The Security Think Tank considers what CISOs and buyers need to know to cut through the noise around AI and figure out which AI cyber use cases are worth a look, and which are just hype.

The company has developed Maia 200, an AI accelerator that promises to boost inference workloads

Summary Bullets:

• Slack has been given a new lease on life from its parent Salesforce, serving as a frontend for the platform.

• It is not yet time to include Slack in the discussion along with rivals, but the company merits keeping a close eye on.

When Slack was acquired by Salesforce in July 2021 for nearly $28 billion, the smart money said that Slack would slide into obscurity. After all, Slack was a second-tier player in the team collaboration space while Salesforce was a premier provider of customer resource management (CRM) technology and a captain of industry at large. Surely, the acquisition would follow the familiar pattern of so many, which preceded it with a ‘big fish’ gobbling up a ‘little fish’ never to be heard from again. For certain, Slack would be stripped of its brand name, and its technology capabilities absorbed into Salesforce’s massive stockpile. Well, quite the opposite happened. Slack has not only survived – it has been granted a new and better life by its parent.

Salesforce has kept busy adding features to Slack, repositioning it as the frontend for Salesforce’s AI ecosystem. The poster child for this transformation is Salesforce Agentforce. It allows users to build specialized, task-specific AI agents that operate directly in Slack, handling everything from simple support queries to executing complex processes. The agents have access to company and customer data stored in Salesforce and are integrated with messages, files, and workflows residing within Slack. As a result, the agents provide responses that are highly tailored to the user’s work environment.

At a higher level, Slack is increasingly becoming embedded into Salesforce’s broader product fabric. For example, Salesforce recently announced a comprehensive update that creates a unified space in which teams can collaborate and act without leaving the flow of work. At the heart of the update is a new type of Slack channel labeled ‘Salesforce Channels’. Salesforce Channels reflect Salesforce’s broader strategy to consolidate applications, workflows, AI agents, and data into a single environment. Salesforce Channels connect directly with Salesforce records such as accounts, opportunities, and custom objects. Because Salesforce Channels are bi-directional, being accessible from either Slack or Salesforce with no loss of context, they reinforce Slack’s evolving role as the default collaboration interface for the Salesforce platform.

Not only has Slack evolved from a product perspective, it has evolved from a management perspective as well. In January 2023, Lidiane Jones, an EVP and GM at Salesforce, succeeded Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield as CEO. Only 10 months later in November, Jones was replaced by Denise Dresser, a long-time Salesforce executive. Dresser departed in late-2025 and Rob Seaman, Slack’s CPO has been acting as interim CEO since.

Slack has come a long way bit by bit since Salesforce purchased it, but it is not yet time to include them in the discussion with competitors such as Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom. Rival organizations have kept busy accumulating AI-driven features across their platforms, not only for team collaboration but for contact center as well, and they have generated substantial brand equity in the process. However, as a central interface into the Salesforce platform, a foundational tool for corporate America, Slack merits keeping a close eye on.

Eight LinkedIn Learning courses to build AI skills in 2026, from generative AI and ethics to agents, productivity, presentations, and engineering.

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Few believe Meta will abandon VR entirely, but many see an unmistakable pivot as resources move toward AI systems and devices such as smart glasses.

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The newest Office version is here and includes a variety of updates to help you work more efficiently.

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New Mac Pro rumor resurfaces as Bloomberg maps a busy 2026 Mac roadmap, with redesigned MacBook Pro features like OLED and touch in the mix.

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The acquisition is a shift toward tighter control over the physical supply chain required to scale quantum computers.

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Replace your manual spreadsheets with intelligent budget tracking, personalized recommendations, and more with this deal.

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The disruption began Saturday (5am Pacific time, Jan .24) affecting approximately 1.8 billion Gmail users worldwide with widespread email misclassification.

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The government is ploughing in public money to build out one of the UK’s most powerful supercomputers

Digital sovereignty is set to become a top investment priority in 2026, due to geopolitical and legislative changes

The deal ends ban threats and uncertainty, but a weekend outage and new terms of service and privacy policies raise questions about the algorithm.

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It has been an exhausting quarter for system administrators and security teams. The last three months have been dominated by a storm of high-priority security issues. We have seen critical vulnerabilities surfacing in everything from container orchestration platforms to widely used identity management systems. Just as many teams were preparing for the holiday freeze, yet another critical alert dropped on December 23 regarding the Net-SNMP protocol suite.

US lawmakers have extended the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 for another nine months, buying time to enact a replacement for the legislation.

A massive unsecured database exposed 149 million logins, raising concerns over infostealer malware and credential theft.

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Summary Bullets:

• SubCo will establish a trans-pacific submarine cable project dubbed ‘APX East’ that will directly connect Australia with mainland US.

• While Australia already has sovereign owned cables, it’s crucial that this type of infrastructure remains in domestic ownership to ensure data sovereignty is met.

Over the last few years, international connectivity strategies have largely been driven by scale – favoring bigger pipes, alternative routes, and the assumption that capacity would keep pace with demand. However, with the rise in data traffic contributed by AI, data-intensive workloads, and diminishing tolerance for outages, this is forcing carriers to rethink how international networks are designed and evaluated.

In that context, submarine network developer and operator SubCo, based in Australia, announced that it would build the APX East cable, directly linking Australia to the US by 2028. This can be viewed as a significant step forward in strengthening Australia’s national telecommunications resilience. As data continues to become a core and strategic national asset, a sovereign-owned international cable offers Australia greater control over how its critical information is transmitted, secured, and governed – reducing reliance on foreign-controlled infrastructure at a time of rising geopolitical and cyber risk. While this project is a commercial infrastructure, it will also be a nation-building digital backbone. Given cables are tied to national security and strategic importance, the Australian government should take steps to encourage local investments and ensure ownership for securing Australia’s digital future.

SubCo plans to establish a direct trans-pacific optical link connecting Sydney (Australia) to San Diego, California (US) using a 16 fiber-pair design with no intermediate landings. The system is expected to cost $500 million (AUD747 million). At an estimated length of 12,000 to 13,000 km (7,500 to 8,075 miles), the cable is expected to be the longest continuous subsea optical route in the world. The project is intended to support the rapid growth of AI infrastructure in Australia, where hyperscalers and emerging neocloud providers are expected to deploy up to 3GW of AI ”factories” in the coming years. This cable will complement the company’s existing Oman Australia Cable (OAC) connecting Perth (Australia) to Muscat (Oman), which was launched in late-2022. It is worth noting that both Vocus and Telstra (including Endeavour to Hawaii) have already built their own cables, which demonstrates that private businesses are ready to invest in the country’s digital backbone. As the importance of this infrastructure grows, ensuring continued domestic ownership of future investments is critical.

As highlighted in GlobalData’s recent subsea cable report (AI Growth Collides with Infrastructure Limits, December 19, 2025), governments are increasingly intervening in the development and operation of cable systems due to digital sovereignty concerns. These concerns directly affect government services, defense, healthcare, and other critical industries. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly important that Australia exercises greater control over how sensitive data is routed and protected, reducing exposure to foreign jurisdictions, commercial priorities, and strategic interests of foreign-owned hyperscalers. In an era of heightened cyber risk and geopolitical uncertainty, ownership and control of digital pathways are as important as capacity.

Governments already co-invest in critical infrastructure such as roads, power, ports, and defense assets. Subsea cables should now be recognized with the same category. The government could show support in various ways from co-investment, underwriting – it could even have long-term capacity commitments. The goal is not to remove private capital; rather, targeted public participation can help ensure that national security, resilience, and data sovereignty are met. As the window narrows for Australia to shape its digital future, projects like APX East will determine who controls the arteries of the nation’s digital economy.

Jan. 20–23 recap: Code went corporeal as Big Tech bet on bodies, and your weekend chores suddenly look negotiable.

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Many people from underrepresented groups find difficulties in entering the tech sector – experts attending the 2025 Computer Weekly diversity in tech event, in partnership with Harvey Nash, offered advice for dismantling these barriers

Black Hat Europe made clear that cyber security can no longer be separated from politics, economics and behaviour, as ransomware, AI and long-standing security failures combine