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.
Introducing fleming-1, Sierra’s own model for detecting when the caller on a phone call is another agent.
Sara Brooks, Chief Growth Officer at BetterHelp, shares how her team built their brand into every AI agent, and why adoption starts with a leader willing to do the work themselves. The post Leading from the front: How BetterHelp’s Chief Growth Officer is building an AI-native marketing engine appeared first on WRITER .
Gemini is everywhere in Google apps: it can read your emails, pull in data from your calendar, and find that file you accidentally saved to your work Drive. But no matter how much of your work is in Google, there are always other apps you'll need Gemini to access: things like your CRM, project management tool, marketing automation platform, and help desk, to name a few. Gemini connectors add a…
Build an agent that pays for real purchases. Restock runs in Slack on Managed Deep Agents and pays with Stripe's Link over the Machine Payments Protocol.
I have two voices in my head when it comes to new tech. One is the wide-eyed optimist who wants to try every tool and click every AI button. The other wants to delete every app on my phone, move to a cabin in the woods, and write by candlelight. There's no doubt AI is exciting. It's already helping teams save time, be more creative, and get through the workday with fewer repetitive headaches. But…
As a writer covering technology and AI, I spend plenty of time separating useful information from the hype. A good AI newsletter can help cut through that noise. But the best newsletter depends on what you need. Someone making AI strategy decisions needs different coverage than someone looking for an AI workflow they can try this afternoon. To find the best AI newsletters, I started by…
Deep Agents now lets you bind tools to skills, pin skills at runtime, and reload skills mid-thread, so agents with expansive skill repositories stay context-efficient and effective.
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.
LangChain just released new capabilities in Managed Deep Agents. Agents can now schedule follow-ups, reconfigure themselves on every run, and react to Slack messages.
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.
The transition from isolated large language models (LLMs) to interoperable multi-agent systems promises a revolutionary leap in productivity. It will allow autonomous AI to negotiate, trade, and collaborate across company lines. Agents from third-party vendors and partners can access data and execute tasks across your platform, a fluidity that’s a fundamental engine of strategic growth. […]
Anyone can share knowledge as quickly and easily as you can upload a video to YouTube. But to explore a topic in depth, build a community, earn an income, or grow your business by selling online courses? That takes a more robust setup to help you design course pages, build out a curriculum, and promote your course. I've been updating this article for several years, and this year, after…
Gmail and Yahoo Mail (a.k.a. Yahoo! Mail a.k.a. Ymail) are two of the biggest email providers. While the stats are hard to verify and seldom updated, Google's Gmail is reportedly responsible for over a third of opened emails and has 3 billion active users, while the partially Verizon-owned Yahoo Mail, despite launching in 1997, apparently has around 225 million active users per month. Whatever way…
Gemini, Google's AI chatbot, offers all the same features you'd expect from any AI chatbot: it can browse the web, conduct in-depth research, analyze and visualize data, generate AI images and videos, you name it, it can do it. But, for my money, the best thing about Gemini is that it integrates deeply with other Google products. Want to search your Gmail file jungle with one prompt? Or summarize…
See how LangGraph orchestrates Jev, TypeSafe AI's decision model, to build faster, cheaper production agents.
AI is moving faster than anyone predicted. At Sierra Summit, we shared how Sierra helps companies stay on the frontier, stay in control as personal agents arrive, and turn customer context into a lasting advantage.
We’re excited to be a launch partner in OpenAI’s new marketplace. Now, eligible customers can build agents with Sierra using their OpenAI commitments.
We’re excited to announce Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard Meta and Sierra are developing along with industry partners at Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart that defines how personal agents interact with businesses.
Rogue agents are a permissions mistake to understand and protect against, not a reason to slow down. Learn how marketing leaders can manage AI agent risks. The post Your AI agent doesn’t need to be evil to ruin your quarter appeared first on WRITER .
Today we’re introducing Sierra’s partner ecosystem: the technology platforms, marketplaces, and service partners bringing Sierra to more businesses worldwide.
Salesforce Principal Architect of Ethical AI Practice Kathy Baxter explains how pairing a probabilistic model with deterministic logic gives agents the ability to take action, without giving up the guardrails.
Anyone who lives in the Google ecosystem has probably used Gemini for a quick draft or a fast answer. (Or if you're like me, you've been driven to your limit by the Google Docs popups encouraging you to use AI whenever your cursor strays too close to the bottom of the screen.) But a chat window is just the beginning of what Gemini can do. Its real power shows up when you connect it to the rest of…
Every capability that made Zapier Agents powerful, tool calling, reasoning, autonomous action, now lives inside a single AI step in the Zap editor, using AI by Zapier. Here, I'll map each Zapier Agents feature to its equivalent in AI by Zapier, so if you're coming from Zapier Agents, you know exactly where to click. What's changed between Zapier Agents and AI by Zapier Zapier Agents consisted of…
Picking a project management app is like wandering through the story of Goldilocks, there are so many options and no perfect fit. It feels like you'll always be sampling scalding porridge and trying to get comfy in a doll-sized bed. Asana is a quality option (so much so that it's made Zapier's list of the best free, small business, and enterprise project management apps), but that doesn't mean…
