All posts tagged: enterprise

The DOGE Boys Get VC Funding to Support Their Latest Enterprise

The DOGE Boys Get VC Funding to Support Their Latest Enterprise

Published by skeptic

Former members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have launched a startup to, they say, bring “DOGE for the private sector.” Their holding company, called Special, has backing from billionaire Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm a16z and several other former DOGE members. In a post on a16z’s Substack, Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, who led DOGE’s efforts at several government agencies, write that their startup will build “an operating system to transform critical American industries with AI,” and claim that “Main Street,” like the federal government, is inefficient. The plan, according to Fox and Cavanaugh, is to “vertically integrate,” buying up businesses in critical sectors and running them using Special’s operating system. Their first target is senior care, with a vertical called FigureHealth. In an interview on TBPN, Cavanaugh said that Special is also looking at “markets like construction, manufacturing, other very labor intensive, highly regulated markets that a lot of the learnings we had from DOGE can then get applied back into the private sector.” Their work also purports to target waste, …

Anthropic says 80% of its new production code is now authored by Claude — how your enterprise can keep up

Anthropic says 80% of its new production code is now authored by Claude — how your enterprise can keep up

Published by skeptic

Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei said it was coming, but it still feels like a milestone: More than 80% of the code merged into Anthropic’s production codebase in May wasn’t authored by humans, but by its own AI model, Claude, according to a new report shared by the record-breaking AI startup today. This transformation has triggered an 8x increase in the volume of code shipped per engineer per quarter compared to the company’s 2021–2025 baseline, which the company notes means even more code someone or something must review. For enterprise technical leaders, this is no longer a localized research curiosity; it’s a new, aggressive competitive baseline. If a frontier AI laboratory can successfully offload the vast majority of its engineering output to autonomous agents — showing signs of the long-sought AI Holy Grail of “recursive self-improvement,” models that can independently research and upgrade themselves — what’s preventing enterprises across other sectors from automating more of their internal software development with AI agents, too? Obviously, it’s easier said than done. Anthropic is one of the …

Google’s new open source Gemma 4 12B analyzes audio, video — and runs entirely locally on a typical 16GB enterprise laptop

Google’s new open source Gemma 4 12B analyzes audio, video — and runs entirely locally on a typical 16GB enterprise laptop

Published by skeptic

While many AI open source model providers are pursuing larger and more powerful models, Google is still giving attention to the smaller, more local side of the market. Today, the tech giant released Gemma 4 12B, an 11.95-billion-parameter open-weights model with permissive Apache 2.0 license optimized to execute locally on a standard enterprise laptop using just 16GB of VRAM or unified memory. That means those enterprise users looking to keep working with AI while on a flight without WiFi, or trying to keep it offline for security reasons, can now do so far more easily and at far less cost (free to download and operate). Gemma 4 12B’s most notable breakthrough is an encoder-free “Unified” architecture, which allows raw audio waveforms and visual patches to flow directly into the core LLM backbone without the latency or memory overhead of secondary processing modules. Available immediately for download on Hugging Face and Kaggle and for use on Google AI Edge Gallery, Gemma 4 12B packs a 256K token context window, native agentic tool-use capabilities, and an explicit …

The Agentic Reckoning: Enterprise AI organizations have a runtime problem, not a model problem — and most are building the wrong solution

The Agentic Reckoning: Enterprise AI organizations have a runtime problem, not a model problem — and most are building the wrong solution

Published by skeptic

In Q1 2026, VentureBeat’s Pulse Research surfaced the “Governance Mirage”: the gap between the governance org charts enterprises had drawn and the control layers they had actually built. Forty-three percent said a central team owned AI governance; 23% couldn’t agree on who owned it at all; and 31% named vendor opacity as the single biggest obstacle. This new wave of research asks the next question: Once you’ve admitted the governance problem, what breaks first when you try to fix it? The answer from our respondents is unambiguous. The failure point is not the model. It’s the runtime. Enterprises are discovering that AI agents built on stateless infrastructure — Python scripts, LangChain chains, ad hoc orchestration — cannot survive the operational realities of production. Container restarts erase context. Token costs breach business cases. Hallucinations in Step 3 compound into catastrophic failures by Step 12. And the majority of engineering teams are spending more time managing this “plumbing” than building the intelligence that was supposed to justify the investment. What emerges from this survey is a picture …

Meet Microsoft Scout, Your AI Coworker That Never Logs Off

Meet Microsoft Scout, Your AI Coworker That Never Logs Off

Published by skeptic

Soon, your coworkers in Microsoft Teams might not all be human. Scout, an always-on AI agent announced at Microsoft’s Build developer conference on Tuesday, can go through your work messages, calendar, and email inbox to automate tasks, reschedule meeting conflicts, and draft professional-sounding responses. Microsoft more or less built an enterprise agent on top of OpenClaw, the AI tool that riveted San Francisco’s early adopters at the start of 2026. Scout is designed specifically to be an assistant for office folks, who can send commands directly in Teams as if the agent was a carbon-based coworker. Scout is part of Microsoft’s larger, agent-first transformation, automating how knowledge workers use software and inserting AI assistants into daily office interactions. “Your company essentially hires your assistant,” says Omar Shahine, the newly appointed corporate vice president of Microsoft Scout. “The whole point of having a personal assistant is that they’re working when you’re not working.” So, while you’re munching on some Doritos and gossiping next to the office vending machine, Scout is busy blocking off calendar time for …

Enterprise AI agents keep creating data silos. Microsoft’s Build answer is Microsoft IQ and Rayfin.

Enterprise AI agents keep creating data silos. Microsoft’s Build answer is Microsoft IQ and Rayfin.

Published by skeptic

Every new AI agent your team deploys starts from scratch: no memory of how the business works, where data lives, or what rules apply. And as agentic coding tools spin up applications faster than anyone can govern them, each one risks becoming another silo outside your data layer entirely. Microsoft is addressing both problems directly at Build 2026. According to VentureBeat’s VB Pulse’s Q1 2026 RAG Infrastructure Market Tracker, hybrid retrieval intent among 100-plus employee organizations tripled from 10.3% in January to 33.3% in March, a signal that enterprises have moved past expanding RAG coverage and are now focused on the architecture underneath it. Shared business context is the part retrieval does not solve. On the context side, Microsoft is expanding Fabric IQ, its existing business data context layer, into a broader unified system called Microsoft IQ, adding three additional context sources covering how the organization works, what it knows and real-time global signals from the web, so any agent can tap all four as a single foundation. On the application side, Rayfin, a new …

Work IQ is Microsoft’s big bet on agent-first enterprise IT, and I have questions

Work IQ is Microsoft’s big bet on agent-first enterprise IT, and I have questions

Published by skeptic

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways Microsoft is building Work IQ for agent-first enterprises. Agents can discover data structures dynamically at runtime. The biggest concerns are cost, governance, and exposure. Work IQ is a new offering from Microsoft that showcases two quintessential Microsoft skills: the ability to solve complex technical and infrastructure problems with an elegantly sophisticated solution, and the ability to make something almost impossible to explain. But I’m going to try. Work IQ is the result of Microsoft completely redesigning how enterprise software works. Yeah, it’s that big.  If you think about how the enterprise software ecosystem has worked for the past few decades, it’s consisted of applications and data (together, let’s call them “solutions”) that worked on their own, or passed data between one another. Also: Enterprise AI agents are multiplying fast, and Microsoft wants full control of them Those solutions were often linked either through data transfer protocols or APIs. But no matter what, some human had to code the …

OpenAI’s Codex update lets agents build interactive enterprise workspaces via Sites and role-specific plugins

OpenAI’s Codex update lets agents build interactive enterprise workspaces via Sites and role-specific plugins

Published by skeptic

Agentic AI is moving rapidly from the developer terminal to the corporate world. On Tuesday, OpenAI announced a major update of its agentic AI platform Codex, introducing domain-specific workflows, a rapid, semi-private web hosting feature within it for enterprises called “Sites,” and an in-place editing tool named “Annotations”. The release marks a deliberate strategy to transform Codex from a specialized programming assistant into an everyday operating environment for business professionals. Non-developers—including financial analysts, marketers, operators, and researchers—now constitute approximately 20% of the platform’s 5 million weekly users and are adopting the technology three times faster than traditional engineers, according to research shared by OpenAI with VentureBeat and other outlets. OpenAI is capitalizing on this shift to position Codex as the premier application for white-collar task automation. The timing of the announcement is highly strategic, arriving precisely as its own primary investor turned business rival Microsoft this week kicks off its annual BUILD developer conference in San Francisco—where a slate of competing enterprise productivity tools is expected—and hot on the heels of Anthropic’s rapid adoption among …

AI agents keep giving confident wrong answers. The context layer is enterprise AI’s next production problem.

AI agents keep giving confident wrong answers. The context layer is enterprise AI’s next production problem.

Published by skeptic

Enterprise AI agents have a new production failure mode, and it is not the model. As enterprises move from single-layer RAG to hybrid retrieval architectures, the same underlying data produces different answers depending on which agent, tool or system asks the question. Revenue means one thing in a business intelligence (BI) dashboard, something slightly different in a SQL table and something else again in an agent instruction. The retrieval infrastructure build-out of the past two years produced faster and cheaper vector search. It did not produce a shared definition of what the data means. At Snowflake Summit 26 in San Francisco, the data cloud vendor is taking a broad swing at that problem, with announcements spanning a Kafka-compatible managed streaming service called Data Stream, adaptive compute improvements, expanded Apache Iceberg interoperability and updates to its Cowork and CoCo agent and coding products. Running underneath all of it is a context layer: Horizon Context and Cortex Sense, a two-layer system designed to give agents a governed, shared definition of business logic across retrieval stacks. The context …

Fly-tipping has become a national criminal enterprise, new report warns | UK | News

Fly-tipping has become a national criminal enterprise, new report warns | UK | News

Published by Sam Flores

Fly-tipping has become a national criminal enterprise, a major new report warns. The illegal dumping of waste is devastating rural communities, damaging the environment and costing the UK economy hundreds of millions of pounds every year, according to the Future Countryside and the National Rural Crime Network. The paper argues that the current system for dealing with fly-tipping is fragmented, inconsistent and failing victims. The report – Breaking the Cycle: Tackling Fly-Tipping and Waste Crime – highlights growing evidence that organised criminal gangs are increasingly involved. It makes a series of recommendations including a single national reporting system for waste crime incidents. Tim Passmore, chair of the National Rural Crime Network, said: “This report exposes a system that is failing. “Waste crime and fly-tipping is not low-level nuisance offending – it is serious, organised criminality that is damaging our environment, hitting rural communities hard and leaving innocent victims to foot the bill. “Criminals know the risks are low and the rewards are high. That has to change. “We need tougher enforcement, sharper accountability and a …