Reusable AI skills, agents that sell, and banks open earnings season

Salesforce made its Winter ’27 release generally available on October 12, with 15 new features. Its Agentforce agents gained Agentic Commerce Search, which lets shoppers search a store in plain language instead of exact product names; Salesforce says early results show a 13% lift in purchases and a 17% rise in add-to-cart rates. The release also added voice agents that book appointments without a human handoff and the ability to run agents from AWS, Azure and Google alongside Salesforce’s own.

Microsoft announced Maia 300, its next custom AI chip, and said it will expand its Maia systems to multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027. Microsoft says Maia 300 delivers 40% more work per unit of power than leading chips from other makers, and up to seven times the output of its earlier Maia 200 chip in a full server rack. Production begins in 2027; the Maia 200 is already running some of Microsoft’s own services.

The largest U.S. banks reported third-quarter results on Tuesday. Goldman Sachs posted revenue of $18.68 billion, well above the $16.71 billion analysts expected, helped by strong trading. JPMorgan Chase reported revenue of $50.91 billion and raised its full-year forecast for net interest income, the gap between what it earns on loans and pays on deposits, to $106.2 billion. Wells Fargo earned $1.87 a share on revenue of $21.87 billion.

Domino's Pizza reported third-quarter revenue of $1.19 billion, up 3.4% from a year earlier. U.S. same-store sales rose just 0.3%, down sharply from 5.2% a year earlier, and international same-store sales growth slowed to 0.2%. Net income rose to $152.2 million, or $4.60 a share, in the first report under new chief executive Joe Jordan.

Cleveland Federal Reserve President Beth Hammack, a voting member of the Fed’s rate-setting committee, said on Monday that a "restrictive monetary policy stance is appropriate to ensure a timely return to 2 percent inflation." She added that she prefers smaller, quicker rate adjustments over waiting and risking a larger correction later.