Here Comes the Internet of Agents
00:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, Microsoft and the internet of agents, and before that in the headlines,all about the startup that wants to spend a million dollars on agents.The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.Thanks to today's sponsors, KPMG, blutsi.com, and super intelligent, and to get an ad-free version of the show,go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief.Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes.And in fact, we're going to try to be extra fast today, given that it's a long conversation with Microsoft Build,and I'm kind of thinking that there's going to be a lot of densely packed news this week.
00:44Kicking off, though, an interesting story that's been getting a lot of buzz around the internet.A Y Combinator startup is in the market to spend a million dollars on agents.Web crawling company Firecrawl has posted three new ads on YC's jobs board, but humans need not apply.Firecrawl wants a content creation agent, a junior software engineer agent, and a customer support agent,with a $25,000 monthly salary listed for each. Now, they had actually done something similar to thisback in February, but didn't find any AI applicants that were up to the task. However, founder Caleb Pfeffersaid that more than 50 applicants have applied in the week since the ad went live this time.He writes, The future belongs to those who can build and control armies of AI agents. We're hiring
01:23hundreds of them and their creators across our business. And indeed, this is an important detail,although they want these agents to be autonomous, doing things like deciding what to create, creatingit, posting it, and measuring the impact and growing from that feedback, they also want to hirethe human creators behind the agents. Now, obviously this is a publicity stunt, at least in part,but it also is a very first interesting glance at what agent hiring might look like in the future.Pefer said, AI can't replace humans today. The future, what we see, is a world where the next10x engineers are operating armies of agents, AI systems that they're building, maintaining, and monitoring.What we want to do is work with people that want to be one of those agent operators.
02:01This, my friends, is a theme that you will hear lots about when we get into Microsoft Build.Next up, however, another story on the theme of digital teammates.Salesforce has announced something called Agent Force in Slack that allows companies to build and deploytask-specific AI agents that can interact and have access to Slack, which is, of course,where many employees are already spending their time.Salesforce Chief Product Officer Rob Seaman said,similar to how employees with specialized skills and knowledge collaborate to solve problems,our customers need AI agents that collaborate to solve problems for both their own customers
02:33and their employees. Now VentureBeat sees this as a shift from trying to havegeneral purpose agent to more specialized agents. But it seems to me like if each of the agentsis more limited in scope, their capabilities have increased. John Cusera, the SVP of SalesforceAI said, with these digital teammates in Agent Force and Slack, AI agents can reason and takemulti-step actions like orchestrating workflows, interacting with multiple systems across the business,and adapting their approach to the specific task at hand. TLDR, digital teammates are here.Next up, a follow-up to a story from last week. XAI has followed through in its promise and revealedGROC's system prompts, which show that the chatbot is supposed to be a hardwired skeptic.
03:13Among the instructions, GROC is directed to be balanced and neutral. It's also told, quote,you are extremely skeptical. You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media.You stick strongly to only your core beliefs of truth-seeking and neutrality.Now, it's important to note that we didn't get access to the system prompt that went haywirelast week, but this system prompt certainly falls in line with Elon Musk's public personality.I think outside of the specifics, it gives us more of a look into how AI chatbots are programmed.In a separate prompt for the tweet analysis tool, for example,GROC has instructed to, quote,
03:44provide truthful and based insights, challenging mainstream narratives if necessary,but remain objective.So if you're wondering why GROC seems more,edgy than its rivals, that's probably your answer.Overall, people are excited about this, but want to see it taken to the next level.Daniel Kokotajlowe writes, publishing system prompts for the public to see? Good. Thank you.I encourage you to extend this to the spec more generally, i.e. publish and update a live documentdetailing what goals, principles, values, instructions, etc. you're trying to give GROC.
04:12The equivalent of OpenAI's model spec and Anthropics Constitution. Otherwise, you arereserving to yourself the option of putting secret agendas or instructions in the post-training.system prompt is only part of the picture.X-AI engineering leader Igor Babushkin responded to that writing, good point.So is this a turning point for AI transparency?Certainly can't hurt.Lastly today, some more information from inside the guts of a high-growth AI startup.A piece in the information has shared a number of details about perplexity's financial
04:41inner workings, including the fact that last year the company made $34 million in revenue,but burned about $65 million.Still, because of its very frequent fundraising, it ended 2024 with around 850 million in the bank.Their biggest source of cost was web services for R&D, including AWS, at $48 million.That's more than double, for example, what they spent on payroll.Still, while they're losing money, it feels like this is a pretty good base to build from.The question then remains, just can perplexity continue to prove that there remains a massive opportunityin what used to be pejoratively called AI rappers?
05:18A question to continue pondering, but for now, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily BriefHeadlines edition. Next up, the main episode.Today's episode is brought to you by KPMG. In today's fiercely competitive market, unlockingAI's potential could help give you a competitive edge, foster growth, and drive new value.But here's the key. You don't need an AI strategy. You need to embed AI into your overallbusiness strategy to truly power it up. KPMG can show you how to integrate AI and AI agentsinto your business strategy in a way that truly works and is built on trusted AI principles andplatforms. Check out real stories from KPMG to hear how AI is driving success with its clients
05:57at www.kpmg.org.com slash AI. Again, that's www.kpmg.comg.coms slash AI.Today's episode is brought to you by Blitzy, the Enterprise Autonomous Software DevelopmentPlatform with Infinite Code Context, which, if you don't know exactly what that means yet,Do not worry we're going to explain, and it's awesome.So Blitzy is used alongside your favorite coding copilot as your batch software development platformfor the enterprise, and it's meant for those who are seeking dramatic development accelerationon large-scale codebases.Traditional co-pilots help developers with line-by-line completions and snippets, but Blitzy works
06:32ahead of the IDEE, first documenting your entire code base, then deploying more than3,000 coordinated AI agents working in parallel to batch build millions of lines of high-qualitycode for large-scale software projects.So then whether it's code-based refactors, modernizations, or bulk development of your product roadmap,the whole idea of Blitsey is to provide Enterprise's dramatic velocity improvement.To put it in simpler terms, for every line of code eventually provided to the human engineering team,Blitzy will have written it hundreds of times, validating the output with different agentsto get the highest quality code to the enterprise in batch.
07:04Projects then that would normally require dozens of developers working for monthscan now be completed with a fraction of the team in weeks,empowering organizations to dramatically shorten development cycles and bring products to market faster than ever.If your enterprise is looking to accelerate software development, whether it's large-scale modernization,refactoring, or just increasing the rate of your STLC, contact Blitzy at blitzy.com,that's B-L-I-T-Z-Y dot com, to book a custom demo, or just press get started and start using the product right away.Today's episode is brought to you by Super Intelligent and more specifically Super's Agent Readiness Audits.If you've been listening for a while, you have probably heard me talk about this.
07:41But basically the idea of the agent readiness audit is that this is a system that we've createdto help you benchmark and map opportunities in your organizations where agents couldspecifically help you solve your problems, create new opportunities in a way that, again,is completely customized to you.When you do one of these audits, what you're going to do is a voice-based agent interviewwhere we work with some number of your leadership and employees to map what's going oninside the organization and to figure out where you are in your agent journey.That's going to produce an agent readiness score that comes with a deep set of explanations,
08:17strength, weaknesses, key findings, and of course a set of very specific recommendationsthat then we have the ability to help you go find the right partners to actually fulfill.So if you are looking for a way to jumpstart your agent strategy, send us an email at agentat bsuper.a.i, and let's get you plugged into the agentic era.Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief.As we discussed yesterday, this is a big week for big tech conferences, specificallyAI Frontier Lab conferences, and Microsoft got us kicked off with the first day of MicrosoftBuild.
08:50And in case you had any doubts, what this was going to be about, I would simply point you tothis anchor post by Microsoft Chief Communications Officer Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft Build2025, the age of AI agents and buildingthe OpenAgentic web. This was not a day of announcing some big new model. There was no announcementof any weird competition with OpenAI or anything like that. This was a day where Microsoft'sassertion that 2025 is the year of the frontier firm, where intelligence can be bought on tap,where human agent teams up in the org chart, and where every employee becomes an agent boss,is not some far away in the future thing, but right here, right now. In fact, if you're
09:35If you were watching this presentation and you were in Enterprise, that was anything other thanup to your eyeballs in agents, goodness gracious would you have felt behind.We've been talking for a while now about how we've reached an inflection point, where allof our cute little conversations about pilots and explorations and the future are justquaint compared to the here and now assertive reality of change.And the fingerprints of that change are all over this event.Let's start by just looking at this blog post.Microsoft, again, via their chief communications officer, writes,
10:09We've entered the era of AI agents.Thanks to groundbreaking advancements in reasoning and memory,AI models are now more capable and efficient.We envision a world in which agents operate across individual organizational teamand end-to-end business contexts.This emerging vision of the Internet is an open-agentic web,where AI agents make decisions and perform tasks on behalf of users or organizations.At Microsoft, we're showing the steps we're taking to make this vision a reality through our
10:35platforms, products, and infrastructure.We're putting new models and coding agents in the hands of developers, introducing enterprise-gradeagents, making our platforms the best places to build, embracing open protocols and acceleratingscientific discovery with AI, all so that developers and organizations can go invent the next bigthing.And it's worth taking a pause here and zooming out for a second.Yesterday, I talked about the five vectors of AI competition, two of them being agentsand the enterprise. And these are obviously very interlinked in some ways, if for no other reason
11:06that the enterprise is about to be completely transformed by agents. The gist of what Microsoft is sayingin that Work Trend Index report is that pretty much all the stuff that we do now, the actualdoing of the work, will be done by agents in the future. The people who are doing that work nowwill be managing the agents in the future. Your experience in the skills you've built up to this pointwill be redeployed in service of managing teams of these digital employees who are doing the workthat you used to do. Now, what's interesting, I think, about the ubiquity of agents and openagentic web and all of these things all across this Microsoft presentation is that in some ways,it actually makes sense that Microsoft, as the default leader in enterprise software worldwide,
11:50would be the deepest in and making the deepest bet in and around agents. They have a front row seatto the changes that are coming. And those changes are, frankly, whether they have the best software or not,in many, if not most cases, coming through Microsoft Rails. CEO Satchi Nadella reinforced this messagewith his summary thread on Twitter about this. Today, he writes, at Build, we showed you how we arebuilding the open agentic web. It's reshaping every layer of the stack, and our goal is to helpevery dev build apps and agents that empower people in orgs everywhere. Sotchi then goes on to sharethe five big things that were announced today. So let's go through those announcementsstarting with their coding agent. Nadella writes,
12:30we're taking GitHub co-pilot from being a pair programmer to a peer programmer.You now have a full coding agent built right into GitHub.You can assign it issues, whether it's bug fixes, new features, or ongoing code maintenance.And it will complete these tasks autonomously.We'll go back to that graphic I had about the five vectors of AI competition.Outside of agents and enterprise, another one was, of course, coding.And we expected to hear something about this.Now, I'm not sure that this is a particularly overwhelming announcement.
12:55In fact, many people have wondered how GitHub, which had such a lead with Copilot,allowed so many of these other platforms to basically lap it with developer affiliation.At the same time, though, GitHub Copilot has the benefit of installs inside enterprises,something that Cursor and WinSurf just can't match.Now, the details of the coding agent itself were pretty de rigueur.GitHub says the agent incorporates context from related issue or PR discussionsand follows any custom repository instructions, blah, blah, blah, blah.The point is, the coding agent kind of does what you would expect it to do.
13:27In fact, the part of the announcement, which was a little bit more buried, but which was waymore exciting to developers, at least on X, was that Nadella and Microsoft also announcedthat VS code, of which both cursor and windsurf are forks, would go completely open source.Next on Nadella's list, copilot tuning.He writes, copilot can now learn your company's unique tone and language.It's all about taking that expertise you have as a firm and further amplifying it so everyonehas access. And to me, what was actually interesting about this is that if you go check outthe blog post that announced this particular piece, it's an even clearer representation of just
14:01how much Microsoft is actually pushing its enterprise customers into the future. Now, copilottuning is something that is likely to be extremely successful with organizations. It reminds me ofwhat Glein has been doing, offering basically organizations the easy ability without a ton of technicalcapability to tune AI models using their own data. That being,embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem will be extremely appealing. And more than that, shows that we aregetting to the advanced levels of using AI inside companies, not just hovering around the edges withour cute little co-pilot pilots. Putting another explanation point on that idea, they also announcedmulti-agent orchestration to, as they put it, enable agents to work together as a team with human
14:41oversight and direction. As part of that announcement, they said that already more than 230,000organizations, including 90% of the Fortune 500, are using Copilot Studio to create and customizeagents. The fact that Microsoft has now gotten into the agent orchestration game shows howquickly agents are finding their way across the entire organization. Again, the message is clear.Microsoft is saying, basically, that even if you don't have enough agents yet that you're going toneed orchestration, you will really soon. Next up is Agent Factory. Nadella writes,Foundry is the complete app platform for building apps and agents.We're adding more support for models from GROC, Hugging Face, Meta, Mistral, and more,
15:23plus agentic retrieval in Azure AI search, Foundry agent service, integration withcopilot studio and more.And we're ensuring the tools that you already use for identity, management, and securitywill now all extend to agents too.So two big parts of this announcement, obviously.Agent, agent, agent, agent, agent, and specifically enterprise-grade agents.And second, wait, did he say GROC?Yes, one of the things that people jumped on was that OpenAI and Sam Altman antagonist Elon Musk
15:48was invited to be a part of the conversation.Now, it's not surprising at all if you've been watching Microsoft Strategy that they would integrate GROC.They want Azure to be a neutral place where you can get access to all the different models,even if they have a preferential relationship with some of the companies that have their modelson there like OpenAI. People will, I'm sure, be looking for this to be a gotcha moment,proving yet again that Microsoft and OpenAI are breaking up.but this feels completely inevitable.What's more interesting is what the information picked up on, whereas they put it,
16:19Musk said Grok was proving useful in customer service at both SpaceX and Tesla, and he hopesto sell that service to other companies.Quote, in other words, Musk wants to sell Grok to businesses just as other AI firms want to do.Question, of course, is who will Grok's enterprise customers be, and how seriouslydoes Elon want to pursue the enterprise opportunity?By the way, there were some other guest appearances at the event.Sam Altman was there virtually as well.Nadela and Altman talked about how the role of developers is changing.
16:47The 2021, one of the very first things we did together in GitHub.And we've been talking about how someday we'd get to like a real agentic coding experience.And it's kind of wild to me that it's finally here.I think this is one of the biggest changes to programming that I've ever seen.But this idea that you now have a real virtual teammate that you can assign work to,that you can say, hey, go off and do some of the stuff you were just doing.increasingly more advanced things, you know, at some point say, like, I got a big idea, go offand work for a couple of days and do it, and that you can issue many requests in parallel,
17:19that you can be fixing bugs, implementing new features, answering questions about the code.This is like true software engineering task delegation.And I think it'll only get better from here, but this is just a tremendously exciting moment.It integrates very deeply with GitHub.You can give it access to a repo in an environment, and you can get some pretty amazing stuff done.So again, hitting on those big themes of coding and agents.And then there was this announcement of NLWeb.Nadella said this is a new open project that lets you use natural language to interact with any website.
17:50Think of it like HTML for the Agentic Web.Now, I think this is interesting for more than just having three great initials at the start of the name.In their overarching post, they continue,NLWeb makes it easier for websites to provide a conversational interface for their users with the model of their choice and their own data,allowing users to interact directly with web content in a rich semantic manner.The verge extends the explanation writing,with a few lines of NLWeb code,your choice of an AI model and whatever data you supply to the model,
18:17you can have a custom chatbot up and running in a few minutes.Basically, NLWeb handles all the logistics of turning a question into an answer,and all you do is supply the data.Their goal is very ambitious.They put it as NLWeb becoming the fastest and easiest wayto effectively turn your website into an AI app,allowing users to query the contents of the site by directly using natural language,just like with an AI assistant or co-pilot.
18:40They continue,just like the introduction of HTML made it easy for almost anyone to create a website,we want NLWeb to make it easy for any web publisher to create an intelligent natural language experience for their site.As the agentic web and economy continue to grow,NLWeb will empower web publishers to participate on their terms,ensuring their website is ready to interact, transact, and be discovered by other agents if they choose.TechCrunch kind of reductively called it, Microsoft's project to bring more chatbots to web pages,but I think the implications are just the broader AIification of every web experience.
19:12Now, the last thing, which honestly could be a whole show on its own, was what Nadella called Microsoft Discovery.He writes, we're bringing together the full tech stack to help speed up science itself.Discovery uses agents to generate ideas, simulate results, and learn.So basically, this is agents for science, which, like I said, is a whole separate show.Bringing it back to Microsoft, though, one of the questions that people had going into this eventwas what the implications of these recent layoffs were. Did they suggest that AI behind the sceneswasn't going that well? The information wrote a really interesting piece called behind Microsoftlayoffs automation efforts, boom. And the TLDR of it is Microsoft dog-fooding its own idea
19:50of becoming a frontier firm. They write, while the layoffs only affected 3% of staff,and Microsoft publicly said the move was intended to reduce layers of management,Six current and laid-off employees said executives have foreshadowed it for months as theytalked up the imperative of boosting automation. Senior leaders across the company have beenrepeating a refrain to subordinates. Use AI to increase productivity in sales engineering andcustomer support, among other roles. That's in line with what Microsoft has been tellingits enterprise customers, that Microsoft will be customer zero for the same AI it's pitching tothem as a way to spend less money on employees. Now, a Microsoft spokesperson has argued
20:26vociferously that the company is not replacing roles with AI, but it's very clear that a transformationis underway. If you were surprised at the statistic that somewhere between 20 and 30% of Microsoft'scode is now produced by AI, one Microsoft VP in charge of about 400 software engineers,recently told them that their goal was to have a full half of the code they write coming fromAI. Oh, and by the way, the one other thing that I didn't even get a chance to get to is thatMicrosoft is super into the model context protocol. This is part of their large,open-agentic web push. In that core announcement post, they write, Microsoft is deliveringbroad first-party support for MCP across its agent platforms and frameworks, spanning GitHub,
21:06copilot, studio, etc. In addition, Microsoft and GitHub have joined the MCP steering committeeto help advance secure at-scale adoption of the Open Protocol and announce two new contributionsto the MCP ecosystem. In case we had any doubts that MCP was being firmly enshrined in thisemerging agent developer ecosystem, this should clear that up entirely.And so if you look at this, on first glance, it doesn't seem like there's any one big announcement.There's nothing that's necessarily going to grab headlines.That's why, in fact, most of the articles that have been written have focused either on theElon Grock thing or on a pro-Palestine demonstration that broke out right at the beginning
21:42of the event.But for our purposes, if you're sticking around here and listening to this show, the sum totalis extremely significant.The TLDR is we are past pilots, and we are on into the agentic frontier.Microsoft is investing in agent-building frameworks, they're launching agent orchestration tools,they are screaming forward.And so I would suggest that this is a good moment for most enterprises to gut-check their agent strategyand ask whether they're keeping pace with a field that's evolving incredibly fast.
22:14For now, that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief.Appreciate you listening, as always, and until next time, peace.
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