#ai-agents

#ai-agents

Identity and access management (IAM) provider Descope has announced raising $35 million in a seed funding extension that brings the total raised by the company to $88 million. The cash infusion came from existing investors Cerca Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Notable Capital, Triventures, and Unusual Ventures. Founded in 2022, the Los Altos, California-based startup landed a large $53 million seed funding round in 2023, aiming to disrupt the customer identity and authentication market.

The picture the company paints of the modern office worker is someone who's juggling a growing number of AI systems -- as more get added, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage them all. Instead, ServiceNow is offering to help by telling those workers to simply drop the juggling act and let their own AI software pick up where they left off.

Life sciences leaders are increasingly adopting AI and AI agents to address growing industry disruption. This shift is occurring as the sector confronts new regulatory demands that strain compliance teams, increasingly complex clinical trials, and rising expectations from healthcare professionals. A recent Salesforce study revealed that life sciences leaders see AI as a powerful tool for navigating these challenges, with 94% expecting AI agents to be critical for scaling organizational capacity and strengthening operations.

AI agents are steadily becoming embedded in enterprise workflows: automating customer interactions, coordinating operations, and reasoning across complex datasets. However, if you take a closer look beneath the surface, many organizations are struggling with the technical challenge of supporting them in real time. Legacy data architectures aren't built for this. To make agents performant, scalable, and accountable, IT leaders are turning to something familiar, but more flexible: NoSQL.

A camera app that uses nano banana to make my mediocre iPhone photos look like they were taken on a Leica. A single-purpose AI agent that can take any frontend project and automatically add support for light mode, dark mode, and custom theming. It should be able to use vision to see the UI changes, and then iteratively make changes based on the rendered UI. Another single-purpose AI agent that can decompile and debug minified code into an interpretable codebase.

Far from futuristic hype, AI agents are now taking on the unglamorous but critical jobs: routing tickets, handling repetitive requests, surfacing the right information at the right moment, and keeping operations flowing with less human hand-holding. A McKinsey study says that, with agents in the mix: Up to 80% of common incidents could be resolved autonomously, with a reduction in time to resolution of 60 to 90%.

As Alex Kantrowitz of Big Technology likes to say, what often gets lost in these debates is the nuance - so let's parse the rhetoric from reality. At the extremes, two scenarios could play out: Firstly, in a world where AI agents facilitate critical moments of truth for consumers making decisions about brands, products, and services - and immediately execute transactions - advertising becomes obsolete.

"AI agents are a powerful new identity type. They can act independently, on their own or on behalf of a user or a team or a company," said McKinnon. "They can access tools, apps or data, they can plan or complete tasks on their own. The pace here of innovation is absolutely stunning. "These AI agents and the potential here, are getting very, very powerful and it's happening very quickly. "Without identity security AI security collapses. AI security is identity security, you can't be successful in one without the other."

Emergent, a company built by twin brothers Mukund and Madhav Jha, aims to become a similar platform for consumers when it comes to app creation. The platform allows non-technical users to create an app using prompts. While that's not a unique pitch in 2025, Emergent intends to aid users through the app development process, while also managing different APIs and deployment steps so they don't have to worry about various technicalities.

I think what you're seeing now is the adversaries, the bad guys, they're basically focused on, 'look where's the weakest link, where is the place where we've spent the least?' And infrastructure people are about throughput and speed and access, and security is about protection. And if you have a domain that is split between those two, you're going to find weaknesses.

The agent will draw on all a user's notion pages and database as context, automatically generating notes and analysis for meetings, competitor evaluation reports, and feedback landing pages. The productivity platform said that the agent can create pages and databases, or update them with new data, properties, or views. Users can also trigger Notion agents from outside platforms that are linked to the service. For instance, you can ask Notion agent to create a bug tracking dashboard from various sources, including Slack, email, and Google Drive.

Notion has entered the agent era of its AI evolution with the launch of the Notion Agent on Thursday. The announcement forms the bulk of the Notion 3.0 roll out available to all users. The company calls the new product a "teammate and Notion super user" that "can do everything a human can do in Notion." While Notion users previously constructed pages and databases manually, now the agent builds both for them.

Rather than simply failing a build it's now possible for the CI/CD platform to automatically fix issues that previously required massive amounts of toil. For example, CI/CD platforms infused with AI can not only create a list of tasks that need to be completed to enable a build to run successfully, but it can now perform those tasks in the background while still keeping humans in the loop, he said.

A startup that's built AI agents to monitor and fix IT issues - including those caused by bad vibe coding - has raised $4.6 million. New York-based Vibranium Labs has built tech called "Vibe AI" to proactively monitor, triage, and resolve IT incidents and outages. The AI agent plugs into a company's existing incident response software and runs 24/7. The startup was founded by Tim Hwang, Sang Lee, Charles Kim, and Tanny Kang, who collectively have worked at a number of tech companies, including Google, Amazon Web Services, and Fiscal Note. It aims to address what Hwang described to Business Insider as "the biggest fear in the world" for software engineers: getting a call in the middle of the night to say an app or software product is down.

AI agents that will take actions for humans,

Monday is set to launch an AI agent builder tool that can automate a range of work management tasks, the company announced at its Elevate conference on Wednesday. The agents don't just answer questions, they "execute tasks, connect systems, and learn from context," said Daniel Lereya, chief product and technology officer at Monday, in an email conversation with Computerworld. "This frees teams and individuals from repetitive execution, allowing them to focus on creativity, strategy, and human judgment." Monday's agents can take action across different teams and app integrations he said, as well as interact via multiple communication channels, including email, SMS and phone calls,

"Our agentic AI capabilities are designed to work seamlessly throughout the entire selling experience, which means sellers can go from handling every task themselves to collaborating with an intelligent assistant that works proactively on their behalf around the clock, while always keeping sellers in control," Amazon wrote in a press release. "Seller Assistant will be able to handle everything from routine operations to complex business strategy, so sellers can focus on innovation and growth."

Headless browsers - the behind-the-scenes software that lets machines surf the web like people - were once the domain of quality-assurance testers and SEO agencies. But new AI-powered browsers launched this last year - like Perplexity's Comet and Browser Company of New York's Dia - are bringing new meaning to the term. These players are using headless browsers to power AI agents that need to click, scroll and interact with websites as a human would, to retrieve information.

Employees will soon have access to a single integrated platform where enterprise knowledge, data, and actions come together. The new capabilities include searching across all of an organization's key data sources, including Workday's own data cloud, as well as Google Drive, SharePoint, and Office365. AI agents can act proactively by anticipating needs, summarizing insights, and providing support for projects. In addition, these agents are enabled to create presentations, documents, dashboards, and even entire learning courses based on existing company data.

This system can be used to integrate and manage Workday agents as well as third-party agents. Workday is taking this opportunity forward to become a system of record for all workers - be they digital or human.

MongoDB today unveiled an application modernization platform that makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) agents to analyze and convert legacy applications into code that can be used to deploy a modern application on its document database. Shilpa Kolhar, senior vice president of product and engineering for MongoDB, said the MongoDB Application Modernization Platform (AMP) will make it possible to refactor code in a way that is compatible with the open source Java Spring framework, which in turn could then be deployed on MongoDB.

On the "OpenAI Podcast," which aired on Monday, cofounder and president Greg Brockman and Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux outlined a vision of vast networks of autonomous AI agents supervised by humans but capable of working continuously in the cloud as full-fledged collaborators. "We have strong conviction that the way that this is headed is large populations of agents somewhere in the cloud that we as humanity, as people, teams, organizations supervise and steer in order to produce great economical value," Sottiaux said.

Artificial intelligence is about to enable the most dramatic shift of the century: the transition from human labour to AI labour. In the coming years, businesses won't just use AI as a tool - they'll employ AI as real colleagues, handling critical workflows end-to-end. That shift is inevitable. The real question is: whose employees will we be hiring? If Europe doesn't catch up with the US and China and build its own AI employees,

AI will increasingly automate day-to-day decision-making for businesses in the coming years, thanks to AI and other emerging technologies, Gartner claims in a . Also: Use Claude's new feature at your own risk - here's why The consulting firm's annual Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report aims to provide a sober and practical picture of how buzzy new technologies will be leveraged by businesses in the near future.

So the thing that we think about all day long - and what our focus is at Box - is how much work is changing due to AI. And the vast majority of the impact right now is on workflows involving unstructured data. We've already been able to automate anything that deals with structured data that goes into a database.

Since the arrival of the internet and online marketing, measuring and analyzing certain metrics has been essential for those wanting to attract audiences and sell online. Figures like click-through rates, page impressions, and conversions have traditionally provided marketers with the insight needed to make decisions about how, when, and where to present their products and services to us. Those days, however, could be coming to an end.