#AI agents

#AI agents

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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".

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.