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Amazon claims the headline isn’t robots taking jobs as it reveals new cost-cutting robots
A New York Times report on Tuesday cited internal Amazon documents touting how its shift into automation could help it sell more products without hiring more people, but today the company has issued a PR blast about robotics and delivery tech that is much sunnier. Along with a tease of AI-connected augmented reality smart glasses
Can AI Deliver What Shoppers Want?
Much of the rhetoric around commerce and AI imagines a revolution in how we find and buy things. OpenAI joined the discourse when it announced that you can buy directly through ChatGPT via partnerships with Walmart, Shopify and Etsy—all powered by Stripe. They’re not alone. AI answer engine Perplexity launched one-click checkout with PayPal in 2024, AI fashion agent Daydream is turning conversations into personal styling sessions, and AI browser extension Phia spots the best deals for you, wheth...
Open source agentic startup LangChain hits $1.25B valuation
As TechCrunch previously reported, the maker of a popular open source framework for building AI agents has officially become a unicorn.
OpenAI looks for its “Google Chrome” moment with new Atlas web browser
MacOS version launches today, includes Agent Mode preview to "use the Internet for you."
A16z-backed Codi launches AI agent office manager
Codi launches what it hails as the first fully automated office manager.
A Reality Check on Agents
Around the start of this year, executives at artificial intelligence providers like OpenAI and Salesforce said 2025 would be “the year of agents,” making it seem like fully autonomous AI would soon take over human jobs. Since then, Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP and many others pitched roughly seven types of agent to automate white collar tasks in realms like coding, HR, finance, and sales. But the promise of truly autonomous agents still hasn’t been fulfilled, and tech leaders are warning companies...
Serval raises $47 million to bring AI agents to IT service management
Serval is using agentic AI models to automate IT service management, but the company has a unique approach that takes advantage of agentic AI’s powers while avoiding many of its pitfalls.
Is Andrej Karpathy Right About Overhyped AI?
Andrej Karpathy , one of the founding members of OpenAI , on Friday threw cold water on the idea that artificial general intelligence is around the corner. He also cast doubt on various assumptions about AI made by the industry’s biggest boosters, such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman . The highly regarded Karpathy called reinforcement learning —arguably the most important area of research right now—“terrible,” said AI-powered coding agents aren’t as exciting as many people th...
Yelp’s AI can now take reservations over the phone
Yelp’s AI-powered solutions promise to answer calls, take reservations, and manage bookings for “understaffed” restaurants. Yelp Host and Yelp Receptionist are part of a broader push from the company and similar platforms embracing AI to streamline customer management “around the clock.” Host is an AI agent that can answer calls from guests and manage tables,
The unexpected benefits of AI PCs: why creativity could be the new productivity
Presented by HP Creativity is quickly becoming the new measure of productivity. While AI is often framed as a tool for efficiency and automation, new research from MIT Sloan School of Management shows that generative AI enhances human creativity — when employees have the right tools and skills to use it effectively. That’s where AI PCs come in. These next-generation laptops combine local AI processing with powerful Neural Processing Units , delivering the speed and security that knowledge worker...
Bryan Cranston and SAG-AFTRA say OpenAI is taking their deepfake concerns seriously
Actors, studios, agents, and the actors union SAG-AFTRA have all expressed their concerns about appearing in Sora 2’s AI-generated videos ever since the deepfake machine was released last month. Now a joint statement from actor Bryan Cranston, OpenAI, the union, and others says that after videos of him appeared on Sora — one even showed
Agentic AI security breaches are coming: 7 ways to make sure it's not your firm
AI agents – task-specific models designed to operate autonomously or semi-autonomously given instructions — are being widely implemented across enterprises . But they're also introducing new security risks . When an agentic AI security breach happens, companies may be quick to fire employees and assign blame, but slower to identify and fix the systemic failures that enabled it. Forrester’s Predictions 2026: Cybersecurity and Risk predicts that the first agentic AI breach will lead to dismissals,...
Codev lets enterprises avoid vibe coding hangovers with a team of agents that generate and document code
For many software developers using generative AI, vibe coding is a double-edged sword. The process delivers rapid prototypes but often leaves a trail of brittle, undocumented code that creates significant technical debt. A new open-source platform, Codev , addresses this by proposing a fundamental shift: treating the natural language conversation with an AI as part of the actual source code. Codev is based on SPR, a framework designed to turn vibe-coding conversations into structured, versioned,...
Manus upgrades its AI Agent to version 1.5 - testingcatalog.com
Manus upgrades its AI Agent to version 1.5 testingcatalog.com
Stellantis teams up with Pony AI to develop robotaxis in Europe
The collaboration will integrate Pony’s self-driving software into Stellantis’ electric medium-size van platform, which is built with advanced sensors to support autonomous vehicles.
General Intuition lands $134M seed to teach agents spatial reasoning using video game clips
Late last year, OpenAI reportedly tried to buy Medal and its vast trove of video game data for $500M. Today, the company spun out a frontier research lab that's using that data to build AI agents that understand how they move through space and time, a concept called spatial-temporal reasoning.
Microsoft launches 'Hey Copilot' voice assistant and autonomous agents for all Windows 11 PCs
Microsoft is fundamentally reimagining how people interact with their computers, announcing Thursday a sweeping transformation of Windows 11 that brings voice-activated AI assistants, autonomous software agents, and contextual intelligence to every PC running the operating system — not just premium devices with specialized chips. The announcement represents Microsoft's most aggressive push yet to integrate generative artificial intelligence into the desktop computing experience, moving beyond th...
ACE prevents context collapse with ‘evolving playbooks’ for self-improving AI agents
A new framework from Stanford University and SambaNova addresses a critical challenge in building robust AI agents: context engineering. Called Agentic Context Engineering , the framework automatically populates and modifies the context window of large language model applications by treating it as an “evolving playbook” that creates and refines strategies as the agent gains experience in its environment. ACE is designed to overcome key limitations of other context-engineering frameworks, preven...
Google vs. OpenAI vs. Visa: competing agent protocols threaten the future of AI commerce
When Walmart and OpenAI announced that the retailer would integrate with ChatGPT, the question became how quickly OpenAI could deliver on the promise of agents buying things for people. In the battle of AI-enabled commerce, getting agents to securely complete transactions is one of the biggest hurdles. More and more, chat platforms like ChatGPT are replacing browsers and getting very good at surfacing information people search for. Users will ask ChatGPT for the best humidifiers on the market, a...
Under the hood of AI agents: A technical guide to the next frontier of gen AI
Agents are the trendiest topic in AI today, and with good reason. AI agents act on their users’ behalf, autonomously handling tasks like making online purchases, building software, researching business trends or booking travel. By taking generative AI out of the sandbox of the chat interface and allowing it to act directly on the world, agentic AI represents a leap forward in the power and utility of AI.Taking gen AI out of the protected sandbox of the chat interface and allowing it to act direc...
Liberate bags $50M at $300M valuation to bring AI deeper into insurance back offices
Liberate’s AI agents automate tasks for P&C insurers, working across sales, service, and claims.
Dfinity launches Caffeine, an AI platform that builds production apps from natural language prompts
The Dfinity Foundation on Wednesday released Caffeine , an artificial intelligence platform that allows users to build and deploy web applications through natural language conversation alone, bypassing traditional coding entirely. The system, which became publicly available today, represents a fundamental departure from existing AI coding assistants by building applications on a specialized decentralized infrastructure designed specifically for autonomous AI development. Unlike GitHub Copilot , ...
EAGLET boosts AI agent performance on longer-horizon tasks by generating custom plans
2025 was supposed to be the year of "AI agents," according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and other AI industry personnel. And it has been, in many ways, with numerous leading AI model providers such as OpenAI , Google , and even Chinese competitors like Alibaba releasing fine-tuned AI models or applications designed to focus on a narrow set of tasks, such as web search and report writing. But one big hurdle to a future of highly performant, reliable, AI agents remains: getting them to stay on task...
Salesforce Touts Deeper Ties with OpenAI, Anthropic
Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff, speaking at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, announced expansions of existing partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic aimed at making it easier for customers to build agents using those startups’ models. In doing so, Benioff made clear that ...
Visa just launched a protocol to secure the AI shopping boom — here’s what it means for merchants
Visa is introducing a new security framework designed to solve one of the thorniest problems emerging in artificial intelligence-powered commerce: how retailers can tell the difference between legitimate AI shopping assistants and the malicious bots that plague their websites. The payments giant unveiled its Trusted Agent Protocol on Tuesday, establishing what it describes as foundational infrastructure for "agentic commerce" — a term for the rapidly growing practice of consumers delegating shop...
AI Ad Tech ‘Land Grab’ Pits Salesforce Against Google, Microsoft and Amazon
The murky, highly complex business of helping advertisers buy space on digital media is currently dominated by Google, Amazon and a handful of much smaller ad tech firms. But an array of other companies, including Salesforce, Microsoft and a new initiative led by AppNexus founder Brian O’Kelley, hopes to use new artificial intelligence tools to grab a piece of the market. All these challengers are pitching advertisers or publishers or both on using artificial intelligence agent technology to pla...
Transforming commercial pharma with agentic AI
Amid the turbulence of the wider global economy in recent years, the pharmaceuticals industry is weathering its own storms. The rising cost of raw materials and supply chain disruptions are squeezing margins as pharma companies face intense pressure—including from countries like the US—to control drug costs. At the same time, a wave of expiring patents threatens…
Salesforce bets on AI 'agents' to fix what it calls a $7 billion problem in enterprise software
As 50,000 attendees descend on Salesforce's Dreamforce conference this week, the enterprise software giant is making its most aggressive bet yet on artificial intelligence agents, positioning itself as the antidote to what it calls an industry-wide "pilot purgatory" where 95% of enterprise AI projects never reach production . The company on Monday launched Agentforce 360 , a sweeping reimagination of its entire product portfolio designed to transform businesses into what it calls "agentic enterp...
Salesforce announces Agentforce 360 as enterprise AI competition heats up
Salesforce announces an upgraded version of its Agentforce platform designed to help enterprises build and deploy AI agents.
We keep talking about AI agents, but do we ever know what they are?
Imagine you do two things on a Monday morning. First, you ask a chatbot to summarize your new emails. Next, you ask an AI tool to figure out why your top competitor grew so fast last quarter. The AI silently gets to work . It scours financial reports, news articles and social media sentiment. It cross-references that data with your internal sales numbers, drafts a strategy outlining three potential reasons for the competitor's success and schedules a 30-minute meeting with your team to present i...