#AI agents

#AI agents

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.

That work started about a year ago when Lamaa and his team began pulling together and standardizing its data sources into a single customer data platform. It's no small task for a company that sits on everything from subscription and audience data to e-commerce signals. Think of it as building the brain that will eventually power Immediate Media's wider AI ambitions.

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.

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.

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.

Microsoft announced in August 2025 that support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is generally available in Visual Studio. MCP enables AI agents within Visual Studio to connect to external tools and services via a consistent protocol. The announcement notes that Visual Studio now provides new means to configure and manage MCP servers. MCP, introduced by Anthropic in 2024, is an open standard that simplifies interactions between AI‑enabled development workflows and external systems such as databases, code search engines and deployment pipelines.

"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.

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.

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.

It's the fastest growing product in our history,

A research team from Stanford University has released Paper2Agent, a framework that automatically converts scientific papers into interactive AI agents. The system, introduced in a recent paper, aims to make research methods more accessible by transforming traditional publications into dynamic entities that can execute analyses, reproduce results, and respond to new scientific queries through natural language interaction. Paper2Agent builds on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that allows large language models to connect with external tools and datasets.

That's where Knapsack comes in. It's a collaboration platform specifically designed for enterprises that need to resolve misunderstandings between UI designers, product managers, and engineers. Knapsack creates a unified workspace that connects with tools like Figma and Git, ensuring that any design changes are automatically updated in the code and documentation. This approach makes sure that everything remains up to date, so branding stays consistent across all digital products.

Slack believes it has a gold mine of data. According to the company, the conversation data between employees is said gold needed to feed AI with the right context. That data is now available within Agentforce, but also to third parties. In recent years, there has been a race to build the best LLMs and have sufficient computing power to enable AI. The latter has been achieved, and now it is time to collect the right data and context and feed it to AI agents.