A year after Microsoft's $1.5B no-code unicorn collapsed amid claims its AI was 700 Indian engineers in a trench coat, the more useful question is not "how did investors miss it?" It's "what happens to the dozens of 2026 agent startups

A Brown University study of 110 therapy sessions, presented at AAAI/ACM and broadly covered in March 2026, found that improved prompting did not resolve the core ethical violations of LLMs acting as mental health counselors. Two months later, Anthropic's Project Deal published the same finding in a

Between February and May 2026, six separate companies shipped six separate products that, taken together, constitute the full infrastructure stack for software to operate as a legal-economic actor in the United States. Identity, custody, banking, merchant spending, machine-to-machine payments, and a legal-entity wrapper. Each piece was

In April 2026, Salesforce launched Headless 360 with sixty-plus MCP tools that let any external agent operate the entire CRM directly. Six months earlier, SAP shipped its MCP Gateway with an explicit architectural decision in the opposite direction: external agents should talk to SAP's agents, not to

Last week's memo named the structural problem in agentic commerce – stronger agents extract surplus from weaker ones, and the losers can't tell. This week is for the operators. If you are a PM at a company whose product will, within twelve months, host transactions between AI

In December 2025, 69 Claude agents ran a real marketplace inside Anthropic's San Francisco office. Stronger agents extracted better prices from weaker ones. The losers couldn't tell. That's not a curiosity – that's the business model of every agent-to-agent platform shipping

Marc Benioff is dismantling the abstraction that built Salesforce. The question is not whether he's right that software is becoming labor. It's whether the company that defined the seat can also define what replaces it. In every technology cycle, there's a moment when the

Two and a half years after Klarna replaced 700 customer service agents with an OpenAI-powered assistant, the company is hiring humans again – and quietly building the architecture every enterprise will need next. In February 2024, Klarna told the world it had done what almost everyone else was still talking

For much of the past year, the technology industry has rallied around a deceptively simple idea: software, enhanced by artificial intelligence, would become a copilot--a responsive assistant embedded into existing workflows. It was a compelling narrative. It was also, increasingly, incomplete. In recent discussions--echoed in conversations across the