industry-news

Microsoft's Autogen lets you hand a team of AI agents an objective and watch them prototype and deliver, echoing Adam Smith's insight that specialised collaboration drove the industrial revolution. But teams bring meetings, groupthink and cost. So when does a team of AIs beat one?

Gartner has named agentic AI its top strategic technology trend for 2025, predicting 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously by 2028, up from 0% today. The open question for leaders: which gains are genuinely feasible now, not in 2028?

Our debut at the Shropshire Business Festival on 11 April landed the same day as Google's AI Agents keynote, sparking lively discussion on generative AI and agents in the workplace. Thanks to Ben Simpson, Hugh Strickland and Chris Henderson.

OpenAI's o1 and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 both score just 21% on the ARC reasoning benchmark, against 84% for humans, with a $1m prize. We wrapped Claude in an agentic framework that forms hypotheses, tests them and course-corrects. How far did the score jump?

Agentic AI arrived in four steps: from DeepMind's AlphaZero, through AutoGPT learning to use tools, to Stanford's Voyager adapting skills in Minecraft, to teams of agents writing and testing their own software. So what made today's agents capable of running a business process?

In one week Google launched its Vertex AI agent framework and Andrew Ng devoted The Batch to multi-agent collaboration. So why does splitting a task across 'software engineer', 'QA' and 'product manager' agents outperform a single agent — and how should leaders manage them?

In 2025 Google released the Agent Development Kit and Agent-to-Agent protocol, the plumbing for assistants that search, compare and transact for users. Soon your customer isn't a person clicking a link; it's an agent. So how do you keep your service in the running?

Google DeepMind quietly released GemmaScope, tools that expose and tune individual 'features' inside a language model. Agentico used them on Gemma-2-9B to change how an AI reasons, even who it thinks it is. Why does its 'civil law' feature switch off when you type 'Putin'?

Gartner says a third of enterprise software purchases will involve an AI agent by 2028, and machines are assumed immune to persuasion. We ran 8,000 trials across five frontier models. Which techniques work, which backfire, and what does that mean for selling to agents?

Microsoft Research gave our data science team a shout-out at their annual conference for a team of AI agents, built on the AutoGen framework, that converse freely to write code and investigate data in Jupyter Notebooks.

A pleasure to join the Tech and Innovation roundtable on 5 June, led by Oxford Brookes University — a room of R&D-focused SMEs, from carbon fibre manufacturers to zero-emission transport operators, where we chipped in for AI. Thanks to Richard Rosser at B4 Business.

The gap between top models has collapsed to 5%, and GPT-3.5-level inference cost fell 280-fold in under two years. If AI is now a commodity, competitors can buy the same agent tomorrow. So where does durable advantage live, and why can't it be bought?

Google's AI Co-Scientist matched in two days what PhD researchers took months to discover on bacterial gene transfer, and published how its agents did it. The architecture shows where real AI value comes from. So what separates the firms that profit from those left behind?

Google Brain founder Andrew Ng says agents are the trend to watch. He sets out four reasoning patterns — reflection, tool use, planning and multi-agent collaboration — and a claim: GPT-3.5 arranged into agents can out-code GPT-4. Why would the weaker model win?

Everyone argues about AI writing content. The bigger shift is AI now reading it: businesses deploy agent teams to search, rank and summarise thousands of pages, ignoring clickbait and pretty design. So what must marketers actually change when their audience is a machine?

Berkeley's second Agentic AI Summit drew Google, OpenAI, NVIDIA, IBM and frontier researchers for talks on where agents are heading, from Chi Wang's MassGen to the Linux Foundation's 'Internet of Agents'. So what does the near future of agentic AI actually hold for enterprises?