#agentic-ai

#agentic-ai

AI reveals a hidden, outdated assumption: that humans will continue to serve as the "digital glue," manually connecting disparate systems, teams, and decisions. For decades, enterprise software perpetuated a model of sequential handoffs, in which people managed data entry, reconciled conflicts, chased approvals via email, and updated spreadsheets. This structure was manageable when uncertainty was low and delayed decisions were affordable.

Researchers have discovered that a compromised npm publish token pushed an update for the widely-used Cline command line interface (CLI) containing a malicious postinstall script. That script installs the wildly popular, but increasingly condemned, agentic application OpenClaw on the unsuspecting user's machine. This can be extremely dangerous, as OpenClaw has broad system access and deep integrations with messaging platforms including WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, iMessage, Teams, and others.

AI agents need skills - specific procedural knowledge - to perform tasks well, but they can't teach themselves, a new research suggests. The authors of the research have developed a new benchmark, SkillsBench, which evaluates agentic AI performance on 84 tasks across 11 domains including healthcare, manufacturing, cybersecurity and software engineering. The researchers looked at each task under three conditions:

AI models break down words and other inputs into numerical tokens to make them easier to process and understand. One token is about ¾ of a word. OpenRouter, which helps developers access different AI models, has seen activity roughly double in the first weeks of 2026. This is measured by the number of AI tokens OpenRouter processes. OpenRouter handled 13 trillion AI tokens in the week that ended February 9. That's up from 6.4 trillion during the first week of January.

Indian IT professionals worried about 72-hour workweeks might soon face the opposite concern, as Bengaluru-based outsourcing giant Infosys has partnered with Anthropic to bring agentic AI to telecommunications companies and other regulated industries. Anthropic and Infosys announced their collaboration plans on Tuesday, describing agentic AI as a core focus of their partnership. According to Infosys CEO Salil Parekh, the pair wants to combine their respective domain expertise to give businesses around the world a shot at actually getting some returns on their AI investments.

Rezolve AI ( NASDAQ:RZLV) haș faced quite the thrashing over the past few months. The AI agent platform's shares are down by more than 70% from all-time highs that came near the end of 2025. That also includes a 20% year-to-date drop, but the company's financials and long-term tailwinds make it a promising buy-the-dip candidate. The stock has a market cap below $1 billion, so there is a good opportunity for its valuation to surge if it continues to deliver excellent results.

The emergence of so-called "agentic AI," systems that can perform tasks independently and support decisions, plays a central role in this. Two-thirds of respondents believe that there is currently more hype surrounding agentic AI than previous technological developments. At the same time, three-quarters are still discovering how this technology can be used effectively. According to Basware CEO Jason Kurtz, the time for experimentation is over; executives expect concrete results.

The real change begins when AI stops assisting and starts acting. When systems resolve issues, trigger workflows, and make routine decisions without human involvement, the work itself changes. And when the work changes, the job has to change too. Let's take the example of an airline and lost luggage. Generative AI can explain what steps to take to recover a lost bag. Agentic AI aims to actually find the bag, reroute it, and deliver it.

Whether or not 2026 really is the big year of physical AI (I think it's likelier to be the year when agentic AI breaks out) and robotics, much hype surrounds recent comments made by the great Nvidia ( NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) CEO Jensen Huang, who believes his firm has achieved a "ChatGPT moment" with regards to physical AI.

According to the company, the Bevri POS is designed to complete the 1003 loan application, collect and validate income and asset documentation, run Desktop Underwriter and Loan Product Advisor findings for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and generate underwriting outcomes earlier in the process. The system also aims to reduce repetitive data entry through autonomous task execution. The company also said the platform continuously evaluates next steps in a loan file, resolving gaps and surfacing insights for loan officers.

Autonomy is an output of a technical system. Trustworthiness is an output of a design process. Here are concrete design patterns, operational frameworks, and organizational practices for building agentic systems that are not only powerful but also transparent, controllable, and trustworthy. In the first part of this series, we established the fundamental shift from generative to agentic artificial intelligence. We explored why this leap from suggesting to acting demands a new psychological and methodological toolkit for UX researchers, product managers, and leaders.

As we move deeper into the second half of the decade, businesses across every industry are recalibrating their digital strategies around artificial intelligence. Whether you're a startup founder, CTO, or part of an AI software development company, the accelerating pace of innovation is reshaping how systems are built, deployed, and maintained. 2026 is proving to be the most transformative year yet, with breakthroughs not only in model capabilities but also in the frameworks, ethics, infrastructure, and methodologies that support them.

With the slow death of the search bar, brands can no longer rely on SEO to help how they rank on a search results page, as every interaction, from discovery to purchase, is increasingly filtered through algorithms, making brand story a strategic asset. The shift reflects "a generational change" in consumer behavior, said John Harmon, senior retail and tech analyst at Coresight Research.

Leading the pack has been the rise in agentic coding tools. These tools, such as Gemini Jules, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex, are capable of writing entire programs and products. I put both Codex and Claude Code to the test, creating four plug-in add-on security products for WordPress using Codex, as well as a full-featured iPhone app using Claude Code.

Lema AI, a cybersecurity startup focused on agentic AI-powered third-party risk management, on Monday emerged from stealth mode with $24 million raised across Series A and seed funding rounds. Founded in 2023 by Eddie Dovzhik (CEO), Omer Yehudai (CPO), and Tomer Roizman (CTO), Lema AI has developed an enterprise supply chain security platform that replaces manual spreadsheets and questionnaires with continuous, AI-driven analysis of vendor behavior and risk exposure.

ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski says voice is becoming the next major interface for AI - the way people will increasingly interact with machines as models move beyond text and screens. Speaking at Web Summit in Doha, Staniszewski told TechCrunch voice models like those developed by ElevenLabs have recently moved beyond simply mimicking human speech - including emotion and intonation - to working in tandem with the reasoning capabilities of large language models.

If you've been programming for any number of years, you've pretty much lived through a bunch of hype cycles. Whether it's a new development environment, a new language, a new plugin, or some new online service with an oh-so-powerful time-saving API, it's all "revolutionary" and "world-changing," at least according to the PR reps hawking The Big New Thing. And then there's agentic AI coding. When a tool can help you do four years of product development in four days, the impact is world-changing.

As he explained, programmatic standards like the OpenRTB protocol have enabled computer programs to buy ads on behalf of humans. But the ad formats and inventory types purchased by those programmatic tools have been pretty simplistic, relatively speaking. By that I mean when compared to the complexity of a traditional TV ad buy, where the audience has to be forecasted ahead of time and there are all kinds of rules regarding which advertiser gets what ad slot in which program.

On Monday, Amazon Ads opened a beta program for its new MCP server that connects preexisting software systems and their APIs to agentic AI systems. Amazon Ads hosts the infrastructure on behalf of advertisers, said Paula Despins, Amazon Ads' VP of ads measurement. The Amazon Ads MCP will also be natively integrated with Amazon campaign management tools, she added, though on the AI side clients can bring in their own LLM or agentic AI solution.

By mid-2026, at least one major global enterprise will fall to a breach caused or significantly advanced by a fully autonomous agentic AI system.

On social media, people often accuse each other of being bots, but what happens when an entire social network is designed for AI agents to use? Moltbook is a site where the AI agents bots built by humans can post and interact with each other. It is designed to look like Reddit, with subreddits on different topics and upvoting. On 2 February the platform stated it had more than 1.5m AI agents signed up to the service.

There has been a lot of coverage of the jobs that might disappear due to agentic artificial intelligence-the technology which learns about your business from the data you feed it and then undertakes many of the tasks itself. Less prominent is the story of the jobs that will, and are already, being created. "In the near term, AI is creating more jobs than it is replacing," reads an against-the-grain report by LinkedIn, the social media and employment platform. We should all give thanks for that.

In the U.S. - where the market for agentic AI is projected to grow from $2.43 billion in 2025 to $65.25 billion by 2034 - agents are adding value across the marketing funnel, attracting, nurturing and converting leads by personalizing experiences, optimizing campaigns and writing content. Acting as mini-marketers, they are drawing up plans, making real-time decisions, executing and orchestrating campaigns across channels and using results to learn and improve, with little or no human intervention.

Businesses are acting fast to adopt agentic AI- artificial intelligence systems that work without human guidance-but have been much slower to put governance in place to oversee them, a new survey shows. That mismatch is a major source of risk in AI adoption. In my view, it's also a business opportunity. I'm a professor of management information systems at Drexel University's LeBow College of Business,

With many AI projects failing, there's no one-size-fits-all formula for advancing AI proofs of concept to real-world use in the corporate world. But two companies, Ernst & Young (EY) and Lumen, have had success - though they've tackled the issue in dramatically different ways. EY, being in a regulated space of finance and tax, has embraced what it sees as a measured and responsible approach while managing the risks that come with rolling out new technology. Lumen has been more aggressive, working to create an AI culture at the company by giving all employees AI tools from day one.

It's a powerful tool for coders and one that may very well drive the price of software markedly lower as the technology advances. Of course, Anthropic's enterprise focus may very well be working in its favor as it looks to have one of the most capable AI coders on the market. With Claude Cowork, which was coded in large part by Claude Code, also gaining traction as 2026 becomes the big year for agentic AI, it certainly feels like the tech landscape is shifting

Salesforce is getting cosier with the US Army via a deal worth up to $5.6 billion, selling cloud analytics as the groundwork for a future agentic AI push across the service and the wider DoD. Salesforce announced the 10-year deal on Monday, which it said would equip the Army with a Salesforce-based cloud data analytics system "as the foundation for its agentic enterprise,"

Developing effective agentic AI requires a new research playbook. When systems plan, decide, and act on our behalf, UX moves beyond usability testing into the realm of trust, consent, and accountability. Victor Yocco outlines the research methods needed to design agentic AI systems responsibly. Agentic AI stands ready to transform customer experience and operational efficiency, necessitating a new strategic approach from leadership.