Truell said the company had already automated roughly 80% of its customer support tickets with the help of the technology. He said the company had also implemented an internal AI-powered communication system that allows employees to query information across the organization. “We’ve actually done a lot of work internally on customizing that setup,” he said.

Cursor also uses AI for internal communications, he said. “We have a system where folks can ask any question about the company and get it answered by an AI,” Truell said, as well as an project with “a few forward deployed engineers internally embedded throughout, building custom tooling right now for operations, for sales and experimenting,” he said. 

Across the enterprise software landscape, some larger organizations are increasingly coming up against adoption challenges when attempting to integrate AI into workflows. 

Data silos—where information is trapped in disconnected systems—prevent AI tools from accessing the full context they need to be useful, and technical sprawl—the accumulation of disparate tools and platforms over years of growth— can create integration issues. Many organizations are finding they need more dedicated technical expertise to help tailor AI models to specific business needs.

Engineers are seeing productivity gains

Cursor, which is valued at $29.3 billion, said last month it had crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue and now has more than 300 employees. The company has seen rapid growth since it was founded by a team of four MIT graduates in 2022. The company’s AI coding tool, which first launched in 2023, has been popular with software who use it to help both generate and edit code. 

There has been some conflicting research about how helpful AI tools actually are for software engineering. A July 2025 study by the nonprofit research group METR found that experienced developers working on large, mature codebases actually took 19% longer to complete tasks when using AI tools such as Cursor and Claude, despite believing they had worked 20% faster. The researchers attributed the slowdown to time spent prompting AI, waiting for responses, and time reviewing generated code.

A recent study conducted by University of Chicago found that teams using Cursor’s AI coding assistant in large companies merged 39% more pull requests (PRs) compared to non-users. The research also showed that senior developers created more detailed plans before writing code and demonstrated greater skill working with AI agents.

“A lot of folks think that junior developers get the most out of AI,” Truell said. But “when these academics went in and looked at the data, it looked like senior engineers actually were more effective in using the tools and were accepting code at higher rates and were getting more value from that.”

Truell noted that this surprised him as well: “We want to dig into to understand exactly why that’s the case.”

Glean, last valued at $7.2 billion, has hit $200 million in annual recurring revenue, CEO Arvind Jain revealed at Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco. 

“Today’s move was entirely expected,” Co-CEO Ted Sarandos told investors at a UBS conference, brushing off Paramount’s bid just hours earlier. “We have a deal done, and we are incredibly happy with the deal. We think it’s great for our shareholders. It’s great for consumers. We think it’s a great way to create and protect jobs in the entertainment industry.” From Netflix’s perspective, Sarandos added, “We have a deal done, and we’re incredibly happy with the deal.”

Sarandos’s co-CEO, Greg Peters, then walked the audience through Netflix’s three-phase plan to wring value from Warner Bros. and HBO. If the deal goes through, he said, Netflix would turbocharge licensing opportunities, “double down” on the HBO brand, and unlock upsides from Warner Bros’ vast library of IP, which many analysts consider a “crown jewel” in the industry. 

The executives’ comments came after investors sent Netflix stock tumbling down 6% in the two trading sessions since its Warner deal was announced, with some analysts blasting the $82.7 billion deal as “exorbitant” and “very risky.” Netflix stock is down more than 20% over the last six months.

Peters acknowledged that Netflix is known as a builder, not a buyer—generally developing its own intellectual property, rather than purchasing other companies’: “We haven’t done this before,” he said. But the company that started out lending DVDs by mail has pivoted several times to become the more than $400-billion behemoth now challenging Hollywood’s order.

And it’s worth noting that Netflix began streaming other companies’ content before it began producing its own programming. Its licensing operations are still vaunted in the industry, with the famous example of the legal drama Suits becoming a smash hit several years after it stopped airing on cable TV. As Peter put it: “Essentially, we are constantly in the business of evaluating various different licensing opportunities for titles and then trying to figure out, how do we maximize the value of that asset on our platform?” The Warner deal will just make official what Netflix already does, day in and day out.”

Netflix’s deal announcement on Friday rattled many in Hollywood, including creators and their unions, and movie theater owners, whose trade organization called it an “unprecedented threat” to their business. 

Sarandos, the executive behind the model that made “Netflix and chill” a byword for the millennial dating practice of and binging shows and movies at home, has largely refused to release movies in theaters, except to qualify for awards. At an event earlier this year, Sarandos dismissed going to the movies as “an outmoded idea for most people” and said Netflix was “saving Hollywood” with its stream-at-home model.

But on Monday he extended an olive branch to theater owners, saying of theatrical releases “We didn’t buy this company to destroy that value.” “What we are going to do with this is we’re deeply committed to releasing those movies exactly the way they’ve released those movies today,” he said at the UBS conference. “When this deal closes, we are in that business, and we’re going to do it.” 

Sarandos also discussed his conversations with President Donald Trump—which Bloomberg reported over the weekend began in November. 

President Trump “cares deeply about American industry, and he loves the entertainment industry,” Sarandos said. Jobs were the president’s main concern, according to Sarandos, who reeled off statistics showing that Netflix original productions employed 140,000 people between 2020 and 2024, contributing $125 billion to the U.S. economy. “We are producing in all 50 states,” he said. “We’ve used 500 independent production companies to make content for us, about roughly 1,000 original projects.” 

Sarandos and Peters pointed out that Paramount’s offer might entail more job cuts, because Paramount and Warner have more overlap in their operations than Netflix and Warner. “In the offer that Paramount was talking about today, they also were talking about $6 billion of synergies,” said Sarandos. “Where do you think synergies come from? Cutting jobs. Yeah, so we’re not cutting jobs, we’re making jobs.”

Sarandos also discussed HBO, the premium cable channel turned streamer—Netflix’s former rival and inspiration. Sarandos has famously said of Netflix that “the goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us,” comments he later modified to add he wants “CBS and BBC” too. Now that his company is set to become HBO’s parent, he said it can realize its true destiny as the leading light of prestige TV. 

“They’ve been doing gymnastics to make themselves into a general entertainment brand,” Sarandos said of HBO in the HBO Max era overseen by WBD CEO David Zaslav. “Under this transaction, they don’t have to do that anymore.” 

Both Netflix co-CEOs also hammered a message clearly aimed at regulators who might take anti-trust action to halt the deal: The combined company would hardly dominate TV. The Netflix deal spins off CNN, TNT, Discovery, HGTV, the Food Network and the company’s other cable channels, while the Paramount offer keeps the cable assets attached. Using Nielsen viewership data that appeared to include linear TV as well as streaming, Peters said Netflix commands just 8% of U.S. TV hours; adding HBO would raise that to 9%.

“We’d still be behind YouTube,” he noted. “And we’d still be behind a combined Paramount–WBD at 14%.”

BofA Research’s Media & Entertainment team used a different metric—total TV streaming—from Nielsen data to calculate that Warner and Netflix combined would be about 21% of the market, whereas Paramount and Netflix would be 8%. Both would still come in behind YouTube at 28%, however. 

Trump weighed in on Sunday about his relationship with Sarandos and the pending antitrust question. Saying the Netflix co-CEO is a “fantastic person,” Trump added that the Warner-Netflix market share “could be a problem.” At any rate, Trump added, uncharacteristically for a sitting president, he would be involved in what happens next.

Sarandos finished the UBS panel by reiterating to everyone listening and watching, many of whom have been long-term holders of Netflix stock, that he was “excited” about the deal. (The question of whether Netflix would sweeten its bid for WBD wasn’t raised.)

“We think this deal with Warner Brothers is good for shareholders,” he said. “We think it’s good for consumers. We think it’s good for creators. We think it’s great for the entertainment industry as a whole.”

[Editor’s note: one of the authors worked at Netflix from June 2024 through July 2025.]