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.
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.
A Spooky Good Discount for the Final 100 ODSC AI West Passes Join the world's leading AI training conference in San Francisco & online, Oct 2830, and learn from experts at OpenAI, LangChain, DeepMind, Stanford, and more. Get the deal here and join us next week! Context Engineering for Agentic Applications In this article, you'll see how context transforms ordinary models into persistent, autonomous collaborators and why mastering it will be the defining skill for AI engineers in 2025 and beyond.
From crafting replies that sound just like you to handling high volumes of DMs, comments, and mentions, the Jotform Instagram Agent promises to save time while strengthening your connection with your audience. Curious how it adapts to your unique communication style or integrates with platforms beyond Instagram? Let's uncover how this AI redefines what it means to stay engaged in the digital age. Sometimes, the best way to be present is to let technology amplify your voice.
"AI represents a rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be," OpenAI's CEO said yesterday when announcing the company's latest product: ChatGPT Atlas. In this new AI-powered browser, ChatGPT becomes the central mechanism for surfing the internet. From any webpage in Atlas, you can click an "Ask ChatGPT" button to open a side conversation with the chatbot. Want cooking inspiration? Atlas can pull from recipes you've recently viewed through its "browser memories" feature.
McKinsey recently surveyed 233 senior global marketing and technology leaders who each invest more than $500,000 annually in martech and adtech tools and services. As part of the study, published on Tuesday, the consultancy conducted in-depth interviews with 50 senior Fortune 500 marketers. There was a clear trend: Not one could clearly articulate how they were quantifying the return on investment of that spending, McKinsey said.
LangChain raised $125 million at a $1.25 billion valuation, the company announced on Monday. TechCrunch reported in July that the provider of a popular open source framework for building AI agents was raising fresh funds at a valuation of at least $1 billion. The deal was led by IVP, as we previously reported. New investors CapitalG and Sapphire Ventures joined in, as did existing investors Sequoia, Benchmark, and Amplify.
"They just don't work. They don't have enough intelligence, they're not multimodal enough, they can't do computer use and all this stuff," he said. "They don't have continual learning. You can't just tell them something and they'll remember it. They're cognitively lacking and it's just not working."
The American dream is "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" but, in practice, it has always been about ownership. Sadly, the dream of ownership is slowly slipping away for many people. Harvard University's 2025 Youth Poll found that three-quarters say they want to own a home, but barely half think they ever will. Ownership feels increasingly out of reach.
A vertical agent is more than a chatbot. It's a core part of the martech stack, built with autonomy, context and memory to drive business goals. Vertical agents are powered by the LLM of choice but are trained on a company's catalogs, knowledge base, policies, and brand tone - all centralized in a unified data source. They: Embody the roles a brand requires (i.e., sales, support, etc.). Understand industry language. Adapt across multiple languages. Deliver credible responses.
Problem: If your pricing is tied to human users, but AI is doing the work, you're leaving money on the table (or worse, annoying customers with irrelevant seat counts). Reality: Customers don't care about seats. They care about results. Manny's take: "Don't sell software. Own outcomes." If your product helps a customer resolve 1,000 support tickets a month, why charge for seats? Charge for resolved tickets.
Around the middle of last year, Pim de Witte started reaching out to a handful of prominent AI labs to see if they'd be interested in using data from Medal, his popular video game clipping platform, to train their agents. Within weeks, it became clear that Medal's data was more valuable to the labs than he expected. "We received multiple acquisition offers very quickly," he told me.
Regarding AI agents, the survey found ambition was outpacing readiness. Overall, 83% of organisations planned to deploy AI agents, and nearly 40% expected them to work alongside employees within a year. But the study discovered that, for majority of these companies, AI agents were exposing weak foundations - that is, systems that can barely handle reactive, task-based AI, let alone AI systems that act autonomously and learn continuously.
