Stripe demanded integration. None of these worked for a world where software talks to software at millisecond intervals. Then came x402. The protocol embeds payments directly into HTTP, allowing any API call to include a payment. No checkout flows. No account creation. No human in the loop. Just a request, a 402 response with a price quote, and a cryptographic payment proof attached to the retry.
Last week, Google DeepMind made the Interactions API available as a public beta. The new API represents a fundamental change in how developers work with AI models: from stateless to a stateful architecture with server-side context management. With this move, Google is following the path that OpenAI embarked on in March 2025 with its Responses API. Over the past two years, developers have been working with generative AI via a so-called 'completion' model.
Microsoft has begun rolling out a public preview of native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in the latest Windows 11 Insider builds, edging its much-touted "agentic OS" vision closer to reality. The update is rolling out to Windows Insiders on the Dev and Beta channels as part of build 26220.7344 and provides insight into where Microsoft is going with the technology.
November was the month AI went full gladiator mode: three frontier labs released their best models within a week, Google reclaimed the throne with Gemini 3, and open source proved it can win Olympic gold medals in mathematics. Meanwhile, the agent revolution became official doctrine at Microsoft and Google, and China's AI ecosystem hit escape velocity with 10 million app downloads in seven days.
Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff crowed to investors on Wednesday that the company's Agentforce IT Service, which debuted in October, was already winning customers and saving them money. He singled out PenFed, one of the nation's largest credit unions, as one of the early users and claimed PenFed is projecting a 30 percent cut in operating costs, and $2 million in savings.
Agentic AI is all the buzz in the business world as people envision creating and using special AI agents to carry out both routine and complex tasks on their behalf. Now, Google is launching a new product for Workspace users who want to see if they can benefit from such agents.
C loud computing has now entered its mature adolescence i.e. it's still surprisingly developmental, changeable and occasionally irrational in some areas, but overall it's certainly old enough to know better and should really start behaving properly. With the debate between public and private cloud now long over and the hybrid norm now (mostly) a de facto standard for typical deployments, multi-cloud itself is still an oft misunderstood state of being, with FinOps constantly berating us for waste and inefficiency.
Conversations Inbox - Keeps customer communication organized across email, chat, and social channels. Small business owners can now respond faster, prioritize conversations and stay on top of every customer interaction - all in one place. Marketing Calendar and Social Posts Agents - Helps small businesses plan and launch marketing campaigns and create social posts, videos, and blog content for channels like Facebook, Instagram and more, driving engagement and saving countless hours each week.
In this comprehensive interview at SAP Connect in Las Vegas, Stephan de Barse, President of Global Business Suite at SAP, makes the case for why best-of-breed enterprise software is being replaced by best-of-suite approaches, driven by the commoditization of the application layer through AI. De Barse, who previously spent seven years at o9 Solutions, a best-of-breed supply chain vendor, brings a unique perspective to the debate.
After The New York Times story was published, Guss, Ozair, and about three dozen other people updated their LinkedIn profiles to list their affiliation with the Bezos venture. Several of those people also work at Foresite Labs. Details about Prometheus remain limited. Its founding date, formal name, and headquarters haven't been publicly identified. But the dinner Bajaj hosted in June provided other clues.
Buried in that tidal wave was news of something called Entra Agent ID, the main idea of which is to use Microsoft Entra to govern AI agents in the same way that Entra currently governs human users; that is, to give each agent a unique, managed identity and apply familiar Entra identity controls such as conditional access, identity governance, and identity protection. Entra is Microsoft's cloud-based identity access management (IAM) solution.
Snowflake has signed an agreement to acquire Select Star. This company's technology will expand Snowflake Horizon Catalog by integrating with databases, BI tools, and data pipelines. This will increase the context for AI agents such as Snowflake Intelligence. The full context of data assets is often scattered across upstream and downstream systems. This fragmentation makes it difficult to find the right data and understand the full context. In the AI era, this limited context poses a problem for both humans and 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.