#AI agents

#AI agents

For years, the cost of using "free" services from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other Big Tech firms has been handing over your data. Uploading your life into the cloud and using free tech brings conveniences, but it puts personal information in the hands of giant corporations that will often be looking to monetize it. Now, the next wave of generative AI systems are likely to want more access to your data than ever before.

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.

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.