buy consulting, implementation, licensing, hosting and operations from a single provider, extending a partnership with Deutsche Telekom that began in 2014.

Buyer takeawayRegulated German and European buyers gain a sovereign hosting route for ServiceNow AI workflows, which can ease data residency and compliance reviews.

Teneo.AI completed a rights issue expected to raise about SEK 74 million before costs at SEK 0.05 per share. Only about 51.5% was taken up by subscribers, so guarantors covered the remaining 48.5%. The issue supports a refinancing the company described as securing a debt-free position, which it reported as completed in mid-September.

Buyer takeawayThe refinancing eases near-term balance sheet risk, but the weak take-up means buyers should still review Teneo.AI financial stability in long-term contracts.

ServiceNow and Aramco Digital, the technology arm of Aramco, signed a collaboration agreement under which Aramco Digital will use the ServiceNow platform to standardize and govern digital workflows across affiliates, subsidiaries and joint ventures in more than 50 countries. The scope covers AI-powered workflows, customer experience, group shared services and ERP modernization.

Buyer takeawayA group-wide energy sector deployment strengthens ServiceNow references in the Middle East for enterprises consolidating shared services on one workflow platform.

Backbase, which acquired Kasisto in June 2026, appointed Roland Booijen as Chief Product Officer, Agentic Banking, reporting to CEO Jouk Pleiter. He will lead product strategy for conversational banking, relationship intelligence and customer operations, the areas where Kasisto's conversational and agentic AI now sits. Booijen founded the Dutch payment app Tikkie and previously ran Backbase's ecosystems and marketplace products.

Buyer takeawayBanks using Kasisto KAI should expect its roadmap to be set within Backbase's agentic banking product line and should confirm support and integration plans with Backbase.

SimplAI reported that Nucleus Research placed it in the Accelerator group of its 2026 Technology Value Matrix for low-code application platforms, published on 8 September. Nucleus uses that group for vendors strong on usability and ease of deployment. On the same day SimplAI also noted an Aspirant placement in an Everest Group PEAK Matrix covering 27 process orchestration product vendors.

Buyer takeawayBuyers comparing agentic AI platforms can add SimplAI to shortlists where fast deployment and low-code agent building matter more than breadth of capability.

ServiceNow published its September 2026 release of the EmployeeWorks web app, the employee experience product that combines Moveworks conversational AI and search with ServiceNow workflows. The update adds configurable home pages, topic directory templates, multilingual announcements and time-bound task delegation, renames legacy plugins under the EmployeeWorks brand and places a native mobile experience in controlled availability.

Buyer takeawayBuyers evaluating Moveworks should now assess it as part of the ServiceNow EmployeeWorks roadmap and licensing rather than as a standalone vendor.