Artificial Intelligence News for the Week of February 20; Updates from IBM, Infosys, Rackspace & More
Solutions Review Executive Editor Tim King curated this list of notable artificial intelligence news for the week of February 20, 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.
Artificial Intelligence News for the Week of February 20, 2026
Databricks Custom Agents: Agent Bricks as First-Class Databricks Apps
Databricks has made Agent Bricks Custom Agents (formerly Agent Framework) generally available, letting developers build, test, and deploy production-quality AI agents as fully managed Databricks Apps on serverless compute. Teams can use their preferred models and frameworks, integrate with CI/CD, leverage built-in evaluation, and rely on Lakebase-powered memory so agents stay context-aware while operating directly against governed enterprise data and systems within the Databricks platform.
Read on for more → https://www.databricks.com/blog/custom-agents-now-available-databricks
Crusoe Command Center: Unified operations for GPU-heavy AI workloads
Crusoe has launched Command Center, a unified operations platform for its vertically integrated AI infrastructure that combines deep observability with orchestration across Crusoe Managed Kubernetes, AutoClusters, and Crusoe Managed Slurm. Command Center gives AI teams a single source of truth to monitor GPU utilization, diagnose issues, and see auto-remediation actions taken by AutoClusters, helping maximize every GPU hour and reduce time spent wrestling with black-box infrastructure instead of training and deploying models.
Read on for more → https://www.crusoe.ai/resources/newsroom/crusoe-launches-command-center-a-unified-operations-platform-for-high-performance-ai-workloads
Google Cloud, Ab Initio Link Distributed Data For Agentic AI On Gemini
Google Cloud is integrating Ab Initio’s data integration, governance, and active metadata platform with BigQuery, Dataplex Universal Catalog, and Gemini to create a neutral data hub that unifies access to structured and unstructured data across more than 500 on‑prem and multi‑cloud sources, including legacy systems like COBOL, DataStage, Informatica, and SAS.
Read on for more→ https://www.hpcwire.com/bigdatawire/this-just-in/google-cloud-integrates-ab-initio-tools-to-connect-distributed-data-for-ai-agents/
Empromptu: Golden Pipelines + AI Policies bake data readiness and governance into app building
Empromptu has expanded its AI App Builder into a full end‑to‑end platform by adding Golden Pipelines for data readiness and AI Policies for embedded governance. Golden Pipelines bring ingestion, preparation, and quality checks directly into the build flow so AI apps are consistently fed clean, structured, production‑ready data, while AI Policies apply account‑level rules during app generation—producing auditable, policy‑aligned AI systems by default instead of bolting on governance later.
Read on for more → https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/02/19/3241151/0/en/Empromptu-Expands-End-to-End-AI-Platform-Building-in-Data-Readiness-and-Governance.html
Kong + Solace: One control plane for APIs, events, and AI agents
Kong and Solace have formed a strategic partnership to unify API management, real-time event streaming, and AI connectivity under a single, governed control plane. Solace contributes high-performance event streaming and event governance for event-driven and agentic AI systems, while Kong adds centralized API management, security, observability, and AI gateway capabilities so organizations can apply consistent policies and monitor every interaction—from REST to streaming events to AI agent calls—in one place.
Read on for more → https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kong-and-solace-announce-partnership-to-unify-api-and-real-time-data-and-event-streaming-302691193.html
State of FinOps 2026: AI Spend Is Ubiquitous, and FinOps Is Now “Technology Value Management”
The FinOps Foundation’s sixth State of FinOps survey shows 98% of 1,192 respondents now manage AI spend—up from 31% two years ago—and AI value management is the top forward-looking priority and skill set teams want to add. FinOps has evolved from cloud-only to broad technology value management: 90% now manage SaaS, 64% licensing, 57% private cloud, and 48% data centers, with many organizations expected to self-fund AI investments through efficiency gains guided by FinOps.
NETSCOUT Omnis AI Sensor: Curated “smart data” feeds for CSP AI agents
NETSCOUT’s Omnis AI Sensor for Service Providers converts raw 5G, RAN, core, MEC, and transport telemetry into real-time, curated “AI-ready smart data” so telcos can safely feed AI agents, analytics, and ops tools. By extracting, labeling, enriching, and normalizing key signals into smaller, high-fidelity streams, CSPs get a single, correlated view of performance and subscriber impact that speeds root-cause analysis, improves customer experience, and reduces data volume and infrastructure costs while cutting down on AI hallucinations.
Read on for more → https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260219835756/en/NETSCOUT-Delivers-AI-Ready-Smart-Data-for-Communications-Service-Providers
Redpanda AI Gateway: A control plane for agents, MCP, and live data
Redpanda has expanded its Agentic Data Plane with an AI Gateway that serves as a unified access layer between applications, AI models, and MCP services, centralizing routing, policy enforcement, cost controls, and observability across all AI traffic. Together with unified identity, authentication/authorization, and OpenTelemetry-based AI observability, the platform gives enterprises a governance layer to safely connect AI agents and MCP servers to real-time enterprise data while tracking intent, inputs, and outputs for audit and evaluation.
Read on for more → https://www.redpanda.com/press/redpanda-introduces-ai-gateway-to-bring-control-and-governance-to-enterprise-ai
Savant / Engage fi: Finance AI automation gap—big plans, thin execution
A Savant/Engage fi analysis highlights a widening “AI automation gap” in financial services: 76% of finance leaders plan to invest in AI and automation, but only about 6% report advanced implementations at scale. Many banks and credit unions are piloting chatbots, lending tools, and fraud models, yet just 16% have an enterprise-wide AI roadmap, leaving them with scattered point solutions, vendor dependency, and governance problems when AI-driven decisions raise fair-lending, fraud, or customer-complaint issues.
Read on for more → https://www.einpresswire.com/article/893420899/savant-report-uncovers-finance-ai-automation-gap-as-76-plan-investment-only-6-deliver-advanced-implementation
Selector raises $32M to bring AI-powered observability and agentic ChatOps to Fortune 1000 ops
Selector has raised $32 million in new funding, doubling its valuation as ARR nearly quadrupled on the back of adoption by Fortune 20 and Fortune 1000 organizations. Its AI-driven observability and network intelligence platform fuses LLMs, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to correlate telemetry across domains for true root-cause analysis, and the company plans to launch next-generation, multi-turn Agentic ChatOps so teams can conduct iterative investigations with richer operational context.
Read on for more → https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/selector-raises-32-million-to-eliminate-downtime-with-ai-powered-observability-302689735.html
Stravito Deep Research Agent: Source-cited, multi-step research for insight teams
Stravito has upgraded its Insights Intelligence Platform with Deep Research Agent, an agentic extension of its AI Assistant that plans and executes multi‑step research on top of an organization’s existing insight library. Users ask strategic questions and the agent breaks them into sub‑queries, filters sources by metadata, reads full reports (including charts and tables) in parallel, cross‑checks evidence, and returns synthesized, source‑cited answers—designed to give decision‑makers depth and verifiability rather than shallow summaries or web‑scraped hallucinations.
Read on for more → https://www.stravito.com/resources/introducing-deep-research-agent
Tavus Phoenix-4: Real-time human rendering with controllable emotion and active listening
Tavus has released Phoenix‑4, a Gaussian–diffusion generative video model that renders full head-and-shoulders avatars in real time (40 fps at 1080p) with explicit emotional control, active listening behavior, and continuous facial motion. Developers can drive more than 10 emotion states (joy, concern, curiosity, anger, etc.) via LLM prompts or let the model respond contextually; when paired with perception model Raven‑1 and timing model Sparrow‑1, Phoenix‑4 can nod, react, and express nuanced micro‑expressions during both speaking and listening phases, enabling lifelike, emotionally aware AI presenters and agents.
Read on for more → https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260218278213/en/Tavus-Launches-Phoenix-4-the-First-Real-Time-Human-Rendering-Model-with-Emotional-Intelligence
TEKsystems State of Digital Transformation 2026: Productivity and AI lead, ROI Expectations Reset
TEKsystems’ seventh annual State of Digital Transformation report finds enhancing employee productivity (39%) has overtaken improving customer experience (32%) as the top transformation priority. Only 27% of organizations expect digital transformation ROI within six months (down from 42% in 2025), even as 71% plan to increase AI spending and nearly half (49%) see generative AI as the technology with the most operational impact over the next 12–24 months, highlighting a shift toward longer-horizon, AI-driven change in more complex environments.
Read on for more → https://www.teksystems.com/en/insights/newsroom/2026/state-of-digital-transformation-announcement
Virtana MCP Server: Full-Stack Dependency Graph as Context for AI Ops Agents
Virtana has updated its Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server to expose a unified, live dependency graph of applications, infrastructure, networks, and cloud telemetry so AI agents can reason over real system relationships instead of isolated alerts. Agents connected through Virtana’s MCP Server can perform autonomous root-cause analysis, correlate behavior across layers, recommend optimizations based on downstream impact, and trigger automation via tools like Ansible or Terraform—treating natural language as intent that’s translated into structured, dependency-aware operations.
Read on for more → https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/02/19/virtana-mcp-server/
Wolters Kluwer Q1 2026: Banks are deploying AI, but only ~12% have a mature strategy
Wolters Kluwer’s Q1 2026 Banking Compliance AI Trend Report, based on 148 institutions, finds about 61% have AI/ML in production or active pilots, but only 12.2% say their AI/ML strategy is “well-defined and resourced.” Just 9.5% feel “very prepared” on data infrastructure, with data quality (48%), legacy integration (40.5%), and regulatory concerns (37.8%) as top blockers, while AI is used most in risk management (35.1%) and fraud (31.1%) and lags in credit underwriting because of fair‑lending and model validation challenges.
Read on for more → https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/wolters-kluwer-q1-2026-banking-compliance-ai-trend-report
Zenity Labs: Agentic Browser Security and Safe Harbor for LLM Exploits
Zenity is expanding its AI security platform to cover agentic browsers such as ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity Comet, and Dia, which can autonomously read authenticated content and act on users’ behalf, creating a new “shadow AI” risk surface. Through a device agent, Zenity discovers these browsers, monitors autonomous behavior, applies DLP, detects intention-driven anomalies, and is releasing Safe Harbor, an open source tool that gives agents a “safe action” to escape malicious workflows and structured attacks like data structure injection.
Read on for more → https://www.tipranks.com/news/private-companies/zenity-labs-targets-agentic-browser-security-with-technical-deep-dive
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.
NEW Series Launching Soon: The Human Conversation with Solutions Review President Doug Atkinson
What makes us so special? And why isn’t AI just simply going to replace us all? Doug is sitting down with educators, researchers, and practitioners to try to find out. With the rise of AI, it is more important than ever that we need to have the Human Conversation.
Solutions Review is Getting Set to Host Radware for the Exclusive Session ‘Securing Your AI Agents to Embrace Their Full Potential’ on March 5
In the hour-long webinar, the company’s VP of Product Marketing will examine the state of global AI adoption, the concerns it brings, and the tools an organization can and should put in place to utilize the full power of Agentic AI while still protecting its data and business. The conversation will also cover several threats, some of which were discovered and published only latterly.
Insight Jam is Getting Set to Host Donald Farmer for the Expert Briefing: The Last Mile to AI & Why Analytics Leadership Matters on March 19
While AI can generate insights at unprecedented speed and scale, it cannot verify those insights against business reality, interpret them within organizational context, or take accountability when decisions go wrong. That responsibility still belongs to people. In this live Insight Jam session, Donald Farmer introduces the concept he calls the last mile: the critical gap between AI-generated output and trustworthy business action.
Thought Leaders: The Hidden Crisis Killing Your Data & AI Strategy by Samir Sharma
I spoke with a C-suite leader this week who captured something I’ve been seeing everywhere: “I feel like I’m shouting about transformation from the stage while my team sits in the audience wondering what I’m talking about.” He’s not alone. What I’m calling “velocity whiplash” is the most under reported, over experienced pain point in enterprise AI today. Leaders are racing ahead while their organisations stand still. The gap between them is growing into a credibility crisis that’s quietly destroying AI transformations. You might think that’s too strong, but, it is something I’m continuing to hear.
Thought Leaders: Reflections from Mesh Lab Episode 1: The Future of Work & Learning by Michelle Ament
We built the wrong systems. I carried this tension into our first Mesh Lab conversation, a year-long expert series hosted by Insight Jam. Six of us from K-12, higher education, and workforce development gathered around one question: What is fundamentally broken in today’s learning frameworks now that AI can generate answers, content, and code on demand?
Insight Jam Panel Editorial: AI & Economic Value: Where AI Challenges and Expands Human Expertise
AI challenges human expertise where it is mechanical. It expands human expertise where it is meaningful. The future of economic value will be determined not by how powerful the models become, but by how deliberately humans choose to deploy them.
Insight Jam Panel Editorial: What We’ve Learned from Generative AI & What Comes Next
A recent Insight Jam panel of experts, “36 Months Later,” framed the last three years as a collision between hype, real capability, and organizational lag. The panel opened with a shared sense that the industry has been living inside an “eye of the hurricane” dynamic: every time teams adapt to one shift in model capability, a new breakthrough lands and resets the baseline. That pace has been exhilarating, but also exhausting—especially for builders and operators trying to automate real workflows while the ground keeps moving.
Insight Jam Panel Editorial: Creativity & Commerce: Competing with AI in Media and Marketing
Creativity and commerce aren’t being replaced by AI, but they are being repriced, rescaled, and re-tested. That was the underlying theme of this Insight Jam panel: generative AI has made production radically cheaper and faster, which means the real scarcity now is attention. When anyone can publish at volume, the differentiators shift away from “can you make content” toward “can you make content that earns trust, feels human, and actually lands.”
The Editors Lens: How Leadership Development Groups Solve for the AI Skills Gap by Tim King
The future of analytics leadership development belongs to programs that prepare leaders to own the last mile with clarity, confidence, and authority. Anything less leaves organizations with powerful insight and no one truly responsible for its use.
Contributor Series: AI Real Talk: It’s Time to Compete on Impact, Not Adoption Brandon Sammut
AI adoption has skyrocketed. Take Zapier, for example. Ninety-seven percent of our team uses AI in their core work. This trend lines up with Zapier’s recent survey of more than 500 enterprise leaders, which found that 92% of organizations treat AI as a business priority, and over half describe themselves as enthusiastic champions of the technology.
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.
Insight Jam Launches New “Mesh Lab” to Build a Framework for Work & Learning in the Age of AI
Insight Jam Mesh Lab is a year-long, monthly series of expert-led discussions dedicated to exploring and shaping the next generation of frameworks for work and learning in the age of AI. Rather than reacting to tools or trends, Mesh Lab is designed to initiate a sustained, cross-sector conversation about how human capability itself must be re-architected as AI becomes embedded across education, enterprise, and leadership.
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.
For consideration in future artificial intelligence news roundups, send your announcements to the editor: tking@solutionsreview.com.
Tim King
Executive Editor
Tim is Solutions Review's Executive Editor and leads coverage on data management and analytics. A 2017 and 2018 Most Influential Business Journalist and 2021 "Who's Who" in Data Management, Tim is a recognized industry thought leader and changemaker. Story? Reach him via email at tking@solutionsreview.com.
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