#ai-agents

#ai-agents

AI agents are accelerating how work gets done. They schedule meetings, access data, trigger workflows, write code, and take action in real time, pushing productivity beyond human speed across the enterprise. Then comes the moment every security team eventually hits: "Wait... who approved this?" Unlike users or applications, AI agents are often deployed quickly, shared broadly, and granted wide access permissions, making ownership, approval, and accountability difficult to trace. What was once a straightforward question is now surprisingly hard to answer.

We are building the first vertically integrated full-service platform for legal. We allow the end-to-end completion of legal requests with the help of AI agents and experts in the loop. Lawyers are trapped in the time-for-money model. Their expertise is sold by the hour. Lawyers are selling their most valuable asset, their intellect, in finite blocks of time, effectively capping their potential. nu:legal breaks this ceiling by allowing professionals to transform their knowledge into scalable, agentic services.

Founded by experienced entrepreneurs who've built and scaled products before, we move fast and focus on impact over hype. The Role We're looking for a working student to join us as a UI/UX Designer. You'll work directly with the founders on our product-shaping how users interact with our chatbot and AI agents. This means designing novel user flows for interactions that don't have established playbooks yet. You'll have real ownership, high expectations, and see your work in production.

Published on Wednesday and based on a survey of over 3,200 business leaders across 24 countries, the study found that 23% of companies are currently using AI agents "at least moderately," but that this figure is projected to jump to 74% in the next two years. In contrast, the portion of companies that report not using them at all, currently 25%, is expected to shrink to just 5%.

Although news reports (and dinner table conversations) commonly focus on harmful uses of GenAI tool and dystopian perils of artificial general intelligence ( AGI) (AI that thinks like, or better than, a human), the deployment of AI agents, and more broadly agentic AI systems, is a paradigm shift that is happening now as the technology becomes increasingly accessible and reliable.

AI is disrupting more than the software industry, and is doing so at a breakneck speed. Not long ago, designers were deep in Figma variables and pixel-perfect mockups. Now, tools like v0, Lovable, and Cursor are enabling instant, vibe-based prototyping that makes old methods feel almost quaint. What's coming into sharper focus isn't fidelity, it's foresight. Part of the work of Product Design today is conceptual: sensing trends, building future-proof systems, and thinking years ahead.

Software engineering didn't adopt AI agents faster because engineers are more adventurous, or the use case was better. They adopted them more quickly because they already had Git. Long before AI arrived, software development had normalized version control, branching, structured approvals, reproducibility, and diff-based accountability. These weren't conveniences. They were the infrastructure that made collaboration possible. When AI agents appeared, they fit naturally into a discipline that already knew how to absorb change without losing control.

A year-and-a-half ago, management consulting firm McKinsey had just 3,000 AI agents in its possession, with its 40,000 employees far outnumbering its agentic fleet. But in just 18 months, that number has grown more than 500% to about 20,000 AI agents supporting the company's work, CEO Bob Sternfels said on Harvard Business Review's Ideacast. Now, the company is evaluating how well job candidates can work with its AI tool as part of the interview process.

I attended the convention, held in New York City from January 11 to 13, for the first time tohear from industry insiders about the retail trends to watch in 2026. This year's event drew speakers such as Walmart's incoming CEO John Furner and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who announced a new AI deal this week, as well as Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin. It was clear that artificial intelligence was the big topic on the minds of the attendees from over 5,000 brands at the event.

The soaring valuations of AI companies aren't just a bet on better software. They're a wager on who will control human labor in the future, according to Roman Yampolskiy, a University of Louisville computer science professor who was one of the first academics to warn about AI's risks. As artificial intelligence moves from tools to increasingly autonomous agents, Yampolskiy said markets are pricing in a radical shift: machines providing "free labor" at scale.

Update January 9, 2026: Although the acquisition amount has not been disclosed, we do know that Snowflake has purchased the ITOM platform Observe. Before the deal was finalized, Snowflake had already considered adopting Observe, the company told The Register. Now, the company can not only offer observability functionality to customers, but also apply it itself. However, the emphasis is on preventing downtime and the loss of important data for users of the Snowflake platform.

The 29-year-old told Business Insider that he waited over an hour on the phone to book an appointment with an orthopedist, and then two weeks for insurance to approve his MRI scheduling. Frustrated with the pace of the healthcare system, Seelamsetty cofounded the AI agents startup Tivara with Aumesh Misra. The company promises to answer patient phone calls, handle scheduling and refills - and cut down the hours of grunt work that comes with a medical visit.

In organizations with mature processes, this demonstrably leads to a 30 to 50 percent reduction in mean time to respond. This is not an optimization, but a necessary adjustment. The question is no longer whether AI agents will be deployed, but how far their autonomy extends. Security teams must explicitly determine which decisions can be automated and where human oversight remains mandatory. If these frameworks are lacking, the risks only increase.

In practice, Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, the world's largest community of business-to-business founders, said on Lenny's Podcast recently that this means he will stop hiring humans in his sales department. Instead, SaaStr is going all in on agents, which are commonly defined as virtual assistants that can complete tasks autonomously. They break down problems, outline plans, and take action without being prompted by a user.

A lot of mega-cap tech titans are ending off 2025 on a high note with big acquisitions. Meta Platforms ( NASDAQ:META) joined in the year-end deal-making spree by buying up AI agent startup Manus in a deal reportedly worth over $2 billion. Undoubtedly, Manus is an incredible technology that's already gained quite the following, with around $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

As AI agents become embedded collaborators in our systems, designers face a powerful and pressing question: Who are we designing for now? Suddenly, we find ourselves in the middle of a new Experience dilemma: designing for both people and programs. That means exploring new personas and reconciling different approaches: emotional intuition, logical execution, and the coherence of both. Let's have a look at the pitfalls of this dilemma and explore what we have to consider while designing for both humans and machines.

"This is not just risky; it's unsustainable," he writes. "By 2026, the demand for robust frameworks and private environments to ensure stability and control will be undeniable. Running models locally-on-premises or in controlled AI factories-will become the norm to provide a stable foundation and insulate organizations from external disruptions. But this is more than a prediction. It's an urgent appeal."

Manus debuted in March 2025 and immediately pitched itself as a leap beyond generative AI chatbots, which it characterizes as best suited to summarizing information and answering questions. The outfit promotes its own services as enabling "wide research and context-aware reasoning to produce actionable results in the format you need." To illustrate that promise, Manus offers a scenario in which users ask its tech to select the best candidate for an job by evaluating job applications stored in a .ZIP file.

Every executive I speak with wants to deploy AI agents in their business. Yet most are making the same costly mistake: choosing the wrong tasks to automate. In my previous article, A Beginner's Guide To Building AI Agents, I explained how to get started with agentic AI. Now it's time to tackle the most critical step: finding the right jobs to use them for. Get this wrong, and you'll waste time and money. Get it right, and you'll transform how your business operates.

Amazon ( NASDAQ:AMZN) has been a quiet laggard in the Magnificent Seven this year after gaining just over 3% year to date. With just a few trading days left in the year, it's looking like the $2.45 trillion e-commerce juggernaut is about to disappoint yet again, despite all the encouraging AI projects going on behind the scenes, from "frontier" AI agents to those impressive Trainium3 AI chips, the rollout of Alexa+, and let's not forget about the warehouse robots.

In late 2025, Mark Karpelès, ex CEO of Mt. Gox, lives a quieter life in Japan, building a VPN and an AI automation platform. As Chief Protocol Officer at vp.net-a VPN that uses Intel's SGX technology to let users verify exactly what code runs on servers-he works alongside Roger Ver and Andrew Lee, the founder of Private Internet Access. "It's the only VPN that you can trust basically. You don't need to trust it, actually, you can verify".

David Cohen, Chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), has climbed onto the dangerous prediction limb, with his 2026 Predictions, oppulently titled Search Takes a Backseat as Brands Battle Inside AI's Black Box. AI seems to be top-of-mind, as four of the predictions (including the top three) focus on artificial intelligence. We will spill those top three below, but leaving out the editorial content which accompanies each of his forecasts: