Transcription
Today, we are talking about the biggest AI acquisition in about the last 5 years, but is it actually a big deal? Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief, Headlines Edition—all the daily AI news you need in around 5 minutes.
Recently, rumors started popping up that ServiceNow was in talks to buy Moveworks. Moveworks was founded all the way back in 2016, makes about $100 million a year, and at the terms that were leaking, it looked like this was potentially the biggest AI acquisition for some time. Well, that deal was now confirmed: ServiceNow has bought Moveworks for $2.85 billion.
If you are unfamiliar, ServiceNow is a SaaS company that provides business automation tools. Moveworks will bring their experience in offering AI assistance for Service employee requests, such as IT support and HR. In a press release, ServiceNow COO Amit Zavi said, "With the acquisition of Moveworks, ServiceNow will take another giant leap forward in agentic AI-powered business transformation. Moveworks' talented team and elegant AI-first experience, combined with ServiceNow's powerful AI-driven workflow automation, will supercharge enterprise-wide AI adoption and deliver game-changing outcomes for employees and their customers." According to Zavi, the acquisition will allow ServiceNow to build a platform that "combines ServiceNow's agentic AI and automation strengths with Moveworks' AI assistant and enterprise search technology."
ServiceNow has definitely been pushing aggressively into AI and has been building out a big part of that strategy through acquisition. For example, in January they acquired Qin, a conversation data analysis platform, and at the end of last year ServiceNow reported 1,000 AI customers, resulting in around $200 million in annual contract value. What's interesting is that Moveworks was pretty early in this space; they actually raised a $2.1 billion valuation all the way back in the ancient times of 2021. They've successfully navigated from the automation era to the agentic era. But what ultimately this says for the space, I think, just comes down to the fact that enterprise AI is a very big business and is going to do nothing but get more so.
Next up, some news on what Meta is building out. Apparently, their next AI model will come with voice mode. According to the Financial Times, Meta is planning to introduce voice features in their next open-source LLM, Llama 4. Sources say that the explicit bet is that users will want to interact with advanced AI agents using conversation rather than text. Reporting suggested a big push to ensure voice interactions are natural and free-flowing, rather than robotic and requiring a rigid question-and-answer format. Last year, Mark Zuckerberg teased Llama agents, declaring a desire to build an agentic coding assistant that could replicate a mid-level engineer. The FT also reports that Meta is considering premium subscriptions for Meta AI that enable a range of agentic tasks and included the examples of booking reservations and video editing. Speaking at a recent Morgan Stanley event, Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox dropped a few additional hints. He described Llama 4 as an omni-model where speech would "be native rather than translating voice into text, sending text to the LLM, getting text out, and turning that back into speech." Cox continued, "I believe it's a huge deal for the interface product, the idea that you can still talk to the internet and just ask it anything. I think we're still wrapping our heads around how powerful that is." Now, as you'll see in our main episode later today about OpenAI and Microsoft, it seems like Microsoft's AI leader, Mustafa Suleyman, has a pretty similar feeling about the importance of voice going forward. Part of what makes Meta's plans more interesting to people than just yet another company getting into the voice AI game is that Llama 4 is presumably going to be open source, and having a state-of-the-art voice mode in an open-source model would be a big deal. Also, frankly, given what we've heard about Meta having the wind knocked out of their sales by the release of the latest DeepSeek models, integrating voice NLL could be a way to differentiate in the off chance that Llama 4 isn't actually as advanced as some of the things that DeepSeek has been putting out.
On the infrastructure front, xAI has acquired a million-square-foot property in South Memphis to expand their data center footprint in the city. The Chamber of Commerce announced the acquisition in a press release, with xAI Senior Site Manager Brett Mayo saying, "xAI's acquisition of this property ensures we will remain at the forefront of AI innovation right here in Memphis." Now, the land is right outside the existing Colossus data center, so is presumably part of the expansion plans, tabled to be completed by '26. Judging from satellite imagery, the land seems large enough to about triple the size of the facility. Colossus currently hosts 100,000 GPUs and was constructed with plans to double that size; however, xAI has said they're planning to upgrade the cluster to operate a million GPUs.
Finally, today, an interesting one at the intersection of hardware and software: Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn has built their own AI model for business optimization called FoxBrain. The model has reasoning abilities and was trained in just 4 weeks on a tiny cluster of 120 Nvidia H100s, designed for internal use. The model can aid in data analysis, mathematics reasoning, and code generation. The company intends to open source the model for industry partners and envisions it helping drive advancements in manufacturing and supply chain management. The model was based on Meta Llama 3.1, but still, Foxconn is claiming that this is the first reasoning model developed in Taiwan and optimized for traditional Chinese rather than Mandarin. The company said the model was slightly behind DeepSeek R1 but was approaching state-of-the-art in benchmarking. I think the big takeaway here is that the barrier to rolling your own model, specifically for your purposes and needs, gets lower and lower every day, and that could have pretty big impacts on how the business side of the industry plays out. For now, though, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief, Headlines Edition. Next up, the main episode.