Weekly AI Digest – 16 March 2026

Slack

This week’s highlights

This week, Slack introduced Slackbot, a deeply personalised AI agent designed to enhance productivity by helping users work more efficiently. Additionally, the platform received updates to support agentic collaboration, enabling AI agents to better understand team context and accelerate workflows, detailed in this post.

AI in Slack: Work faster and smarter, right where you are

Atlassian

This week’s highlights

This week, Atlassian showcased significant advancements in AI-powered productivity and prototyping tools. The AI Builders Week highlighted how designers are now moving closer to production-ready prototyping, collaborating seamlessly with engineers using tools like Rovo Dev and Bitbucket, resulting in over 240 builds to streamline workflows. Additionally, Rovo’s AI capabilities within Jira were shown to help teams start work 30% faster, delivering an extra day of monthly productivity by reducing lead time to progress tasks into “In Progress.”

Google Blog

This week’s highlights

Google Maps introduced two new AI-driven features, Ask Maps and Immersive Navigation, enhancing user interaction and navigation experiences. Additionally, Google expanded Gemini-powered AI features in Chrome to India, New Zealand, and Canada, broadening access to advanced AI tools for millions of users (read more). Significant updates to Google Workspace also brought new Gemini capabilities to Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive, including state-of-the-art performance improvements in Sheets to boost productivity (Workspace updates, Sheets beta).

Anthropic

This week’s highlights

Anthropic has announced a $100 million investment into the Claude Partner Network, aiming to expand its collaborative ecosystem. Additionally, the company introduced The Anthropic Institute, a new initiative to advance AI research and safety.

Sydney will become Anthropic’s fourth office in Asia-Pacific

Salesforce

This week’s highlights

This week, Salesforce shared crucial insights on integrating AI agents effectively, highlighting solutions for common blockers like fragmented data systems, privacy concerns, and agent placement to boost adoption in “Top 3 Blockers To Agent Integration — And How To Overcome Them”. Additionally, the upcoming TDX 2026 conference was introduced, featuring “vibe coding” workshops and deep dives into Agentforce Vibes, offering developers and admins hands-on learning with new intent-based development tools. Finally, Salesforce unveiled improved Voice Agent handoff strategies to human agents in “The Art of the Handoff: How Agentforce Voice Escalation Works”, shifting from automatic to dynamic escalation for seamless customer service interactions.

Google Workspace

This week’s highlights

This week, Google Workspace introduced several important updates: meeting updates by delegate users in Google Calendar now consistently send notifications from the principal’s email, simplifying calendar management (learn more). Google Meet hardware received a new Device ID replacing the legacy ID across the Admin console for better device management (learn more), and admins can now assign Google Calendars to Meet hardware in bulk via CSV uploads, streamlining large-scale calendar-device management (learn more). Additionally, “Help me schedule” in Gmail now supports coordinating meetings with multiple guests directly from the compose window, enhancing scheduling efficiency (learn more).