Welcome to the latest edition of the World of DaaS Roundup.
In this week’s edition, the hardest part of the AI era isn’t building the agents, it’s trusting them. Nearly a third of B2B organizations now spend 6+ hours a week just watching them. G2 calls it the “Distrust Tax,” and it might be the most honest thing said about enterprise AI all year.
Also this week: a $3.5B data deal, members at Money 20/20, and art at Frieze London made from training data.
Take your time with this one. 👇🏻
📰 News & Reads
MEMBER SPOTLIGHT ⭐️
World of DaaS member Godard Abel, CEO of G2, just released the 2026 AI Agents Report showing that agents have moved from pilot to production, but trust hasn’t caught up yet.
MEMBER SPOTLIGHT ⭐️
World of DaaS member Nick Tabbal co-authored Larridin’s Q3 2026 Engineering AI Impact Report, tracking how unevenly AI adoption is landing across engineering organizations.
MEMBER SPOTLIGHT ⭐️
World of DaaS member Teo Gonzalez leads one of the fastest-growing AI search and data retrieval companies in the market.
UPCOMING EVENTS⭐️
If you’re heading to Money 20/20 in Las Vegas next week, World of DaaS member, Paul Heywood Co-CEO at IPinfo, and the team, will be there and they want to work through your IP data challenges with you in person.
Fraud, risk, payments, workflow problems. Bring whatever you’re stuck on. They’ll be at Booth 16106 all four days, sitting down with FinTech teams for real working sessions not pitches.
An Unexpected Data Read For Today.
Ransomware attackers used to threaten your data. Now they’re threatening your family.
A new global study of 1,200 organizations found that 37% of ransomware attacks now include psychological or physical threats attackers sending executives pictures of their children’s schools, their home addresses, and personal details scraped from social media. A quarter of victims were doxxed. Another quarter needed psychological or medical treatment afterward.
The data was the entry point. But the leverage is personal.
Where Data Meets Art
At Frieze London this week, a sculpture is emitting audio.
Ella Fleck’s training material shown at Frieze London’s Focus section, opening today in Regent’s Park features directional sound streams of men reading OnlyFans chat scripts. The work investigates how heterosexual male fantasy is produced, packaged, and consumed as content and how that content becomes training data for AI systems learning human desire.
The title isn’t accidental. Training material asks what gets fed into systems that learn to understand us and who profits from generating it.
Frieze London runs October 14–18 in Regent’s Park, London.
🔥 In Case You Missed It…
M&A Funding Roundup
LSEG is in talks to acquire Octus for ~$3.5B to expand its credit intelligence data and analytics platform.
Source launched as the parent of Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare, Honeygain and ScrapingBee at a $3.6B valuation to build web data infrastructure for AI.
Labelbox raised $100M+ Series E to scale its AI data labeling platform trusted by over 90% of leading US AI labs.
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Till next time,
The World of DaaS Team.
