The venture, called The Deployment Company, brings together 19 investors, including TPG Inc., Brookfield Asset Management, Advent International and Bain Capital. SoftBank Group and Dragoneer Investment Group are also involved.

People with direct knowledge say the new company is valued at about $10 billion, not counting the new capital raised, while OpenAI will keep control of the business.

OpenAI wants its tools used inside more companies, not just tested. So it will place its engineers, who will help redesign workflows, automate routine tasks and ensure wider use of its software, directly within organisations backed by these investors.

This approach changes direction from simply selling access to software to focusing on hands-on deployment. It is closer to a service model, where companies pay not just for tools, but for implementation and ongoing support.

The investors backing the venture control more than 1,000 companies between them. That gives OpenAI a ready pipeline of clients without relying on long sales cycles. It also means faster rollout across sectors.

OpenAI has committed about $500 million upfront, with the option to increase that to $1 billion later. The rest of the funding will come from private equity firms over the next few years.

Interestingly, OpenAI is offering investors a 17.5% annual return, and if the venture doesn’t meet expectations, it will cover the gap, creating risk. On a $4 billion commitment, the shortfall could run into hundreds of millions each year if returns disappoint.

The development comes after Anthropic secured about $1.5 billion for a similar initiative. Its backers include Blackstone Inc., Goldman Sachs and Hellman & Friedman, who plan to deploy AI tools across their own investment portfolios.

Both companies are trying to prove that their technology can deliver value inside large organisations even as they move closer to potential public listings.

OpenAI is on track for about $30 billion in annual revenue this year, and at the same time, heavy spending on infrastructure could push losses as high as $14 billion.

The company announced the products on Monday at its Adobe Summit conference in Las Vegas, saying businesses now work so hard to stay visible on AI search tools, chat services and automated shopping platforms, while also improving customer experiences on their own websites.

Adobe said the new system expands its existing Adobe Experience Manager platform, which many brands already use to manage websites and digital content.

The latest update adds tools designed to help companies control approved content, permissions, governance regulations and brand information used by internal teams and AI systems.

Loni Stark, vice president of strategy and product at Adobe, said companies now need to think beyond content management.

“There is a new intermediary between brands and their customers, and unlike every one that came before it, this has the ability to reason,” said Stark. 

“For decades, brands have managed content, but now they also need to manage context to pinpoint what AI understands about their offerings and the institutional knowledge their own agents need to act, challenges that can be solved with our new solution.”

Adobe said the new package includes tools across four areas: monitoring brand visibility, creating content, reaching customers and measuring results.

One product, Adobe LLM Optimiser, is designed to show how brands appear in AI-driven search and recommendation systems. It also highlights gaps in product visibility during online shopping searches.

The company also introduced new features for Adobe Commerce, which supports online retailers. Adobe said these updates will help businesses improve product listings and customer discovery through AI shopping tools.

Another product, Adobe Brand Concierge, offers conversational shopping experiences with real-time product details and checkout options.

Adobe said brands will also be able to create experiences that run directly inside large language model platforms through a new feature called LLM Apps.

The company added several AI agents to support content teams.

These include Brand Experience Agent, which updates web pages and creates new content, Content Advisor Agent, which finds approved materials for teams, and Brand Governance Agent, which checks brand rules, permissions and asset rights.

Adobe also said companies will be able to measure recommendation share across AI platforms, response accuracy and customer engagement on their own websites.

Jennifer Manry, Divisional CIO, Corporate Systems, at Vanguard, said trust remains central as the firm adopts new technology.

“Maintaining the trust of our clients is at the centre of how we approach technology at Vanguard, especially in an AI-driven future,” said Manry. 

“As we advance our technology to give investors the best chance for investment success, we’re embedding AI into client-facing experiences in ways that are both highly personal and deeply responsible.”

Adobe is also working with Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia to ensure the tools work across multiple platforms.

The launch of Adobe AI marketing tools comes as software companies face stronger competition from fast-growing AI firms offering automation tools for business users.

The update focuses on one issue, which is prompt injection. In these attacks, hidden instructions are placed inside content an AI system reads. The goal is to mislead the system into revealing sensitive data or taking actions it should not take.

Lockdown Mode is optional and built for a small group of users who face higher security risks, including executives and security teams in major organisations. Most users will not need it.

When switched on, Lockdown Mode restricts how ChatGPT interacts with external systems. It disables certain tools that attackers could exploit to extract data from conversations or connected applications.

Web browsing is limited to cached content. No live network requests leave OpenAI’s controlled network. Some features are disabled entirely where the company says it cannot guarantee data safety.

The setting is now available for ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, ChatGPT for Healthcare and ChatGPT for Teachers. Workspace administrators can enable it by creating a new role in Workspace Settings. Once activated, it adds tighter limits on top of existing controls.

At the same time, administrators keep granular control. They decide which apps remain available in Lockdown Mode and what actions users can take within those apps. Separately, the Compliance API Logs Platform provides visibility into app usage, shared data and connected sources.

OpenAI said it plans to make Lockdown Mode available to consumer users in the coming months.

The OWASP GenAI Security Project has classified prompt injection as a top vulnerability for large language models. It noted that malicious prompts can alter AI behaviour in unintended ways, even when they appear harmless.

Google’s security team has warned about indirect prompt injections, where hidden instructions are embedded in emails or documents. An AI system may access those sources and leak sensitive data without the user knowing.

Attackers have embedded instructions inside webpages or retrieved documents, causing AI systems to carry out harmful actions. In one case involving Gemini in Google Translate’s Gemini Mode, researchers showed how translation functions could be bypassed to generate dangerous content.

Anthropic recently published findings on prompt injection failure rates. It reported that even advanced models could be breached in certain contexts. In GUI-based systems with extended reasoning enabled, attack success rates exceeded 50% after repeated attempts.

Security researchers have also identified newer forms of attack, including Logic-Layer Prompt Control Injection, which targets deeper parts of AI systems such as persistent memory and retrieval logic.

By restricting live network access and disabling high-risk tools, Lockdown Mode addresses common attack surfaces linked to prompt injection, including browsing and connected apps.

The company said the feature builds on existing safeguards such as sandboxing, monitoring, enforcement, role-based access and audit logs, while adding stricter limits.

Alongside this, OpenAI has standardised “Elevated Risk” labels across ChatGPT, ChatGPT Atlas and Codex. These labels mark features that may introduce additional risk, particularly those involving network access.

For instance, in Codex, developers can grant network access so the system can retrieve documentation or perform actions on the web.

Where that access is enabled, the interface now displays an “Elevated Risk” label explaining what changes, what risks may arise and when such access may be appropriate.

The company said it will continue to review which features carry the label. As security protections improve and risks are reduced, it plans to remove the label from features considered safe for general use.

What happened instead is a lack of clarity in Microsoft’s rebranding. Over the past week, reports have spread across Reddit, Hacker News and X saying that Microsoft Office has been renamed “Microsoft 365 Copilot”. It sounds believable, but it is also wrong.

Gareth Oystryk, senior director of Marketing, Microsoft 365, clarified: “We have not made any recent naming changes to our Office apps. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the Office apps within the Microsoft 365 productivity suite, remain unchanged.

In November 2022, we renamed only the Office “hub” app for web and mobile to the Microsoft 365 app. In January 2025, we updated it to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app to reflect its role in bringing Copilot and Microsoft 365 productivity experiences together in one place.”

The source of the confusion was that Office.com redirected users towards what Microsoft calls the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. 

This is not a new office suite, it’s a hub. One place to open Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, alongside Copilot features, under a single banner.

Microsoft set this path years ago. In 2022, the company dropped the Office name at the brand level and replaced it with Microsoft 365. The familiar apps never disappeared. What changed was the wrapper around them. 

Then, as Copilot became central to Microsoft’s pitch, the old Office app was renamed again, this time as the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.

That is where the language tripped people up. On Microsoft’s own site, users are greeted with the line: “The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)…”. Read quickly, it looks final, almost like an end notice for Office itself. That single phrase was enough to birth the idea that Office had been fully replaced.

It has not. Word is still Word. Excel still opens spreadsheets. PowerPoint still builds slides. Businesses and individuals can even buy Office 2024 as a standalone package, without cloud tools and without Copilot. That option alone should settle the case.

The timing made things worse. Microsoft has recently pushed the Copilot name harder than ever, positioning it as the front door to productivity. Office.com now reiterates that message. The result is a blurred line between the apps people use every day and the hub Microsoft wants them to launch from.

What surprises me is not that users are confused, but that Microsoft seems surprised by the reaction. So far, the company has not publicly stepped in to clear the air. Silence, in this case, has allowed assumptions to do the talking.

There are risks here. Some users now believe Office no longer exists. Others assume Copilot is mandatory or that familiar tools are being phased out. For businesses, especially cautious ones, that kind of uncertainty slows decisions and feeds distrust.

This episode is about unclear messaging layered on top of years of background rebrands. Microsoft may see Microsoft 365 Copilot as a neat, unified story. Many users see something else entirely, a once-simple product family wrapped in names that no longer explain themselves.

Office, whatever Microsoft chooses to call it at the top level, is still very much alive. The problem is that Microsoft’s own words have made that harder to see.

With that scale, we definitely can’t limit the app’s description to a tool just for messaging. For many MSMEs across Africa, WhatsApp is their business platform, the hub for sales, customer service, operations, and payments.

Across large parts of the continent, small businesses don’t run on standalone websites or dedicated point-of-sale systems. They conduct nearly all of their commerce via chat. 

The very ubiquity that makes WhatsApp powerful also creates a subtle but persistent drag on growth. 

This article focuses on how African SMEs use WhatsApp, explores the advantages it brings, examines the limitations it imposes, and argues why we must build infrastructure on top of it, before these enterprises outgrow their conversational foundation.

WhatsApp Business vs Telegram Channels: Competing for SME Communication

Two facts make WhatsApp essential to Africa’s MSME economy. First, WhatsApp’s global reach is enormous, over 3 billion people use it every month, according to Meta’s 2025 report.

Second, mobile technology is a cornerstone of Africa’s economy. According to the GSMA, in 2024, mobile technologies and services accounted for 7.7% of Africa’s GDP, driven by growing smartphone adoption and expanding mobile internet access. 

When mobile is the primary economic gateway, top messaging apps naturally become the infrastructure for business.

Together, these trends mean that WhatsApp sits at the intersection of accessibility and scale, a near-universal app accessed via the phone, the tool of choice for entrepreneurs with limited capital and moderate technical capacity.

How SMEs Use WhatsApp: Business Workflows in Chat

For many African SMEs, WhatsApp is their default workspace. Here’s how:

• Sales and discovery: Merchants use WhatsApp catalogues, broadcast lists and group chats as their storefronts. Buyers browse images and voice notes, ask questions, and place orders, all within the same chat.
• Customer service: Returns, complaints, confirmations, everything happens via chat. Because responses are usually fast and personal, buyers trust the exchange more than a faceless email or website form.
• Payments and invoicing: Sellers coordinate payments via mobile money, bank transfers or USSD. Customers share payment confirmations in chat. Some businesses then issue invoices as photos or PDFs inside WhatsApp itself.
• Operations and logistics: Orders are coordinated through group chats with delivery drivers or warehouse staff. Drivers get drop-off locations, customer photos, and verbal instructions, all in real time.
• Team coordination: Small teams manage tasks, schedules and recruitment through voice notes and chat groups, minimising friction in low-infrastructure environments.

These workflows mean that for many micro-entrepreneurs, moving off WhatsApp would slow them down and weaken the personal, trusted communication that underpins their sales.

The Upside: Why WhatsApp Triggers Growth

The benefits that come with this arrangement are real and substantial:

• Reduced entry cost: It is free to create a catalogue and share it. No need for a website or expensive digital tools.
• Trust-building: Real-time chat, voice messages and pictures create direct, human engagement. Buyers feel more secure.
• High engagement: Chat messages beat traditional outreach: responses are faster, and conversion rates are higher.
• Financial inclusion: Entrepreneurs who lack formal infrastructure can still transact, document orders and build a client base.
• Scalability: For many African SMEs, WhatsApp provides a way to scale activity without investing heavily in physical or digital infrastructure up front.

The Digital Ceiling: Limits to Scale

Despite the strengths, WhatsApp’s consumer-app roots embed limitations that become more obvious as businesses try to grow.

1. Account and device friction
   A WhatsApp account is typically tied to a single phone number and device, making collaboration difficult. Shared inboxes are awkward, unless businesses adopt the Business API, which comes with onboarding costs.
2. Absence of native data analytics
   Conversations in chat are unstructured. There is no built-in way to run analytics on customer behaviour, funnel performance or churn, unless external tools are used.
3. Limited integration with business systems
   There is no native link between WhatsApp and inventory management, accounting or fulfilment systems. Many firms must reconcile chat-based orders manually.
4. Payment reconciliation challenges
   Payments come through diverse channels, mobile money, bank transfers, USSD. Sellers rely on customers to share confirmation screenshots in chat, then manually reconcile records.
5. Platform risk
   Companies using WhatsApp face real vulnerability from outages or policy changes. The six-hour Facebook/WhatsApp outage in October 2021, and more recent API policy changes, show how a private platform can become a systemic risk.
6. Regulatory and formalisation gaps
   Transactions in chat are opaque to regulators, tax authorities and lenders. Without structured receipts or formal records, many businesses remain informal and credit-invisible.

These challenges add friction, cost and risk, particularly for businesses that want to scale beyond a single phone or a small customer base.

The Layer-2 Ecosystem: Building on What Exists

Recognising these limits, a growing ecosystem is building on top of WhatsApp. Providers include:

• Business Solution Providers (BSPs) that connect WhatsApp Business API to CRMs and customer-service dashboards.
• Chat-commerce platforms that standardise order intake and use templates to turn chat into structured data.
• Reconciliation tools that match payment confirmations to orders, reducing manual labour.
• Voice-to-text or voice-to-structure tools that convert voice notes into itemised orders.

These companies leverage WhatsApp’s reach while adding the structure, analytics and automation SMEs need to scale. But access is uneven: expenses, regional availability and ease-of-use vary, and many small merchants are still excluded.

Macro Risks and Policy Implications

The WhatsApp-first model of commerce presents bigger economic issues:

• Systemic concentration: When trade sits on a single privately-owned messaging platform, any disruption (technical or policy) carries significant economic risk.
• Tax and credit invisibility: Governments lose visibility into business transactions, making effective taxation and credit provision difficult.
• Lack of open data standards: Without a standard for business metadata inside chat (orders, receipts, invoices), each provider builds its own silo.
• Consumer protection: Disputes in private chat are hard to adjudicate. Regulators need clearer safeguards for transactions that begin and end in WhatsApp.
• Digital sovereignty: African economies must balance the benefits of low-cost communication infrastructure with the risk of over-dependence on a platform owned by a global company.

To address these risks, policymakers should incentivise interoperable messaging standards, support layer-2 tools for reconciliation and analytics, and promote subsidised digital infrastructure for SMEs.

A Founders’ and Investors’ Playbook

For entrepreneurs:

• Use structured order-forms or templates within chat.
• Invest in a Business API integration early if you anticipate growth.
• Automate payment reconciliation: match client screenshots with invoices or orders.
• Maintain fallback channels (SMS, email, USSD) to mitigate against outages.
• Record structured data from day one, it supports credit, compliance and scale.

For investors:

• Invest in SaaS firms building shared inboxes, CRMs or reconciliation tools for chat-based businesses.
• Prioritise companies that enable multi-user chat accounts or group-based order management.
• Look for voice-commerce technology: voice-to-text or structured templates that work in low-literacy markets.
• Support developers working on open messaging standards or APIs for business metadata.

WhatsApp has gone beyond being just messaging for African SMEs; it’s the bedrock of commerce for millions. It gives speed, trust, low cost, and inclusion. 

But it was not built for enterprise scale. Many businesses will hit a ceiling if they rely exclusively on conversational workflows.

We now face a choice. Do we treat WhatsApp as the final platform, or as the base layer for a richer infrastructure? 

To turn conversations into scalable economic value, we need to invest in structured data tools, open standards, and lightweight business platforms that build on and elevate what WhatsApp offers. Only then can we fully activate the possibilities of this de facto operating system.

The update turns the POS terminals from basic payment machines into complete business management tools for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

With this new feature, merchants can now handle every part of a sale, from selecting products to confirming payment, without switching between apps or devices. 

The update helps small business owners save time, simplify daily operations, and serve customers faster.

“Our goal has always been to help small businesses operate more efficiently,” said Nosa Oyegun, SVP, Business Banking at Kuda. 

“With Shop & Orders, we are transforming the POS into a connected sales management tool that allows merchants to handle payments, track inventory, and manage orders in one place. It’s a practical way to help business owners focus less on administration and more on serving customers.”

The improvement is part of Kuda Business’s plan to build an all-in-one commerce platform for Nigerian entrepreneurs. In embedding business management directly into POS devices, Kuda aims to remove the need for separate systems that usually slow down operations.

According to the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), SMEs make up 96% of all businesses and 84% of total employment in Nigeria. However, many still depend on manual record-keeping and sales tracking. 

Kuda’s Shop & Orders feature helps bridge this gap by digitising sales processes and making daily operations more efficient.

“Technology should make business easier, not harder,” Oyegun added. “By putting key management tools on the POS terminal itself, we’re giving entrepreneurs one reliable place to run their shops. This is how we see the future of business banking in Africa — integrated, intuitive, and built around how merchants actually work.”

The Shop & Orders update is built for supermarkets, restaurants, and convenience stores, sectors that need quick and simple ways to manage sales. 

SMEs are currently looking for connected digital tools, and Kuda’s new solution provides just what they need, a smoother, all-in-one experience.

While other POS providers focus mainly on payments, Kuda POS terminals now let merchants sell, get paid, and manage sales in one place. The Shop & Orders update is available to all users of Kuda Business POS terminals across Nigeria.

The platform, built on Google’s Gemini models, aims to strengthen the tech giant’s competitive edge in enterprise AI, as Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, among others, are not holding back.

Gemini Enterprise functions as a conversational system that enables employees to interact directly with company data, documents, and applications. The goal, Google says, is to make AI a core part of every workflow, not just an add-on. “We’re introducing Gemini Enterprise, designed to bring the full power of Google’s AI to every employee, for every workflow,” the company said during the launch.

The announcement comes as Google Cloud continues to expand, having surpassed a $50 billion annual revenue run rate in the second quarter of 2025. According to the company, about 65% of its cloud customers already use Google’s AI products, including nine of the world’s top ten AI labs.

Gemini Enterprise builds upon Google’s full-stack AI strategy, combining the strength of its infrastructure, foundational models, and research divisions such as Google DeepMind. The platform is powered by a multi-layer system, from the company’s purpose-built Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Nvidia GPUs, to its world-leading Gemini models, which have consistently topped global performance benchmarks.

Google describes Gemini Enterprise as “the new front door for AI in the workplace.” It features pre-built AI agents capable of conducting deep research, generating data insights, and automating complex workflows. Through a no-code interface, companies can also create and deploy their own agents, tailored to their specific operations.

Early adopters of the platform include Gap, Klarna, and Figma. Klarna, for instance, is using Gemini’s generative tools to produce personalised lookbooks that have boosted customer orders by 50%. 

In the healthcare sector, HCA Healthcare has deployed a “Gemini-powered Nurse Handoff solution” that simplifies patient information transfers between shifts, a move expected to save millions of hours annually.

Google is also using its own technology internally. Nearly half of all new code at the company is now generated by AI and reviewed by engineers, significantly accelerating development cycles.

The launch further reveals Google’s vision for a connected AI ecosystem. Gemini Enterprise securely links with data across multiple platforms, including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and SAP, ensuring enterprise-wide access without compromising governance or security.

To encourage adoption, Google is rolling out Google Skills, a free training platform that will teach users how to build and deploy agents within Gemini Enterprise. The company also introduced Delta, a team of expert AI engineers who will work directly with clients to deploy advanced solutions.

With Gemini Enterprise, Google is embedding AI at the very foundation of how organisations work. “AI is presenting a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform how you work, how you run your business, and what you build for your customers,” the company stated.

The new infrastructure will serve users across Australia and New Zealand, reducing latency, improving application responsiveness, and ensuring compliance with strict data residency requirements in sectors such as healthcare, finance, and government.

With the server based locally, organisations will gain several immediate benefits. Applications will run more smoothly due to shorter data travel times, downtime risks will be reduced with improved recovery systems, and businesses will be able to keep critical information onshore, a requirement in many regulated industries. 

The infrastructure also provides flexibility to scale as customer needs evolve, whether for small businesses or larger enterprises.

Andrew Travis, chief revenue officer (CRO) at Foxit, said: “Bringing our intelligent PDF and document management solutions even closer to Foxit’s Australian customers is a significant milestone, reflective of our ongoing commitment to increasing trust and globalization. By hosting data locally, we are significantly improving performance and reliability and ensuring our customers meet stringent regulatory requirements.”

The Australian rollout comes under Foxit’s global expansion strategy to localise its cloud infrastructure. This approach aims to ensure users worldwide can access secure, high-performance digital document solutions without relying on distant servers.

Customers in Australia can now take full advantage of Foxit’s suite of tools, including secure document collaboration, advanced editing, and e-signature features, while enjoying the assurance of local cloud hosting.

Foxit, a provider of PDF and eSignature products, serves more than 640,000 customers in over 200 countries, ranging from small businesses to multinational enterprises. The company maintains offices across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia.