#ai-agents

#ai-agents

Once upon a time, when you ran Windows on your desktop, it was your desktop. Oh, the IT department might have called the shots on how much you could do with it, but you could write what you needed to, and it was all kept nicely on your PC or your choice of network drive. Those days are long gone.

So what, exactly, is the DoorDash problem? Briefly, it's what happens when an AI interface gets between a service provider, like DoorDash, and you, who might send an AI to go order a sandwich from the internet instead of using apps and websites yourself. That would mean things like user reviews, ads, loyalty programs, upsells, and partnerships would all go away - AI agents don't care about those things, after all, and DoorDash would just become a commodity provider of sandwiches and lose out on all additional kinds of money you can make when real people open your app or visit your website.

Microsoft Entra Agent ID has been released in an extensive form in public preview. This gives organizations a "complete inventory of their agent fleet," according to Microsoft. Thanks to an agent registry, AI agents appear in exactly the same interface as human users. This makes it immediately clear what permissions an agent has and whether it is consulting the resources that are to be expected. Built-in lifecycle management prevents agents from wandering around and potentially being used by malicious parties.

Microsoft unveiled a new series of services to address some longstanding problems with managing data centers at its annual Ignite conference, Tuesday. The company, which well understands these problems because it runs some of the world's largest data centers, has a new multi-tiered solution that may give all of us IT folks a little peace. Enterprise data centers are huge, complex operations. Enterprise networks alone consist of a bouillabaisse of distributed services, third-party APIs, proprietary and open source cloud services, and local services. All of these face constant large and small updates, along with constant integrations with new capabilities (or re-integrations because someone changed their API). It never stops.

The system combines an ontology model, semantic models, and AI agents to convert business data into real-time decision-making. According to Microsoft, organizations are drowning in data without understanding the semantics. For example, an airline does not think in terms of tables and schedules, but in terms of flights, passengers, and delays. However, that meaning lives in people's minds. Teams use their own definitions and reports. AI systems can read data, but they lack the business context to make reliable decisions.

One of the key components of Antigravity is how it reports on its own work. As it completes tasks, it will produce what Google calls Artifacts: task lists, plans, screenshots, and browser recordings that are intended to verify both the work it's done and what it will do. Antigravity will also report on its actions and external tool use along the way, but Google says that Artifacts are "easier for users to verify" than full lists of a models' actions and tool calls.

Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Informatica. The CRM provider paid more than $8 billion (€6.9 billion) for the data management company. The acquisition is intended to lay the foundation for reliable AI agents within the Salesforce ecosystem. The completion brings Informatica's data catalog, integration tools, and governance services to the Salesforce platform. CEO Marc Benioff emphasizes the importance of this step: "You have to get your data right to get your AI right. Data and context is the true fuel of Agentforce."

In a fascinating experiment, journalist Evan Ratliff populated his own fictional tech startup that he called HurumoAI - complete with its own jargon-splattered website - exclusively with AI agents to see what would happen. Ratliff, as the only human involved, was the one calling the shots. The rest was taken care of by AI - the ultimate test of the " one-person billion-dollar company " that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted earlier this year.

2025 has undeniably been the year of AI agents. Coming into the year, it was nearly impossible to tune into any conversation in the tech ecosystem without hearing the agent buzzword thrown around. In an attempt to gain my own understanding of this new space, I started reading up on AI, machine learning, and agents. This led me to Mastra, an open-source framework for building AI agents. The best part was that it's built in my go-to language, TypeScript.

One day a couple months ago, in the middle of lunch, I glanced at my phone and was puzzled to see my colleague Ash Roy calling. In and of itself it might not have seemed strange to get a call from Ash: He's the CTO and chief product officer of HurumoAI, a startup I cofounded last summer. We were in the middle of a big push to get our software product, an AI agent application, into beta.

King worked with engineers at PwC and OpenAI to customize teams of autonomous AI systems, called agents, for Fortune 500 companies. Normally, multinational companies contract thousands of people to modernize their backend software. Home Depot, for example, might enlist an army of consultants to update inventory or its SAP accounts-payable processes. Recently, though, AI agents have gotten pretty good at that kind of work.

Amazon is following the same playbook Google and Meta have refined for years: automate more of the planning and buying that agencies once handled. But this isn't an overt bid to push them aside. It's to capture the long tail - the thousands of advertisers who were never going to hire a shop in the first place. That's the way Amazon ad execs are pitching a major overhaul to the way its ads business works this week: the DSP and Sponsored Ads console are being unified into a single Campaign Manager.

Israeli AI agent startup Wonderful has raised $100 million in a Series A round led by Index Ventures, with participation from Insight Partners, IVP, Bessemer, and Vine Ventures. The large round, in a market already crowded with AI agent startups, suggests Wonderful has convinced top tier investors it's not just another GPT wrapper, but a company building the infrastructure and orchestration that could scale if multi-agent systems take off.

The US insurance industry faces a compounding crisis: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects nearly 400,000 workers will leave through attrition by 2026, while claim volumes continue rising and operational complexity deepens. This staffing shortage hits third-party administrators particularly hard, as TPAs depend entirely on adjuster capacity to process claims, coordinate repairs, and manage the full lifecycle from intake to resolution.

Retail's AI-driven digital transformation is well underway. In 2026, more than ever, customers are looking to technology for smoother, hassle-free shopping experiences, while businesses harness it to drive efficiency and hone their competitive edge. At the same time, the barriers between physical retail and e-commerce are blurring, and shifts in the way algorithms put products in front of us are shaking up the industry.

"There is really a question about how the world is going to change by having these agents collaborating and talking to each other and negotiating," said Kamar. "We want to understand these things deeply."

Amazon sued a prominent artificial intelligence startup on Tuesday over a shopping feature in the company's browser, which can automate placing orders for users. Amazon accused Perplexity AI of covertly accessing customer accounts and disguising AI activity as human browsing. Perplexity's misconduct must end, Amazon's lawyers wrote. Perplexity is not allowed to go where it has been expressly told it cannot; that Perplexity's trespass involves code rather than a lockpick makes it no less unlawful.

AI companies know that children are the future - of their business model. The industry doesn't hide their attempts to hook the youth on their products through well-timed promotional offers, discounts, and referral programs. "Here to help you through finals," OpenAI said during a giveaway of ChatGPT Plus to college students. Students get free yearlong access to Google's and Perplexity's pricey AI products. Perplexity even pays referrers $20 for each US student that it gets to download its AI browser Comet.

Mbodi wants to make training robots easier and quicker with the help of AI agents. The company will be showcasing this tech as one of the Top 20 Startup Battlefield finalists at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. New York-based Mbodi built a cloud-to-edge system, a hybrid computing system using both cloud and local compute, that is designed to integrate into existing robotic tech stacks. The software relies on a multitude of AI agents that communicate with each other to gather the needed information to help a robot learn a task faster.

The third shift is in the way that AI is reshaping developer choice, not just code. In the past, developer choice referred to choosing an IDE, language, or framework. In the present timeframe, that has changed. GitHub now sees a correlation between the rapid adoption of AI tools and evolving language preferences. This and other shifts suggest AI now influences not only how fast code is written, but which languages and tools developers use.

When AI is a bubble, and talking about AI being a bubble is a bubble ... what do you do? Right, you start talking about AI agents. And AI... agentic... what does it matter? Once you put out a new message, you quickly find a small group of people most likely to respond. You harvest that group fast, performance drops, you change the message, find a new cohort, repeat.

Imagine an always-on learning partner that knows what you don't, nudges you at just the right moment, and turns busy work into bite-sized growth. That's the promise of learning co-pilots-intelligent AI agents embedded into daily workflows to guide, teach, and coach employees at scale. Not a replacement for instructors or mentors, these co-pilots augment human capability: they make learning contextual, timely, and measurable.