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đ¨ AI Just Wiped 13% Off IBM in One Day
Legacy tech is shaking. AI agents, data centers, and infrastructure plays are accelerating fast.
Avinash Mada
February 26, 2026
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In this weekâs edition, we brought AI updates backed by high-quality research and data to give you deeper insights. You'll find the Top AI Breakthrough of the Week, a featured AI tool with a mini-tutorial, learning resources to help you master these tools, the top 3 AI news stories, and more.
Our goal is to help you improve your knowledge and stay ahead in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. You can submit your questions, queries, thoughts, opinions or anything regarding AI as a reply to this email and we'll feature and address them in our next newsletter.
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An in-depth look at a major AI development, its industry impact, how it could affect your career, and a bold future prediction.
IBM Shares Suffer Worst Drop Since 2000 as AI Targets Legacy Mainframe Business
Anthropic revealed that its Claude Code system can analyze, refactor, and help modernize decades-old COBOL systems, software that still runs banks, airlines, governments, and financial infrastructure worldwide. Within hours, IBMâs stock fell roughly 13 percent, its steepest one-day drop since 2000.
The trigger was not revenue data. It was capability. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL still power mission-critical systems, historically maintained through high-margin, multi-year consulting contracts. Claude Code claims to automate core pain points: dependency mapping, legacy logic interpretation, and structured refactoring. If modernization timelines compress from years to months, the economics of enterprise IT change immediately.
Markets reacted to the possibility that AI can penetrate one of the most defensible, specialist-heavy segments of enterprise technology.
Potential Impact
Banking and Financial Infrastructure Modernization
AI-assisted analysis of massive COBOL bases reduces dependency on shrinking specialist talent pools.
Government and Public Systems Upgrades
Faster risk assessment and refactoring shorten procurement and transformation cycles.
Enterprise IT Cost Compression
Consulting-heavy modernization projects shift toward AI-led execution models.
If credible at scale, this reframes legacy modernization from a decade-long capital drain into a strategic acceleration lever.
Implications for People/Careers
COBOL specialists lose scarcity leverage. Enterprise architects and AI-augmented engineers gain power.
Entry-level coders face compression as AI absorbs mechanical refactoring work. Mid-level developers must move up the stack into systems integration and risk modeling. Senior consultants cannot rely on billable hours tied to manual modernization.
The premium shifts from writing or translating code to designing resilient, secure, AI-supervised transformations across infrastructure, security, and compliance layers.
Our Future//Take
Markets now price AI disruption before revenue moves. Capability signals alone erase billions in valuation.
Legacy industries no longer enjoy immunity. If your edge depends on complexity, opacity, or specialist scarcity, AI will target it next.
Start building fluency in AI-driven systems transformation, not just coding. The winners will orchestrate AI across infrastructure, compliance, and operations.
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Quick summaries of this week's top AI news, their relevance to your career, and our expert opinions.
Salesforce came into earnings with one mission: stop the market from pricing it like a legacy seat based SaaS company in an AI agent world. It posted $10.7B Q4 revenue up 13% YoY and $41.5B for the year up 10%, helped by its $8B Informatica acquisition. Net income hit $7.46B and guidance targets $45.8B to $46.2B next year with RPO above $72B.
Benioff leaned into the SaaSpocalypse narrative on the call, name checking it repeatedly, then countered with capital return and agent proof points: a nearly 6% dividend raise to $0.44, a new $50B buyback, and a new unit called agentic work units designed to measure completed enterprise tasks, not tokens.
Why It Matters to You
If you sell software or build on it, this tells you what buyers will demand next: outcomes, not features, and verified work, not token counts. Salesforce is trying to turn agents into a new consumption layer while protecting the system of record position that controls budget and workflow.
You should copy the move even if you are tiny. Define a business-native unit of value, instrument it, and price around it. If you cannot quantify work completed, you will get undercut by tools that can.
Our Take
The SaaSpocalypse fear is real, but not for the reason people repeat on X. Seats die when workflows fragment and agents route around your UI. Salesforce sees that and is racing to own the agent control plane that writes to your records and closes the loop. AWU is the tell: Salesforce wants procurement to compare agent output like they compare cloud usage.
What you do now: redesign your product around actions completed, build auditability into every agent step, and assume your next competitor is a model company shipping an enterprise agent, not a SaaS peer. đ Do Not Delay Anymore - Master AI Before Its Too Late.
Peter Steinberger, the author of the viral autonomous AI agent OpenClaw, now part of OpenAI, shared a clear developmental philosophy: build by playing, iterating, and not expecting instant mastery. OpenClaw began as a side project integrating with WhatsApp, growing into a widely used assistant capable of executing real tasks across messaging apps and desktop systems. Steinberger credits its success to curiosity-driven exploration rather than a fixed blueprint; he urges builders to treat AI creation like learning a skill, adapting through practice rather than demanding perfection from day one. This mindset contrasts with rigid engineering approaches and signals a broader shift in how frontier AI tools are conceived, tested, and adopted at scale, especially in agentic workflows that blur the boundary between tools and autonomous collaborators. (Yahoo! Tech)
Why It Matters to You
Youâre operating in a landscape where success favors rapid iteration, not perfect first designs. Steinbergerâs experience highlights that autonomous AI products like OpenClaw donât emerge from immaculate planning; they evolve through playful experimentation and learning from real use. If youâre building agentic systems, generative tools, or workflow automators, adopting this mindset accelerates progress and reduces burnout. The market rewards those who prototype fast, learn from usage data, and adjust. This update isnât about a personalityâitâs a playbook for building the future of AI-native products. (Yahoo! Tech)
Our Take
This moment marks a cultural shift in AI creation: agency matters as much as algorithms. The success of OpenClaw shows utility and accessibility can outpace research purity. Expect the next phase of AI innovation to come from builders who treat tools as puzzles to explore, not codebases to perfect. Your immediate action is to allocate time for rapid prototyping, embrace incremental releases, and instrument feedback loops tightly. Treat failures as data. Teams that do this will ship better products faster in the agent economy. (Yahoo! Tech)
Investors are repositioning India as a long-term base for AI data centres, generative AI infrastructure, and critical mineral processing. The Asian Development Bank has committed roughly 1 billion dollars of its own capital to India in 2025 and mobilised another 1 billion dollars from partners, directing about 20 percent of its global private sector portfolio into the country. More than 10 million MSMEs benefited from ADB-backed financing in 2024. Capital is flowing into digital infrastructure, renewables, skilling, agriculture, and affordable housing. What stands out is timing. Global capital is not chasing short-term arbitrage. It is aligning with Indiaâs policy stability, talent pool, and long-horizon infrastructure play. AI compute and rare earth supply chains are now strategic assets, not side sectors.
Why It Matters to You
If you build in AI, climate tech, manufacturing, or fintech, this directly affects your access to capital. Institutional money is moving toward infrastructure layers, not just consumer apps. You need to position your work inside these priority stacks. AI tools that depend on compute, green tech built on mineral supply chains, MSME finance platforms linked to real productivity gains. The advantage now goes to founders who understand capital flows and align with national scale themes.
Our Take
This signals structural confidence in India as a future infrastructure anchor, not just a growth market. Expect deeper capital pools around AI compute, critical minerals, renewables, and SME financing platforms over the next five years. You should start building where sovereign interest and private capital overlap. Focus on infrastructure, compliance readiness, and scalable systems. The next wave of Indian unicorns will not come from surface apps. They will sit on top of compute, energy, and supply chain leverage. AI Mastery for FREE (Sign up Now).
Discover a comprehensive guide to an AI tool, exploring its features, practical use cases, and learning resources to help you master it.
đŁď¸ Humva
Humva is a user-friendly online platform that leverages artificial intelligence to create customized video avatars, enabling users to produce professional-looking videos for various purposes without the need for advanced technical skills.
â Top Features
AI-Generated Presenters: Create lifelike avatars to deliver your scripts, ensuring a polished and engaging presentation.
Script Integration: Input your text-based script, and the system converts it into a spoken presentation.
Avatar Customization: Adjust the avatarâs appearance, voice, tone, and language to align with your brand or message.
User-Friendly Interface: Designed for users with no prior technical or video editing expertise, making the process straightforward.
Quick Turnaround: Produce professional-quality videos in minutes, streamlining your content creation process.
A curated list of noteworthy AI tools and their key details to help you stay ahead in your field.
PreCheck.ai is an AI-powered platform offering facial recognition and identity verification services. It enables users to monitor online images, protect personal privacy, and prevent fraud with high accuracy.
AI Headshot Generator is a tool that transforms selfies into professional headshots without the need for a photoshoot. By uploading at least four high-quality selfies, users can receive polished headshots in approximately 30 minutes, suitable for various professional uses.
Go Legal AI is a comprehensive legal tech platform designed to simplify legal tasks for businesses, freelancers, and individuals. Powered by advanced AI, it offers over 5,000 customizable legal templates, AI-assisted document drafting and editing, and automated compliance tracking with smart reminders.
TalkText is an AI-powered dictation tool for Mac that refines spoken language into polished text. It removes filler words and corrects mistakes, allowing users to dictate naturally while producing clear and professional written content.
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