#agentic-ai

#agentic-ai

At Fortune's recent Brainstorm AI event in San Francisco, an expert roundtable grappled with that question as insiders shared how their companies are approaching security and governance-an issue that is leapfrogging even more practical challenges such as data and compute power. Companies are in an arm's race to parachute AI agents into their workflows that can tackle tasks autonomously and with little human supervision.

Big Tech has spent the past year telling us we're living in the era of AI agents, but most of what we've been promised is still theoretical. As companies race to turn fantasy into reality, they've developed a collection of tools to guide the development of generative AI. A cadre of major players in the AI race, including Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, has come together to promote interoperability with the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). This move elevates a handful of popular technologies and could make them a de facto standard for AI development going forward.

The three companies are also transferring ownership of some widely used agentic technologies over to the foundation. This includes Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), which allows agents to connect and interact; OpenAI's Agents.md, which lets programs and websites specify rules for coding agents; and Goose, a framework for building agents developed by Block. These technologies were already free to use, but through the new foundation it will be possible for others to contribute to their development.

When I read it, I'm like, 'Oh my gosh, this actually is real data [for] the conversations I'm having where, 'Yeah, we bought all these Chats and Claudes and Geminis and people can summarize their emails and look up stuff in their calendar and help me write a nice letter.' But is that real work? It's not.

"We had a clear choice - be the last airline built on legacy technology or be the first built on the platforms that will define the next decade of aviation," said Adam Boukadida, chief financial officer of Riyadh Air. "With IBM, we've stripped out 50 years of legacy in a single stroke. Riyadh Air isn't just built for today; it's built for the future and creating a pathway for many airlines to follow in the years to come."

It's the big trend that's taken the tech industry by storm over the last year, and truth be told, I'm at the point where I've covered the topic so much that I'm dealing with a severe case of semantic satiation. AWS announced a new class of agents at its annual re:Invent conference last week. Known as " frontier agents ", these are more powerful, intuitive, and better equipped to deal with extended periods of operation than the first generation of agents.

Amazon's Nova 2 announcement at AWS re:Invent 2025 is exactly the type of AI offering we expected from AWS and, frankly, exactly what should make thoughtful architects nervous. Nova 2 is positioned as a frontier-grade model, tightly integrated with Amazon Bedrock. It's part of a growing ecosystem of "frontier agents" and the AgentCore framework unveiled at re:Invent 2025. The story is compelling: better models, better tools, and a single platform to build, deploy, and scale agentic AI.

I was asked about this in the wake of Salesforce's recently completed $8 billion acquisition of Informatica. In part, I believe that people are paying attention because deal-making is up in 2025. M&A volume reached $2.2 trillion in the first half of the year, a 27% increase compared to a year ago, according to JP Morgan. Notably, 72% of that volume involved deals greater than $1 billion.

At the low end, this looks like the "deep research" tools AI firms have already released that search the web and synthesize information on your behalf, attempting to automate the task of using Google. More theoretically, it might mean models trained to use productivity software in a work context, which may then be used to attempt to automate increasingly complicated jobs.

Picking up another 20%+ total return next year will likely hinge on valuation improvement for most stocks (especially the mortgage REITs), however we're optimistic there could be some earnings torque in the servicers as a function of AI-driven workflow helping trim expenses, which we think is only partly reflected in valuations, he added. BTIG covers 20 companies in the mortgage sector. As a group, they are expected to originate $750 billion in 2026, representing a 12% year-over-year increase.

My dear friend Jack Ellis is an unending source of founder inspiration. Not only has he recently started embracing AI agentic coding-something he's been holding back on for quite a bit. I think I've mentioned several times on this podcast alone how he and I seem to have quite opposing views on embracing this technology. But something has clicked, and he's been diving headlong into it. So over the next couple months, hopefully he'll explore it more, and after that, I've been trying to get him to come on this podcast and talk about his experiences. Let's give him time to explore it fully.

"Snowflake's most strategic partnerships are measured not just in scale, but in the depth of innovation and customer value that we can create together," he said. "Anthropic joins a very select group of partners where we have nine-figure alignment, co-innovation at the product level, and a proven track record of executing together for customers worldwide. Together, the combined power of Snowflake and Claude is raising the bar for how enterprises deploy scalable, context-aware AI on top of their most critical business data."

AWS claims the vibe coding IDE Kiro is designed to avoid all the pitfalls of letting AI do your development, like surprise drive deletions and database wipeouts. Users will have to put a lot of trust in those claims. Aside from those worst-case scenarios, AWS is fully aware that AI coding tools have "introduced new friction" into developers' workloads. "You can find yourself acting as the human 'thread' that holds work together," AWS said, describing scenarios like contextualizing tasks, manually coordinating cross-repository changes, and collating information across tickets and pull requests.

Well... that happened. PR folks the world over can take a lesson from how Amazon announced the enhancement of its AWS Transform service. They hauled an old AWS server 150 feet up on a crane in the middle of Las Vegas, and then dropped it on a pile of explosives. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you get the attention of tech journalists. I mean, dropping a server 150 feet and blowing it up is a happy place I didn't even know I had.

Amazon Web Services' big annual event, re:Invent 2025, is getting into full swing in Las Vegas this week. Last year's event was largely focused on their AI efforts, including new foundation models, services tackling AI hallucinations, and new security measures. And this year is likely to follow suit, based on what Amazon has announced so far and the lineup of speakers and programming that you can explore in more detail below.

Enter agentic AI. In general, these AI models are able to perform tasks that require some reasoning or information gathering, such as acting as live agents or helpdesk assistants for customer queries, or are used for contextual searches. The concept of agentic AI has now spread to browsers, and while they may one day become the baseline, they have also introduced security risks, including prompt injection attacks.

Instead, it's a computer use agent (CUA) that can complete tasks for users by taking over the mouse or keyboard. "Fara-7B operates by visually perceiving a webpage and takes actions like scrolling, typing, and clicking on directly predicted coordinates," the company explained in a . "It does not rely on separate models to parse the screen, nor on any additional information like accessibility trees, and thus uses the same modalities as humans to interact with the computer."

It seems like an oversimplification, but many real estate agents don't realize they're using AI, or even interacting with AI that's in large part because agentic AI is becoming more commonplace. AI has already had a meaningful impact on the day-to-day lives of real estate agents, even if they don't realize it whether it's the use of major graphic-design platforms like Canva, social media apps, or embedded AI tools within search engines.

We all knew it was only a matter of time before agentic AI hit the mobile web browser. I've tested agentic AI on the desktop and, quite honestly, I've not been all that impressed. Why? Because doing things on a desktop is really easy for me. However, doing things on a mobile device is not quite so efficient. First of all, my mobile typing skills would be laughed at by Gen Z.

Microsoft is pushing agentic AI deeper into the PC with Fara-7B, a compact computer-use agent (CUA) model that can automate complex tasks entirely on a local device. The experimental release, aimed at gathering feedback, provides enterprises with a preview of how AI agents might run sensitive workflows without sending data to the cloud, while still matching or outperforming larger models like GPT-4o in real UI navigation tasks.

"Unlike traditional chat models that generate text-based responses, Computer Use Agent (CUA) models like Fara-7B leverage computer interfaces, such as a mouse and keyboard, to complete tasks on behalf of users," Microsoft said in a blog post. "With only 7 billion parameters, Fara-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance within its size class and is competitive with larger, more resource-intensive agentic systems that depend on prompting multiple large models."

It was essentially trading the way a trafficker would, but automated. It looked at insertion orders (IOs) that came in [from brands and media buyers], it set up the campaigns, it set the campaigns live, and it started optimizing them. We were like: "This is amazing!" Well, for about a day. It spent a few thousand dollars in one go. And then we got scared.

Today's businesses face this pressing question: how do they reskill and keep individuals time and again as the technology revolutions gather speed? Most corporate learning architectures are by-the-book, rigid, and off the beat, divorced from tangible business results. With accelerating automation, hybrid workplaces, and skill obsolescence, responsive, data-driven, and personalized learning is a necessity, not a choice. Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends report states that nearly

According to research from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), agentic artificial intelligence (AI)-based applications will lead to major management headaches. This is because technology purchases have traditionally been considered either as a substitute or a complement to human workers. Technology automates or augments and so can either be considered as a tool or as a worker.

Agentic AI will soon be able to carry out shopping for us, interacting on our behalf with brands and retailers online. That means staying competitive means building platforms capable of interacting with both humans and AI. This could be good for humans, who will save time and mental capacity - and it can be good for brands, if they execute right.

In this week's edition of Computer Weekly, we take a closer look at reports of low workplace morale within the Police Digital Service, as its staff eagerly await the outcome of the long-promised Home Office's policing reform whitepaper. Jérôme Goulard, the chief sustainability officer of Orange Business, talks us through the work he is doing to balance business objectives with IT sustainability within the organisation.

In a new blog post, Google touted the latest shopping skills available through AI Mode, Gemini, and even AI agents. You can strike up a conversation in Google's AI mode to discuss your shopping needs. You can get shopping ideas via the Gemini app on your mobile device. You can even send an AI agent on a shopping spree to find out which items are in stock and on sale.