AI product management · Industry brief

AI M&A activity is accelerating with unconventional deal structures replacing traditional financial metrics. According to Peter Werner, chair of Cooley LLP's global business department, buyers are conducting rapid acquisitions based on talent quality and technology potential rather than earnings data, using earnouts tied to talent retention and technology integration to manage risk. The firm has advised on major AI transactions including Confluent's $11 billion IBM acquisition, io Products' $6.5 billion OpenAI acquisition, and Anthropic's $30 billion Series G financing. To sidestep regulatory scrutiny, tech giants are increasingly using licensing agreements coupled with talent transfers instead of equity purchases—such as Nvidia's licensing of Gorq's inference-chip technology, Google's $2.4 billion Windsurf technology license, and Google DeepMind's Contextual AI licensing deal. Werner cautioned that regulators may challenge these structures as de facto acquisitions if they are transformational, noting the Trump administration has lightened antitrust scrutiny but regulators remain actively engaged in AI model oversight. (Source: Bloomberg Law)

OpenAI launched DeployCo, a dedicated services firm staffed with forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) who embed directly inside enterprise clients, alongside a $150 million partner program to address the enterprise AI adoption bottleneck. Rather than model access, the constraint is deployment expertise—companies can access powerful models but struggle to integrate them into existing workflows. DeployCo acquired AI consulting firm Tomoro (150 engineers) and applied AI firm Northslope to scale its FDE headcount; BBVA, a founding partner, demonstrated proof of concept when an embedded OpenAI engineer helped build a credit risk analysis application using AI agents faster than the bank's internal team could achieve. The dual strategy reflects OpenAI's need for consistent enterprise revenue growth amid infrastructure spending commitments and competition from Anthropic and open-source alternatives, with the partner program extending the FDE methodology to accounts OpenAI cannot directly staff. Sources: Wall Street Journal reporting by Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin, CIO Journal coverage.

Block has refreshed Square's cards and business payments technology amid significant industry consolidation, including Stripe's reported negotiations to acquire PayPal (with Block potentially investing $17 billion in equity alongside Stripe and Advent) and Stripe's $7 billion deal to acquire AI firm OpenRouter. Square upgraded its Square Credit Card to enable vendor payments through Square Bill Pay with ACH and check options, while adjusting incentives to 3% cash back on bill pay transactions. The moves align with Block's broader strategy to integrate payments, banking, credit and bill management into one platform, particularly as merchants increasingly adopt large language models for agentic commerce—a capability that could be enhanced by Stripe's acquisition of OpenRouter, which enables developers to research and switch between LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic. According to payments consultant Richard Crone, businesses are becoming more loyal to their LLM providers than payment processors, making AI infrastructure increasingly central to merchant relationships.