AI News for the Week of September 18; Updates from Agentic AI Foundation, Cisco, EY & More

Solutions Review Executive Editor Tim King curated this list of notable artificial intelligence news for the week of September 18, 2026.

Keeping tabs on all the most relevant artificial intelligence news can be a time-consuming task. As a result, our editorial team aims to provide a summary of the top headlines from the last week in this space. Solutions Review editors will curate vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy artificial intelligence news items.

For early access to all the expert insights published on Solutions Review, join Insight Jam, a community dedicated to enabling the human conversation on AI.

AI News for the Week of September 18, 2026

Abacus Launches AI Initiative To Help Regulated Enterprises Move From Pilots To Production

Abacus has launched a new AI initiative focused on accelerating adoption in regulated industries, combining implementation support, governance, and domain-specific capabilities for organizations with strict security, compliance, and operational requirements. The program is designed to help enterprises operationalize AI while retaining the controls needed for high-stakes use cases.

Read on for more→ Abacus Launches AI Initiative to Accelerate Enterprise AI Adoption for Regulated Industries

Acquia Finds CMOs And CIOs Lack Alignment On AI Ownership And Governance

Acquia’s global survey of 500 CMOs, CIOs, and CTOs found that marketing and IT leaders often disagree over who makes CMS and digital-experience platform decisions, with 57% of CIOs and CTOs describing themselves as the primary decision-maker while marketing respondents report a much more distributed model. The study also found that only 41% of CMOs are confident in their teams’ ability to embed governance into AI initiatives and 61% say content is spread across too many systems to provide a reliable source of truth.

Read on for more→ Acquia Research Finds CMOs and CIOs Don’t Agree on Who Leads Their Shared AI Decisions

Agentic AI Foundation Launches First Vendor-Neutral Certification For MCP Skills

The Agentic AI Foundation has introduced the Model Context Protocol Associate certification, a vendor-neutral credential for developers, platform engineers, and AI-governance professionals working with MCP-enabled systems. The 120-minute proctored exam covers protocol fundamentals, architecture, execution, security and governance, and ecosystem use cases, providing employers with a standardized way to assess knowledge of the fast-growing protocol for connecting agents to external tools and services.

Read on for more→ Agentic AI Foundation Launches MCPA Certification to Validate MCP Expertise

Airrived Launches Agent Observability For Enterprise Governance, Data Risk, And Cost Control

Airrived has introduced Agentic Observability for its Agentic OS, giving enterprises visibility into agent ownership, permissions, human approval requirements, data access, actions, business outcomes, and AI consumption costs. Built around the company’s Context Lake, the capability traces workflows from source data through decision and execution, including the movement of PII, payment-card data, and protected health information, and supports on-premises, private-cloud, and air-gapped deployments.

Read on for more→ Airrived Launches Observability for Enterprise AI Agents

Cisco Extends Splunk AI To Private And Air-Gapped Environments With Agent Controls And Token Economics

Cisco has added an AI POD for Splunk to its Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, enabling Splunk Enterprise customers to run AI Assistant, forthcoming Agent Launchpad, and selected open or proprietary models inside on-premises, private-cloud, and air-gapped environments. Cisco also expanded Splunk Agent Observability across Splunk Observability Cloud and Cisco Cloud Control with Tokenomics for real-time AI-cost attribution and forecasting, while new agentic SOC capabilities, Exposure Analytics, and a multi-year AWS co-development agreement target faster, governed security operations.

Read on for more→ Cisco Delivers Trusted AI at Scale Through New Splunk Advancements

Collibra Finds AI Teams Are Paying A “Hallucination Tax” To Validate Agent Outputs

Collibra’s Harris Poll survey of 306 U.S. data, privacy, and AI decision-makers found that 72% attribute underperforming AI initiatives to weak or unaligned data foundations, while 76% have encountered critical roadblocks moving agent programs from pilot to production. Eighty-seven percent regularly re-verify the accuracy and currency of agent context, and 51% spend significant staff time reviewing and correcting agent outputs before release, underscoring how incomplete governance and context turn promised automation into manual oversight.

Read on for more→ New Survey From Collibra by The Harris Poll Finds 72% of Tech Decision-Makers Feel AI Initiatives Today Are Falling Short

DataCebo Releases Generative Relational Models For Privacy-Safe Enterprise AI Development

DataCebo has launched SDV 2.0, enabling organizations to create generative relational models that learn the structures, relationships, rules, and statistical patterns across enterprise databases inside customer-controlled infrastructure. The models can generate synthetic data, simulate rare scenarios, and provide context for AI-agent training and evaluation without exposing production data; SDV 2.0 automates schema and relationship discovery, business-constraint detection, model tuning, and task-specific dataset creation across sources including Oracle, SQL Server, BigQuery, Spanner, and AlloyDB.

Read on for more→ DataCebo Releases SDV 2.0 for Building Generative Relational Models of Enterprise Data

EY Finds Autonomous AI Deployments Are Moving Faster Than Enterprise Governance

EY research finds that organizations are accelerating the rollout of autonomous AI capabilities while governance, accountability, and oversight frameworks struggle to keep pace. The resulting gap increases the importance of defining decision rights, monitoring agent behavior, managing access to sensitive data and systems, and establishing escalation paths before autonomous systems take on broader business responsibilities.

Read on for more→ EY Survey: Autonomous AI Implementation Outpaces Oversight, Yielding an AI Governance Gap

Expanse Raises $5.3 Million To Predict AI Compute Needs Before Workloads Run

Expanse has raised $5.3 million in seed funding led by Crane Venture Partners to expand software that predicts the optimal GPU, CPU, memory, and runtime requirements for AI workloads before infrastructure is allocated. Deployed inside customer cloud or on-premises environments, the platform aims to improve utilization, prevent failed jobs, reduce over-provisioning, and keep code and telemetry within customer boundaries; Expanse says one production deployment identified nearly $8 million in idle compute capacity in a month.

Read on for more→ Expanse Raises $5.3 Million to Eliminate Guesswork From AI Computing

Factory Raises $200 Million To Build Governed, Self-Improving Software Development Systems

Factory has raised $200 million at a $5 billion valuation, more than tripling its $1.5 billion valuation from April and bringing total funding above $400 million. The platform enables enterprises to operate autonomous “software factories” that build and improve software under customer control, with support for managed cloud, on-premises, and air-gapped deployment models; Factory says customers include Nvidia, Blackstone, RBC, Palo Alto Networks, and Adobe.

Read on for more→ Factory Raises $200 Million at a $5 Billion Valuation to Scale Self-Improving Software Development in the Enterprise

HPE Doubles Alletra Storage MP X10000 Scale For Expanding AI Data Estates

HPE has released the fourth software update for Alletra Storage MP X10000, expanding the object-storage platform’s scale and capabilities for data-intensive AI and analytics environments. The update is designed to help organizations manage rapidly growing unstructured data volumes with a disaggregated storage architecture that can scale capacity and performance independently while supporting enterprise data protection and hybrid-cloud operations.

Read on for more→ HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 Release 4: Twice the Scale, Built for AI

Neudata Finds Alternative Data Spending Strong As AI Benefits Remain Efficiency-Led

Neudata’s 2026 survey of 191 global data buyers and providers found that 97% of buyers expect alternative-data spending to rise or remain steady over the next year, the strongest budget confidence in the report’s three-year history. While 56% of buyers reported a measurable AI return during the past 12 months, 41% pointed to efficiency gains and only 17% to improved investment performance; the report also found that 44% of providers offer Model Context Protocol access, with more than half charging no additional fee.

Read on for more→ Alternative Data Budget Confidence Hits 3-Year High While AI Returns Remain Efficiency-Led — Neudata’s 2026 Industry Report

OpenText And Cohere Partner To Deliver Sovereign Agentic AI For Regulated Enterprises

OpenText and Cohere have formed a strategic partnership that combines OpenText’s data-management and context layer with Cohere North, a privately deployable agentic AI platform and enterprise model suite. The companies plan to integrate Cohere technology into OpenText Aviator AI agents and offer the resulting solution through on-premises, private-cloud, public-cloud, and sovereign-cloud options, targeting governments and regulated industries beginning in early 2027.

Read on for more→ OpenText, Cohere Partner to Combine Trusted Data with Agentic AI

Perforce Previews Engineering Intelligence Layer To Measure AI-Enabled Developer Productivity

Perforce has previewed P4 Signals, a native engineering intelligence product for Perforce P4 that provides DORA metrics, branch analysis, time-to-review, time-to-resolution, and project comparisons from version-control metadata and change history. Available next year, P4 Signals will offer a web dashboard and protections-filtered GraphQL API, giving engineering leaders a way to measure AI’s productivity impact against standardized development metrics; Perforce also made P4 Cloud available on AWS Marketplace and added P4 as a managed option in Dev Stream Labs.

Read on for more→ Perforce Previews New Engineering Intelligence Product With Perforce P4 Signals

Seagate Finds Enterprise AI Storage Demand Is Outrunning Infrastructure Readiness

Seagate’s 2026 Data Infrastructure Readiness Report found that 99% of 2,712 surveyed enterprise technology decision-makers expect AI to increase storage needs within three years, yet only 38% consider their organizations fully prepared. Data quality and readiness ranked as the top deployment barrier at 53%, followed by storage infrastructure at 43%, while 32% expect capacity needs to grow by more than 50%; 77% have delayed or restructured AI-infrastructure expansion because of energy and sustainability concerns.

Read on for more→ Seagate Survey Finds AI Storage Demand Is Rising Faster Than Enterprise Readiness

TypeSafe AI Raises $40 Million To Build Fast, Composable Intelligence Into Software

TypeSafe AI has emerged from stealth with $40 million in seed funding led by DCVC and introduced Jev, a machine-native model designed to operate as a predictable, low-latency software component rather than a conversational assistant. Available in early access, Jev delivers parallel outputs and calibrated confidence scores to help developers decide when systems can act autonomously; TypeSafe says the model provides frontier-level intelligence in under 100 milliseconds and is up to 100 times faster and less expensive than other frontier models.

Read on for more→ TypeSafe AI Emerges From Stealth With $40M in Funding With New Model for Composable AI

VDURA Adds Proactive Storage Support To Catch Faults Before They Affect AI Infrastructure

VDURA has launched Sentinel, a proactive support capability included with its V12 Data Platform that continuously monitors storage health, capacity, alerts, and diagnostics, then automatically opens a support case with recommended remediation when it detects known failure patterns. Designed for GPU clouds and AI factories, Sentinel can trigger parts dispatch before operators identify an issue while giving customers API-level access to the same telemetry and keeping shared data limited to customer-selected operational metadata.

Read on for more→ VDURA Launches Sentinel: Storage Support That Opens the Service Request Before the Customer Sees a Fault

Western Digital Outlines Scalable Storage Architecture For Fast-Growing AI Data Pipelines

Western Digital used the AI Infrastructure Summit to detail its strategy for scaling storage capacity and performance as AI pipelines generate and retain growing volumes of training, inference, and operational data. The company’s approach emphasizes high-capacity hard drives and storage architectures that can keep data available and cost-effective across the rapidly expanding AI infrastructure stack.

Read on for more→ WD Details Scalable AI Storage Strategy at AI Infrastructure Summit

Expert Insights

Watch this space each week as our editors will share upcoming events, new thought leadership, and the best resources from Insight Jam, Solutions Review’s enterprise tech community where the human conversation around AI is happening. The goal? To help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend through expert advice, best practices, predictions, and vendor-neutral software evaluation tools.

Solutions Review Set to Host Red Hat for Exclusive Spotlight Show (The OpenShift Annual Summit) “Modernize Without Compromise on September 22

Join Red Hat experts and customer leaders for a virtual learning experience exploring how organizations are modernizing applications, securing software supply chains, and preparing their platforms for AI with Red Hat OpenShift. Designed for both technical practitioners and IT leaders, this on-demand event features keynote presentations, technical sessions, and real-world customer insights that you can watch anytime.

Register on LinkedIn

Insight Jam Skills Series Episode 7: The Workforce Reality: What Employers Actually Need

In partnership with America Succeeds, the Insight Jam Skills Series explores why durable skills are essential in the age of AI. Across eight episodes, leaders from education, business, policy, and philanthropy share real-world strategies to build career readiness through critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and leadership. Discover actionable insights to move durable skills from awareness to implementation and help shape the future of work.

Watch on YouTube

EdTech Series: Rethinking Screen Time in K-12 Moving from Reactionary Rules to Purposeful Visibility Harrison Parker

The narrative that all technology use is inherently damaging treats every minute spent on a device as interchangeable, but that does not reflect reality. A student collaborating with peers on a digital engineering project and a student passively scrolling entertainment feeds would register identically on a standard duration-based dashboard. Yet, the cognitive, social, and educational impacts of these two activities are vastly different.

Read on Solutions Review

EdTech Series: Skills-Based Hiring is a Promise: Most Employers Haven’t Built the System to Keep it by Tim Taylor

The shift toward skills-based hiring has been one of the most discussed workforce trends of the past several years. Major employers have dropped degree requirements. States have removed four-year college mandates from government job listings. The rhetoric has been consistent and, in many cases, genuinely well-intentioned: judge candidates on what they can do, not on the credential they hold.

Read on Solutions Review

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1 Million Views: Insight Jam Surges Past 1 Million Site Views & 10 Million on YouTube by Tim King

We’re thrilled to announce that Insight Jam has officially surpassed one million views on Insightjam.com, reaching the milestone at nearly the same time the Insight Jam YouTube channel crossed 10 million lifetime views and more than 1,000 published videos. All this after the Solutions Review channel reached the 250,000 subscriber milestone earlier this year.

Read on Solutions Review

Mini Jam Q2, 2026: AI in Practice: How L&D Are Actually Changing Broadcasts June 25-26

AI is quickly moving from experimentation to operational reality across education, workforce development, and practitioner learning environments. What began as a conversation around tools has evolved into a much larger transformation involving skills, implementation strategies, institutional design, and the future structure of learning itself. All-in, Mini Jam Q2, 2026 provides an unparalleled opportunity to gain insights, engage with experts, and stay at the forefront of the conversation on the human impact of AI on education.

Read on Solutions Review

Solutions Review Announces New EdTech Site on the Future of Work and Learning

The site will provide ongoing editorial, expert thought leadership, research-driven analysis on the state of EdTech, and awards programming through Mesh Awards to cover fully this transformation. Solutions Review EdTech will also house information gain from quarterly virtual events, expert panels, podcasts, and more from its sister brand Insight Jam (1M+ on YouTube), the home for the human conversation.

Read on Solutions Review

We Didn’t Build Solutions Review for AI, We Built it for Buyers by Tim King

A nuclear bomb has been exploded in not only digital marketing, but enterprise tech buying. Buyers increasingly discover information through AI search and their favorite GenAI bot, social media platforms like LinkedIn, and synthesized answers rather than lists of blue links. Visibility still matters, but the question is evolving from “Can you rank?” to “Can you be anchored as trusted a source?”

Read on Solutions Review

Insight Jam’s Mesh Lab Episode 5 Now Available: Human-Centered Environments

The conversation shifts beyond standard pedagogy to address the existential crisis facing students and workers as AI disrupts traditional ideas of productivity and purpose. Panelists emphasize the urgent need to stop measuring final outputs and instead focus on the creative, collaborative process of learning. Ultimately, the group argues that to foster uniquely human skills like adaptability in students, educators must first be granted the autonomy to exercise those exact same skills.

Watch on Insight Jam

Solutions Review Editors Publish New Whitepaper – Authority with Video & How Marketers Win GenAI Search

This is a market-presence strategy for enterprise marketers who want to move from campaign execution to category influence and even niche building, while also positioning their brands for visibility inside the large language models that increasingly shape how buyers discover, evaluate, and shortlist enterprise tech solutions.

Read on Solutions Review

Solutions Review Surpasses 250K on YouTube to Power Unmatched Media Momentum in Enterprise Tech & the Human Impact of AI

Solutions Review has officially surpassed 250,000 subscribers on YouTube, a milestone that’s about more than just the number. This moment marks the payoff of a deliberate, two-year strategy centered on authoritative video, human-led insight, and an early recognition of how AI search engines ingest information, assign trust, and surface sources at scale.

Read on Solutions Review

Solutions Review Editors Launch New ‘Human-AI Ledger’ Newsletter to Chronicle the Human Impact of AI

Artificial intelligence is everywhere—but understanding its human impact has never been more urgent. That’s where Solutions Review‘s latest newsletter, The Human-AI Ledger, comes in. Designed to chronicle how AI is reshaping the way we learn, work, lead, and live, this newsletter explores the soft side of AI—the non-technical, deeply human dimensions that determine whether this technological revolution helps us thrive or leaves us behind.

Sign up now to get a weekly debrief of the latest human-centric news, insights, and commentary coming out of this emerging discussion.

Sign Up Free

How One Solutions Review Article Reshaped AI Answers Across an Entire Software Category

Something just happened in the AI search landscape that most companies will miss. But the ones who understand it will have a multi-year advantage. In January, Solutions Review recorded a 324 percent increase in media domain citations across AI answer engines in less than 30 days.

Read on Solutions Review

For consideration in future AI news roundups, send your announcements to the editor: tking@solutionsreview.com.