This weekly update showcases a remarkable shift in how artificial intelligence agents are transforming workplaces and shopping experiences around the world. An AI agent is essentially a smart computer program that can understand what you want, make decisions by itself, and complete tasks without needing constant instructions from a human.

Shopping Gets Smarter with AI Agents

One of the biggest changes happening right now is agentic commerce, where AI agents become personal shopping assistants. Instead of people searching for products themselves, AI agents can now search through millions of items, compare prices, check what's available, and even make purchases automatically if you give them permission first. PayPal and OpenAI recently announced a partnership that lets people shop right inside ChatGPT without leaving the app. This is huge for shoppers because they can ask questions like "Find me good running shoes" and the AI agent will find them, show options, and complete the sale in just a few taps. Stripe, a company that handles online payments, even created something called the Agentic Commerce Protocol to make sure these AI shopping agents are safe and work smoothly with stores everywhere.

Teams Working Together with AI

Instead of having each person chat with their own AI separately, companies are now building tools where teams can work together with AI agents on shared projects. Miro, a popular teamwork platform, just launched its AI Innovation Workspace, which is like having an AI helper sitting at your team's meeting table. Everyone on the team can talk to the AI at the same time on the same project, which means less copying and pasting between different programs and much faster teamwork. This approach helps teams move at the speed of AI while staying connected to each other.

Building AI Agents Without Writing Code

Microsoft Copilot Studio 2025 Wave 2 is making it so regular people, not just computer experts, can create their own AI agents. The tool uses a no-code approach, meaning you don't need to write complicated computer instructions to make it work. You can build an AI agent with point-and-click buttons and simple instructions, and it plugs right into Microsoft 365 and Azure (Microsoft's cloud service). Similarly, Adobe is putting AI agents into all its creative tools so photographers, video makers, and graphic designers can ask their AI helper to do repetitive tasks like adjusting hundreds of photos or adding background music to videos.

AI Agents Solving Real Business Problems

Big companies in important fields are deploying AI agents to handle critical work. Alight, which helps companies manage their employee benefits, partnered with IBM to create AI agents that answer employee questions about health insurance, time off, and other benefits in a personalized way. Early testing showed these AI agents increased employee productivity by over 90 percent. In construction, DroneDeploy introduced three specialized AI agents working together: Safety AI finds hazards on job sites, Progress AI tracks how much work gets done each day, and Inspection AI predicts when equipment will need maintenance before it breaks. By using multiple AI agents that talk to each other, companies can automate more tasks and make smarter decisions based on real data.

Super-Fast Coding Agents

In software development, Cursor Composer is a new AI agent specifically trained to write computer code, and it's remarkably fast. This coding agent can complete most programming tasks in less than 30 seconds and can run eight coding agents in parallel, meaning they work at the same time on different parts of a project. The agent was trained by learning from real software engineering problems, including testing code and fixing errors automatically. This means students and professional programmers can now work alongside AI agents in a way that matches how real software teams actually work in big companies.

The Bigger Picture

All these developments show that AI agents are moving from being individual helpers to being team players. Whether in shopping, creative work, business operations, or software development, AI agents are learning to collaborate with each other and with humans. Companies that prepare for this change now by organizing their data, setting up their systems, and training their employees will have a big advantage in the coming years. The trend is clear: AI isn't just something companies buy off the shelf anymore—it's something they're building into everything they do.