Nvidia was the number one trending stock in pre-market trading after the artificial intelligence (AI) darling announced a strategic collaboration with Salesforce (CRM) aimed at advancing AI innovation, particularly in the enterprise space, with a focus on autonomous agents and interactive avatar experiences.
The partnership will combine Nvidia’s AI technology with Salesforce's platform and its Agentforce initiative, targeting improvements in sales, service, marketing, and IT workflows.
The collaboration seeks to optimise predictive and generative AI workflows, accelerate data processing, and enhance retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), offering businesses new insights and increased productivity.
Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce, said: "Together with Nvidia, we're leading the third wave of the AI revolution — moving beyond copilots to intelligent agents working seamlessly to drive customer success. This collaboration will allow every Trailblazer to fully harness AI through the Salesforce Platform and Agentforce."
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said: "In the future, every company, every job will be enhanced by a wide range of AI agents.
"Nvidia and Salesforce are combining our technologies to accelerate the development of AI agents that will supercharge productivity across industries."
High street retailer Next has once again raised its full-year profit outlook, driven by robust overseas sales and a recent recovery in UK trading. The group announced a 7.1% increase in underlying pre-tax profits, reaching ￡452m ($599m) for the six months ending July 27, as overall group sales rose by 8%.
Next’s shares surged 5.5% to a new all-time high of ￡109.10.
While UK sales showed modest growth of 1%, the company's flagship Next brand experienced a slight dip, with full-price sales down 0.9%. The decline was attributed to weaker demand for seasonal collections, as an unseasonably cool early summer affected consumer behaviour. However, overseas markets delivered strong results, with sales surging by 23%.
Next also reported a stronger-than-expected rebound in UK trading in August, as warmer weather helped lift consumer demand. Full-price sales for the first six weeks of the second half increased by 6.9%, reinforcing the company’s optimism.
The retailer has raised its full-year profit forecast by ￡15m to ￡995m, and now expects overall sales to rise by 4%.
Richard Hunter, head of markets at Interactive Investor, said: “In all, the warm share price reaction to the numbers comes as little surprise and adds to a gain of 46% over the last year, as compared to a rise of 7.8% for the wider FTSE 100 (^FTSE) and of 78% over the last two years.
“Even at these levels the company is not stretched on a historic valuation basis, with the only downside being that such share price recognition has not been echoed by a market consensus which has not moved from being a hold for some considerable time. Even so, Next continues to defy any lingering doubts and the strength of its trading performance should rightly grab the headlines from the naysayers who continue to search for chinks in the armour.”
Ocado Retail has raised its revenue outlook for the year, now expecting double-digit percentage growth, following a significant rise in third-quarter turnover. The London-listed online grocer reported a 15.5% increase in revenue year-on-year, reaching ￡658m for the quarter ending 1 September. Weekly average orders also climbed 14.7% to 437,000.
Despite a slight decline in average selling prices, down 0.4%, Ocado benefited from a growing customer base. The retailer saw 1.06 million customers over the period, up from 961,000 in the same quarter last year. This rise comes in contrast to the broader UK grocery sector, where inflation hovered around 2% during the period.
Ocado has managed to maintain a broadly flat average basket value of ￡120.97.
Hannah Gibson, chief executive of Ocado Retail, credited the company's strategy for its recent success. "Our focus remains on providing unbeatable choice, unrivalled service, and reassuring value," Gibson said. "We’re seeing this momentum as more customers shop with us more frequently, enjoying better service and value.”
The upbeat performance and customer growth have bolstered Ocado's confidence in its full-year revenue guidance.
Shares in Alibaba were trending in Hong Kong after it announced that is making over 100 large language models available to the open-source community as it pushed further into artificial intelligence.
The models, part of Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen 2.5 series, cover a range of modalities including language, audio, and vision, and are positioned as the company’s most ambitious open-source initiative to date.
Jingren Zhou, chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, described the move as a "significant milestone" in the tech giant's AI strategy. The announcement was made during Alibaba Cloud's annual three-day event in Hangzhou, China, which featured AI experts and start-up founders, including Chinese-American computer scientist Li Feifei.
Since launching its Qwen models in April 2023, Alibaba reported over 40 million downloads across leading open-source platforms such as Hugging Face and ModelScope.
Alibaba on Thursday also introduced a new text-to-video model as part of its Tongyi Wanxiang image generation suite, signalling its entry into the fast-growing text-to-video AI market. This move positions the Chinese tech firm in direct competition with global leaders like OpenAI, which is also exploring advancements in this emerging technology.
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