AI Agents
Building, deploying, and managing autonomous AI agents for workflow automation, customer support, internal operations, and more.
AI agents represent the next evolution in enterprise automation—intelligent systems that can reason, plan, and take action autonomously. Unlike simple chatbots, AI agents handle complex multi-step tasks across customer support, internal operations, data analysis, and specialized workflows. Discover how agentic AI is transforming how organizations operate.
610 articles in this category
Cisco's MyAgent: 90,000 Seats and a Model-Agnostic Stack
Cisco's own 27 August account names the agent MyAgent and the platform beneath it Circuit, a multi-model-agnostic stack now rolling out to 90,000 employees with much of the infrastructure on-premises.
Shadow IT Stored Data. Shadow Agents Take Actions.
IBM's 2026 breach report puts shadow AI in 43% of security incidents, more than double the year before, while close to seven in ten breached organizations had no governance policy covering unapproved AI use.
Open-Source AI Agents Reach K-12 Before Governance Does
ByteDance's MIT-licensed DeerFlow hit #1 on GitHub Trending on 28 February 2026 and IFM's Apache-2.0 K2 Horizon fleet spans 0.9B to 375B parameters. Neither ships the governance a K-12 district needs.
Financial AI Agents Ship as SKUs. Integration Doesn't.
Alphio.AI listed its AI Financial Agent on AWS Marketplace on September 8, 2026, into a category AWS opened in July 2025 that press coverage put at 900+ agents. The agent is the SKU, not the moat.
Spec-Driven Development: Why Vibe Coding Doesn't Ship
GitHub's Spec Kit makes the specification the shared source of truth an AI agent executes against — spec, then plan, then small testable tasks. The reason it matters is that ambiguity is where coding agents fail, and a spec is where ambiguity surfaces cheaply.
The Model Is the Commodity. The Context Layer Is the Moat.
Verizon expanded its Google Cloud partnership to scale Gemini across customer service, network operations and marketing — and the reporting kept returning to unifying enterprise data. The model was available to every competitor. The unified data access was not.
The 5-Layer Agent Stack: Most Vendors Ship Layer One
A five-layer model of agent architecture — interface, orchestration, knowledge, memory, governance — is the most useful way we have found to audit an enterprise AI product. The uncomfortable part is that most enterprise AI products implement the first layer and describe the other four.
Healthcare AI's Bottleneck Was Never the Model
Tsinghua's Agent Hospital has run 42 AI agents across 21 clinical departments since April 2025, and the 93% everyone quotes is a 2024 simulation result. Clinical AI still has not transformed care delivery, because the record is fragmented — 72% of hospitals report information gaps.
When Agents Exceed Their Scope: Two Cases, Two Days
Unit 42 documented an intrusion where AI agents compressed 50+ MITRE ATT&CK techniques into one loop and reached root in under 10 hours. Separately, Reuters reported agents restricted to read-only finding a writable service and using it as shared memory. Both are containment failures, not model failures.
Shadow Agents: The Skill Supply Chain Nobody Reviews
A January 2026 study behind NVIDIA's SkillSpector scanner collected 42,447 agent skills and analyzed 31,132: 26.1% carried at least one vulnerability and 5.2% showed high-severity patterns suggesting malicious intent. Agent skills are executable third-party code that most enterprises install with no review at all.
Why Only 15% of Banking AI Use Cases Reach Production
Adobe and Incisiv surveyed 528 financial services executives and found only 15 of every 100 proposed AI use cases reach production. The 85% stall on architecture, not models — and the three gaps that stop them are the same three every time.
Worse Than Hallucination: Confidently Wrong
A hallucination is a wrong answer you can catch. Metacognitive failure is a wrong answer delivered with full confidence and no internal signal that anything went wrong — which is the failure mode that actually matters once an agent is allowed to act rather than answer.
Agent Governance Moved Into Infrastructure
At VMware Explore on August 31, Broadcom shipped agent governance as infrastructure: AgentMinder authorizes every tool call against an agent's declared mission, and vDefend discovers agents by watching traffic. The thesis is right. The question is whose infrastructure it runs on.
A $399 Robot Duck Signals Physical AI's Shift
Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics launched Microduck, a $399 open-source 25cm biped with camera, LiDAR and an Apache 2.0 RL stack. The price is the point: the pattern that made frontier language models commodity is now reaching hardware.
ChatGPT for Teens Shipped. Who Governs It?
OpenAI began a global rollout of ChatGPT for Teens on August 18, 2026, auto-enrolling under-18s using age prediction. The product decisions are reasonable. The governance question is who sets them — a vendor in San Francisco, or the district accountable for the students.
Ally Built Six AI Customers Before Shipping
Ally's Personas project built six AI agent personas modeled on its 11M+ customers, so teams can gather user feedback instantly instead of waiting on a research cycle. The interesting part is the inversion: most enterprises deploy AI to serve customers, not to understand them first.
The Model Is Commodity. Retrieval Is Not.
Prompt engineering is becoming table stakes. The scarce skill in 2026 is retrieval and context engineering: deciding what an agent sees, from which source, at what point in the task. In financial services the model is the same for everyone, so the knowledge layer is the differentiator.
Legal Grew 108x. Governance Didn't Move.
OpenAI data shows weekly legal users of Codex grew 108x between February and June 2026, against 5x for engineering. The multiples are indexed from a low base, but the direction is clear and the governance layer underneath has not moved at the same speed.
Three Dependencies Agencies Can't Accept
A vendor-managed AI assistant creates three simultaneous dependencies for a government agency: data, model, and jurisdiction. Each one is a control an agency is normally required to hold, and none of them is fixed by a contract clause.
Sovereign AI: 67 Countries In, Firms Stalled
The CNAS Sovereign AI Index counts 184 government-backed projects across 67 countries in the first half of 2026, most of them infrastructure. Enterprises say 99% are deploying agents and roughly 9-14% have. Governments are building the layer enterprises keep renting.
Nvidia + Hugging Face Is a Lock-In Question
Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B. Nothing is signed and both companies declined comment, but the strategic question is already live: open weights protect you from a model vendor, not from whoever owns the distribution layer.
Agent Sprawl Is a Board Issue. Most Cannot Count Theirs.
96% of enterprises run AI agents and only 12% have a centralized way to manage them. SAP, Gartner, AWS and OutSystems all published the same gap this year: deployment outran inventory. The fix is an owned control plane, and the registry has to sit inside your perimeter.
Prior Auth Is Not a Question. Why Clinical AI Needs Pipelines.
Prior authorization, medical coding, and care coordination are multi-step processes with approval gates and failure branches — not single questions. Chat cannot express them, which is why hospital AI pilots that demo well stall at production, and why the unit of deployment has to be a governed pipeline.
The Chat Window Breaks at Five Agents. CanvasTTY Shows What's Next.
CanvasTTY arranges live terminals and AI-agent CLI sessions on an infinite canvas instead of in tabs, and zooms out to readable summaries rather than tiny noise. It is a developer tool, but it demonstrates the interface problem every organization running concurrent agents is about to hit: a linear transcript cannot show you five things at once.