Evaluating AI Agents & Automation this quarter? This page brings together what changed, which companies are most active, what practitioners are asking and how to build a shortlist.
Software that plans and acts on its own: agent frameworks, orchestration, tool protocols such as MCP and A2A, and the identity and guardrails that keep agents safe in production.
Start with the news. These are the AI Agents & Automation stories getting the most attention right now, so you know what has shifted before you talk to anyone.
See how LangGraph orchestrates Jev, TypeSafe AI's decision model, to build faster, cheaper production agents.
Why it matters, from the Techarda editors: A concrete example of separating the decision model from the orchestration layer. Useful reading if you are trading off cost and latency for agents in production.
LangSmith Custom Apps lets you build the interface you want with your LangSmith data, publish it into your workspace, and skip the hosting, auth, and permissions work. Learn more.
LangChain announced new updates to LangSmith. Updates include Engine v2 with red teaming and automatic testing, a new version of Managed Deep Agents, trajectories and more.
LangSmith Engine now includes Red Teaming to proactively detect agent issues and automated agent testing. Learn more about the Engine v2 release.
LangChain introduces LangSmith Fine-Tuning and SmithTune, a CLI built for post-training models. Train specialized models without building data pipelines by hand.
In the leadup to Dreamforce 2026, dozens of announcements outlined what enterprises look like when software meets AI, but the event itself filled in the picture. Organizations are being transformed. Ways of working within them are transforming just as quickly. To see how headless architecture, Slack Code, purpose-trained models, and more are going to shape […]
Click publish, exhale. Start again. Tomorrow's post doesn't write itself. What are people discussing right now? Dive into analytics, surface trends, reply to 15 DMs. And then you go viral, your sales dashboard goes through the roof—but no more free time for you in the next three weeks. Congratulations? The content hamster wheel isn't going away, but AI is here to help you run faster, with more…
Those stories keep returning to the same names. These are the companies we track in this category; each profile has its news, solutions and published reviews.
Salesforce is a US enterprise software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, founded in 1999. It sells customer relationship management (CRM) applications including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud, the Agentforce AI agent platform, Data Cloud, Tableau analytics, MuleSoft integration, Slack and Informatica data management. Salesforce is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
ServiceNow is a US enterprise software company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, founded in 2004 by Fred Luddy. Its ServiceNow AI Platform automates workflows across IT service management, IT operations, security, customer service, HR and field service, with AI agents, low-code app building and observability capabilities. ServiceNow is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Microsoft is a global technology company whose enterprise portfolio spans the Azure cloud platform, Microsoft 365 productivity software, Dynamics 365 business applications, security products and developer tools such as GitHub. Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft is one of the largest providers of cloud and AI services to businesses.
Google Cloud is the cloud computing business of Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. It offers Google Cloud Platform infrastructure and services including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, BigQuery, Spanner and the Vertex AI platform with Gemini models, as well as Google Workspace. It serves enterprises, public sector organisations and startups through global cloud regions.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud computing subsidiary of Amazon, headquartered in Seattle and launching its core services in 2006. It offers on-demand infrastructure and platform services including EC2 compute, S3 storage, databases such as Aurora and DynamoDB, EKS containers, IoT, analytics, Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker for AI, and Trainium and Graviton custom chips.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and deployment company that develops the GPT family of large language models, reasoning models, image, video and speech models, and the ChatGPT assistant. It sells access through ChatGPT consumer and business plans and the OpenAI API, which includes tools for building agents. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, OpenAI counts Microsoft as a major investor and partner.
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company founded in 2021 and headquartered in San Francisco. It develops the Claude family of large language models, offered through the Claude apps, the Claude Developer Platform (API), Claude Code for software development, and cloud marketplaces including Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation.
IBM is a US technology company providing hybrid cloud and AI software, infrastructure and consulting. Its portfolio includes Red Hat OpenShift, the watsonx AI and data platform, IBM Z mainframes and Power servers, IBM Storage, Db2 databases, and automation and observability software such as Instana and HashiCorp Terraform. Founded in 1911 and headquartered in Armonk, New York, IBM is listed on the NYSE.
UiPath is an automation software company founded in 2005 in Bucharest, Romania, by Daniel Dines and Marius Tîrcă, and headquartered in New York City. Known for robotic process automation (RPA), it sells an agentic automation platform that combines software robots, AI agents, orchestration, document processing and process mining for enterprises. UiPath is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Automation Anywhere is a US intelligent automation company founded in 2003 and headquartered in San Jose, California. It sells a cloud-native Automation Success Platform combining robotic process automation (RPA), AI agents, intelligent document processing and process discovery, used by enterprises to automate business workflows across finance, operations, customer service and IT.
SAP is a German enterprise software company, SAP SE, headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, and founded in 1972. It sells enterprise resource planning software, notably SAP S/4HANA Cloud, along with the SAP HANA database, SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Data Cloud, the Joule AI copilot and agents, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur and Signavio. SAP is listed in Frankfurt and on the NYSE.
Pegasystems, known as Pega, is an enterprise software company whose Pega Platform provides low-code workflow automation, case management, decisioning and generative AI for large organisations. Its offerings include Pega Infinity, Pega GenAI Blueprint for designing applications, Pega Customer Decision Hub and Pega Customer Service, used heavily in financial services, insurance, healthcare and government. Founded in 1983 by Alan Trefler, Pega is listed on Nasdaq.
Workday is a US enterprise cloud applications company founded in 2005 by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri and headquartered in Pleasanton, California. It sells software for human capital management, financial management, spend management and planning (Adaptive Planning), with AI agents built into its platform, to medium and large organisations. Workday is listed on Nasdaq.
Zapier is a US no-code automation company founded in 2011 in Columbia, Missouri, by Wade Foster, Bryan Helmig and Mike Knoop, and headquartered in San Francisco as a remote-first company. Its platform connects thousands of web applications so users can automate workflows (Zaps) and build AI agents, chatbots, tables and interfaces without code, serving individuals, small businesses and enterprise teams.
Sierra is a US artificial intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco, California, founded in 2023 by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. It builds conversational AI agents that handle customer service and customer experience interactions for businesses across chat, voice and other channels, using its Agent OS platform and agent development tools. Sierra is privately held and venture-backed.
LangChain is a software company that develops open-source frameworks and commercial tooling for building applications and agents on large language models. Its products include the LangChain and LangGraph frameworks for Python and JavaScript and LangSmith, a platform for tracing, evaluating and deploying LLM applications. LangChain began as an open-source project by Harrison Chase in 2022 and is based in San Francisco.
CrewAI is an AI agent company known for its open-source Python framework for orchestrating teams of collaborating AI agents, called crews, that take on defined roles and tasks. Created by João Moura, the framework is used to build multi-agent automations with large language models. CrewAI also offers a commercial platform for building, deploying and monitoring agent workflows in enterprises.
Glean is a US enterprise AI company that provides a work AI platform combining enterprise search, an AI assistant and AI agents grounded in a company's own data and permissions. It connects to applications such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Salesforce and Jira. Founded in 2019 by former Google engineer Arvind Jain, Glean is headquartered in Palo Alto and privately held.
Writer is a US enterprise generative AI company founded in 2020 by May Habib and Waseem AlShikh and headquartered in San Francisco. Its full-stack platform combines its own Palmyra family of large language models, graph-based retrieval (Knowledge Graph) and tools for building and governing AI agents, used by enterprises to automate work in marketing, operations, finance and other functions.
Kore.ai is an enterprise conversational and agentic AI company that provides a platform for building, deploying and managing AI agents and virtual assistants. Its offerings include the Kore.ai Agent Platform and prebuilt solutions for customer service, employee productivity and process automation, used by enterprises in sectors such as banking and healthcare. Founded in 2014 by Raj Koneru, it is headquartered in Orlando, Florida.
Vendor news only tells you half of it. This is what people working in AI Agents & Automation are discussing and asking each other.
We are hearing a lot about agent pilots and far less about agents still running six months later. What was the first use case, what guardrails did you need, and is it still in production?
LangGraph/CrewAI-style frameworks versus packaged agent platforms from the big vendors. If you have tried both, where did each win on time-to-value, control and cost?
With the news, the companies and the open questions in view, the evaluation guide takes you through criteria and trade-offs to a shortlist you can defend.
If you want more background, here is more of the recent coverage.
Searching for a job is becoming a job of its own. With so many open positions, tests, and interview stages, joining the workforce or moving up is becoming harder. And with screening software automatically disqualifying candidates, the chances to get some 1-on-1 time with recruiters grow thin. But you have something powerful in your corner: AI-powered resume builders can help you generate a…
Back when I was scrolling through my first website in the mid-'90s—I'm almost certain it was SpaceJam.com—web forms were still in their nascent stage. Websites were treated more as one-way communication devices, like newspapers. Forms changed all that. At first, forms were clunky HTML elements that you had to pinch-and-zoom to interact with on small screens. Eventually, Jotform, Typeform, and…
You've probably used software built with Claude Code, maybe even already today. Companies like HubSpot and Atlassian use it to fix bugs and ship new features, and Anthropic itself reports that 80% of Claude's code was generated with its AI coding tool. Originally built for engineers, Claude Code packs a wide range of capabilities to speed up the software development process. But it's so easy to…
Anthropic's Claude family has four primary models: Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, and Fable. The version numbers are inconsistent between them; as I write this, Opus 5.5 just dropped, Fable 5.1 came out on September 1, 2026, Sonnet 5 was released on June 30, 2026, and Haiku is still on 4.5 and launched in October 2025—though a new model is due out soon. There's also Mythos, but the general public doesn't…
At Penn State and DePaul University, AI agents are doing more than automating administrative work. By using AI to connect fragmented data and handle routine tasks, colleges can rethink how they support students in their educational journeys.
For decades, enterprise software was a black box — hard for companies to understand, implement, adapt, and integrate, or even replace. With Sierra, nothing is hidden. It’s easy to build an agent, understand the actions it takes, integrate it with existing systems, and make changes directly.
Salesforce customers are at the forefront of the agentic revolution, and they’re already seeing real-world value from it. Early adopters like Box and Engine are finding new efficiencies and improving the experiences of their own customers at scale. But these kinds of tech shifts don’t happen easily, and there are a lot of learning moments […]
Sierra is now AIUC-1 certified, following an independent audit by Schellman and extensive testing by the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC).
Solve the personalization paradox in private markets. See how WRITER scales advisor outreach in your voice, with compliance built in. The post The personalization paradox in private markets distribution appeared first on WRITER .
Jim Lecinski explains why 85% of marketers are stuck in AI transformation. Learn the AI Marketing Canvas, a five-stage framework no marketer can skip. The post The AI Marketing Canvas: Jim Lecinski on why 85% of marketers are stuck in AI transformation appeared first on WRITER .
AI-native marketing rests on three pillars: visibility, differentiation, and always-on orchestration. Learn why productivity is just the baseline for CMOs. The post The three pillars of AI-native marketing: Why productivity is just the baseline appeared first on WRITER .
Sierra’s multimodal agents bring voice, text, and visuals into the same conversation, so customers get the best of each medium without having to pick just one.
Enterprise Brain launches with team-level Agent Memory, plus new WRITER Meet and WRITER for Slack and Microsoft Teams, bringing shared enterprise context to every conversation, agent workflow, and customer touchpoint The post WRITER Unveils Enterprise Brain, the First Universal Context Layer to Power the Agentic Customer Journey appeared first on WRITER .
Discover Enterprise Brain, WRITER's shared context layer for brand, teams, and compliance. Learn how Agent Memory and WRITER Meet keep GTM work on-brand. The post Introducing Enterprise Brain: The shared GTM context layer, for an always-on customer journey that’s distinctly yours appeared first on WRITER .
Today we’re open-sourcing hyper-𝜏-bench, a new long horizon agent evaluation that measures how well models can not only act as an agent, but construct one.
