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.
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.
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.
Digiday attempted to gauge market engagement after the dust had settled, and backers have started to put in the hard yards. First, it's worth a recap of what exactly AdCP is - for some, it's an open-source bridge between today's programmatic infrastructure and the dawn of the agentic era - or, as Digiday's Tim Peterson phrased it, "openRTB for the agentic AI era" (see video below).
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. This evolution in artificial intelligence empowers systems to plan, execute, and persist in tasks, moving beyond simple recommendations to proactive action.
Central to the GA release is Agentic Chat. This functionality builds on the previously introduced Duo Chat but goes a step further by leveraging context from virtually every part of GitLab. Think of issues, merge requests, CI/CD pipelines, and security findings. Agentic Chat can not only advise, but also actually perform actions on behalf of developers, depending on the rights and approvals that have been set.
Although news reports (and dinner table conversations) commonly focus on harmful uses of GenAI tool and dystopian perils of artificial general intelligence ( AGI) (AI that thinks like, or better than, a human), the deployment of AI agents, and more broadly agentic AI systems, is a paradigm shift that is happening now as the technology becomes increasingly accessible and reliable.
Peter Drucker saw this symbiosis first. He realized that the new industrial order would depend on a worker who produced ideas instead of widgets. The knowledge worker became the engine of prosperity, and management became the social technology that synchronized millions of minds. The modern firm was as much an invention as the transistor it depended on. Three decades later, Tom Peters caught the next wave.
Agentic AI can change how companies perform operations and how individuals access information. This technology can provide relevant information sooner and complete basic tasks. Right now, this technology is the worst that it will ever be. As agentic AI gets better, demand for these solutions will grow. These three stocks are poised to benefit from this growing industry. Amazon (AMZN) Amazon ( NASDAQ:AMZN) offers the largest cloud platform, and that technology acts as the backbone for agentic AI.
Accenture is betting that the future of retail will run through AI with an investment in Profitmind, an agent-based platform that automates pricing decisions, inventory management, and planning. "Profitmind bridges the gap between insight and action through agentic AI," Accenture global retail lead Jill Standish said in a statement that announced Accenture's buy in. "It mirrors how retailers run their businesses, linking data from multiple sources for clear, prioritized recommendations that can be trusted and executed quickly in response to an increasingly competitive industry."
On Tuesday, Walmart execs said they would put ads in Sparky, its AI shopping agent, as well as provide generative AI-powered performance insights and creative. There's also Marty, Walmart's agentic advertising assistant, in beta for sponsored search campaigns to help with billing and bidding, with plans to make it available widely later this year. The announcements come on the heels of Walmart's tests last year with Sparky and Marty.
Reddit has launched an AI-powered media-buying tool designed to automate core aspects of advertising on its platform, including audience targeting, bidding, and creative optimisation. The product, called Max Campaign, is positioned as a way to attract performance-focused advertisers while responding to ongoing concerns around transparency in automated advertising tools. Integrated into Reddit Ads Manager, Max Campaigns is intended to simplify how brands plan, set up, and run campaigns.
Behind the scenes at GSMArena HQ, it was just as busy. Testing devices, digging into specs, breaking news as it happens, and turning complex PR terminology into clear, useful information for millions of readers and viewers around the world. In terms of numbers, we added over 780 new devices to our database and published nearly 5,000 news articles. The review team explored over 140 smartphones and tablets in our usual detailed format,
The deal is sure to turn heads too. Manus and its parent company Butterfly Effect are now based in Singapore but were founded in China - a country with a fraught relationship to the U.S tech industry - and maintain operations there. Facebook's parent company will reportedly pay more than $2 billion to acquire the startup, which it hopes will bolster its own lagging AI capabilities.
Agentic artificial intelligence tools are slated to dominate federal and consumer markets in the coming year, major tech players predict, underscoring the role data organization and cloud computing will play in delivering tailored agentic solutions. Agentic AI, which describes autonomous AI systems that are capable of executing specific tasks with little to no human interaction required, was a hot topic in federal and private sector procurement. Major vendors are responding to the ongoing demand for agentic technology with a holistic infrastructure approach for the coming year.
In this episode, our managing editor Allison Schiff interviews Paul Longo, Microsoft's GM of AI in ads. They discuss the ways AI will transform advertising, from the use of AI technology to create advertising, which Microsoft is doing, to how advertising will become part of agentic AI experiences. (As a writer myself, I also enjoyed hearing him talk about experimenting with AI in some of his work as a screenwriter.)
The problems to solve (and the cost to solve them) jump exponentially at each level, and we posit that, just like fully autonomous self-driving cars at level five that can operate anywhere, we are a far way off from seeing level five agentic AI operating at the "PhD" level as Sam Altman describes it. And the authors both firmly believe that LLMs are not the architecture to get us to level five, but that is a discussion for a separate post.
Agentic AI is dominating conversations in enterprise technology today. In simple terms, agentic AI refers to autonomous AI "agents" that can pursue complex goals and carry out multi-step tasks with minimal human supervision. This isn't just another tech buzzword - industry leaders see agentic AI as "the operating logic of tomorrow's enterprise". In other words, agentic systems are expected to fundamentally transform how businesses operate by taking on decision-making and workflows that previously required constant human input.
The aim of the AAIF is to provide a neutral organization to encourage open-source agentic AI technologies and secure long-term community support of projects. Besides the three members contributing founding projects, the foundation's Platinum members are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, and Google. Dozens of other tech companies have joined as Gold and Silver members. Silver member Obot.ai has donated their MCP Dev Summit events and podcast to AAIF.
AI startups are a bit like podcasts. Which is to say, everyone seems to have one. So how does an AI startup stand out amid so much noise? There's no simple formula for standing out. But, for many founders, the key is a personal connection to the problem their startup aims to solve. That and a belief that humans should stay at the steering wheel, even when the systems run agentically.
For the better part of 2025, agentic AI has been the industry's buzzword. It's defined as "a situation where multiple AI agents work together to complete complex tasks, with minimal oversight or intervention from a human user," as Digiday explains it. The minimal oversight from a human user, however, seems to be the hangup keeping marketers from embracing agentic AI's full autonomy.
