Welcome to Eye on AI! In this edition\u2026agentic AI at Brainstorm Tech\u2026Microsoft to buy AI from Anthropic in partial shift from OpenAI\u2026Oracle shares skyrocket on announcement of massive AI deals\u2026AI is coming for YouTube creators.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m on my way back from Fortune Brainstorm Tech, where I spent the week in the mountains of Park City, Utah, with about 300 AI-focused executives\u2014and I\u2019m still thinking about AI agents. (I probably should be thinking about the wind in the evergreens and the first hints of fall color, but that\u2019s life on the AI beat.)<\/p>\n
One of the most popular panels I moderated was on AI agents: autonomous software systems that can perceive their environment, make decisions, and take actions toward goals with little or no human intervention. Full disclosure: The session was sponsored by Salesforce, which has a major stake in the space with its Agentforce platform.<\/p>\n
But the conversation went far beyond one company\u2019s pitch. Leaders from Zillow, Experian, and Okta joined to discuss how agentic AI is beginning to take shape inside large enterprises. Their consensus: Agents aren\u2019t just souped-up chatbots. While it\u2019s still early days, they represent a shift from tools that simply follow instructions to systems that can act on context\u2014ideally within the guardrails companies set.<\/p>\n
Shibani Ahuja, senior vice president of Enterprise IT Strategy at Salesforce, shared what I consider to be a really useful \u201cmaturity model\u201d that helped me understand the evolution of AI agents within enterprise companies:<\/p>\n
Nicholas Stevens, vice president of product for AI and home loans at Zillow, offered a concrete example of where the company is on this maturity scale\u2014which, to my ear, sounded like Level 1 edging into Level 2. Zillow owns Follow Up Boss, one of the largest CRMs for real estate professionals, where AI is being used to lighten the load of human real estate agents juggling calls, notes, follow-ups, and property tours.<\/p>\n
At first, Stevens explained, the tools are basic\u2014summarizing calls or drafting a message that a human agent can edit. But over time, they begin taking on more autonomous tasks, like sending a pre-approval letter or booking a tour. The progression isn\u2019t just about the technology, he said, but about user trust. Many real estate agents prefer to review and customize outputs early on. Yet as the system learns their tone, quirks, and even emoji preferences, they become more comfortable handing off responsibility.<\/p>\n
Kathleen Peters, chief innovation officer at Experian, said the company already has conversational agents that recommend actions and now carry them out\u2014for example, walking a customer through the steps to boost a credit score. On the B2B side, Experian\u2019s agents are helping financial institutions assess risk in loan and credit card underwriting, shifting decision-making power from data science teams to product managers and even retail bankers. Looking ahead, Peters said the next step is \u201cagents talking to agents, especially with a number of our partners like Zillow.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of the things I\u2019m particularly concerned about, though, is agent security\u2014especially as companies start implement protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol), a framework that standardizes how LLMs connect to and interact with external data sources, tools, and services. When I asked how many in the room had already implemented MCP in their organizations, many raised their hand. Bhawna Singh, chief technology officer of cybersecurity platform Okta, put my concern into perspective: She pointed out that before MCP, there wasn\u2019t even a common understanding to start from regarding AI agents. While it\u2019s early days, she said, and she acknowledged that MCP opens up a new attack surface that boosts the risk of malicious or spoofed agents, having a standard is a big step forward.\u00a0Clearly, though, many enterprises won\u2019t be able to get to Level 3 or Level 4 without more confidence in the safety and security of protocols like MCP.<\/p>\n
Salesforce\u2019s Ahuja agreed that the future was not about building agents that are \u201cwild and free.\u201d Instead, it would be about setting deterministic parameters for the things that must be consistent and reliable, while allowing adaptive reasoning where richer, more context-dependent answers are valuable.<\/p>\n
I came away a bit surprised at how seriously these executives are taking the journey towards implementing AI agents across industries. They seemed realistic yet optimistic, even though there is plenty of hype out there\u2013just six months ago, my former colleague Sage Lazarro wrote<\/a> in Eye on AI that some AI agent customers said the reality did not match the hype. Maybe it\u2019s just like some of the young trees that were swaying outside my hotel window in Park City: growing fast, not yet fully mature, but still well worth watching.<\/p>\n With that, here\u2019s the rest of the AI news.<\/p>\n Sharon Goldman<\/strong> FORTUNE ON AI<\/p>\n Cohere looks to shed its underdog status with a star AI hire, new CFO, and $7 billion valuation\u2014chasing \u2018ROI over AGI\u2019<\/a> \u2014by Sharon Goldman\u00a0<\/p>\n For OpenAI\u2019s chief revenue officer, research chops rather than \u2018big marketing efforts\u2019 is the key to winning customers<\/a> \u2014by Sharon Goldman<\/p>\n AI for chemistry startup CuspAI raises $100 million in new venture capital funding<\/a> \u2014by Jeremy Kahn<\/p>\n AI IN THE NEWS<\/p>\n Microsoft to buy AI from Anthropic in partial shift from OpenAI. <\/b>Microsoft is breaking from its deep reliance on OpenAI by bringing Anthropic\u2019s Claude models into Office 365, according to<\/a> The Information, marking its biggest move yet to diversify AI providers. In the coming weeks, the company will announce that Office Copilot features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook will be powered by a mix of Anthropic and OpenAI technology. Executives say Anthropic\u2019s models, hosted on AWS, outperformed OpenAI\u2019s in key areas like generating financial functions in spreadsheets and producing more polished PowerPoint decks. While the shift could be seen as a bargaining tactic amid tense negotiations with OpenAI over its restructuring and IPO ambitions, insiders emphasize that Microsoft is simply going with the best-performing models.\u00a0<\/p>\n Oracle shares skyrocket on announcement of massive AI deals. <\/b>The Wall Street Journal reported<\/a> Oracle shares soared nearly 40% after the company disclosed a string of multibillion-dollar AI-related contracts, signaling far greater traction in the cloud infrastructure race than expected. The software giant reported $455 billion in outstanding contract revenue for the quarter ending Aug. 31\u2014more than four times last year\u2019s level\u2014and said additional mega-deals could soon push that figure above $500 billion. CEO Safra Catz called it an \u201castonishing quarter,\u201d citing demand for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure from OpenAI, Meta, and Elon Musk\u2019s xAI, among others. Analysts noted the backlog, which includes the $500 billion Stargate supercomputer venture with SoftBank and OpenAI, makes Oracle\u2019s long-term revenue targets highly achievable. Once seen as a cloud laggard, Oracle is now positioning itself as a central player in supplying infrastructure for the AI boom, aided by Larry Ellison\u2019s close ties with tech leaders like Elon Musk and Nvidia\u2019s Jensen Huang.<\/p>\n AI is coming for YouTube creators.<\/b> According to reporting<\/a> from The Atlantic, YouTube creators like Jon Peters, who built an audience of over a million subscribers by sharing woodworking tutorials, now face the threat of obsolescence as their videos are being quietly scraped to train AI. Researchers have identified more than 15 million YouTube videos in AI training datasets\u2014often without creators\u2019 knowledge or permission\u2014including instructional, news, and educational content. Tech companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia have used these datasets to develop generative video tools that can churn out custom clips, raising unresolved legal questions about copyright and fair use. While companies argue the practice is lawful, critics warn it could undermine creators\u2019 livelihoods as AI-generated videos increasingly compete with and even overshadow authentic human-made work.<\/p>\n AI CALENDAR<\/p>\n Oct. 6-10:<\/strong>\u00a0World\u00a0AI\u00a0Week, Amsterdam<\/p>\n Oct. 21-22:<\/strong>\u00a0TedAI San Francisco. Apply to attend\u00a0here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n Dec. 2-7:<\/strong>\u00a0NeurIPS, San Diego\n<\/p>\n Dec. 8-9:\u00a0<\/strong>Fortune Brainstorm\u00a0AI\u00a0San Francisco. Apply to attend\u00a0here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n EYE ON AI NUMBERS116%<\/p>\n
sharon.goldman@fortune.com<\/a>
@sharongoldman<\/a><\/p>\n