Based on promises of AI's potential to dramatically optimize operations through new developments in the space, including models that are smarter, cheaper, multimodal, better at reasoning, and even autonomous, business leaders have funneled money into related expenses. Global corporate AI investment reached $252.3 billion in 2024, and US private AI investment hit $109.1 billion, according to Stanford data -- it's safe to assume those numbers will only continue to grow.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff last week came closer to answering a multibillion-dollar question when he said seat-based pricing - with some caveats - was becoming the norm for its AI agents after flirting with pricing based on consumption and per-conversation payments. While there is much debate about how users will get money back from investing in AI agents, the stakes are also high when it comes to how they pay for them.
"The agent underneath is actually more universal than we thought." Instead of building new agents for every use case, companies should rely on a single general agent powered by a library of skills, Zhang said. Skills are "organized collections of files that package composable procedural knowledge for agents," Zhang said. They are simply folders that contain whatever an agent needs to complete a task consistently and efficiently.
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.
In late October, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, a web browser with ChatGPT at its core. In Agent Mode, it can perform actions on your behalf, such as pulling together an online order. Elyse Betters Picaro, Senior Contributing Editor at ZDNET, tried it that day, successfully using it to place a same-day delivery order from Walmart. The experience was so positive that she then used it to buy Disney on Ice Tickets, which she said saved her some money and hassle.
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.
AI agents connect the power of large language models with APIs, enabling them to take action and integrate seamlessly into employee workflows and customer experiences in a variety of domains: World-class IT organizations are adapting their strategies and practices to develop AI agents while mitigating the risks associated with rapid deployments. "Building a world-class IT team means leading the conversation on risk," says Rani Johnson, CIO of Workday.
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.
Snowflake has signed an agreement to acquire Select Star. This company's technology will expand Snowflake Horizon Catalog by integrating with databases, BI tools, and data pipelines. This will increase the context for AI agents such as Snowflake Intelligence. The full context of data assets is often scattered across upstream and downstream systems. This fragmentation makes it difficult to find the right data and understand the full context. In the AI era, this limited context poses a problem for both humans and agents.
Once upon a time, when you ran Windows on your desktop, it was your desktop. Oh, the IT department might have called the shots on how much you could do with it, but you could write what you needed to, and it was all kept nicely on your PC or your choice of network drive. Those days are long gone.
So what, exactly, is the DoorDash problem? Briefly, it's what happens when an AI interface gets between a service provider, like DoorDash, and you, who might send an AI to go order a sandwich from the internet instead of using apps and websites yourself. That would mean things like user reviews, ads, loyalty programs, upsells, and partnerships would all go away - AI agents don't care about those things, after all, and DoorDash would just become a commodity provider of sandwiches and lose out on all additional kinds of money you can make when real people open your app or visit your website.
Microsoft Entra Agent ID has been released in an extensive form in public preview. This gives organizations a "complete inventory of their agent fleet," according to Microsoft. Thanks to an agent registry, AI agents appear in exactly the same interface as human users. This makes it immediately clear what permissions an agent has and whether it is consulting the resources that are to be expected. Built-in lifecycle management prevents agents from wandering around and potentially being used by malicious parties.
Microsoft unveiled a new series of services to address some longstanding problems with managing data centers at its annual Ignite conference, Tuesday. The company, which well understands these problems because it runs some of the world's largest data centers, has a new multi-tiered solution that may give all of us IT folks a little peace. Enterprise data centers are huge, complex operations. Enterprise networks alone consist of a bouillabaisse of distributed services, third-party APIs, proprietary and open source cloud services, and local services. All of these face constant large and small updates, along with constant integrations with new capabilities (or re-integrations because someone changed their API). It never stops.
The system combines an ontology model, semantic models, and AI agents to convert business data into real-time decision-making. According to Microsoft, organizations are drowning in data without understanding the semantics. For example, an airline does not think in terms of tables and schedules, but in terms of flights, passengers, and delays. However, that meaning lives in people's minds. Teams use their own definitions and reports. AI systems can read data, but they lack the business context to make reliable decisions.
One of the key components of Antigravity is how it reports on its own work. As it completes tasks, it will produce what Google calls Artifacts: task lists, plans, screenshots, and browser recordings that are intended to verify both the work it's done and what it will do. Antigravity will also report on its actions and external tool use along the way, but Google says that Artifacts are "easier for users to verify" than full lists of a models' actions and tool calls.
Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Informatica. The CRM provider paid more than $8 billion (€6.9 billion) for the data management company. The acquisition is intended to lay the foundation for reliable AI agents within the Salesforce ecosystem. The completion brings Informatica's data catalog, integration tools, and governance services to the Salesforce platform. CEO Marc Benioff emphasizes the importance of this step: "You have to get your data right to get your AI right. Data and context is the true fuel of Agentforce."
In a fascinating experiment, journalist Evan Ratliff populated his own fictional tech startup that he called HurumoAI - complete with its own jargon-splattered website - exclusively with AI agents to see what would happen. Ratliff, as the only human involved, was the one calling the shots. The rest was taken care of by AI - the ultimate test of the " one-person billion-dollar company " that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted earlier this year.
