The retail sector experienced an AI agent revolution this week. Startup New Generation (USA) launched brand-specific AI storefronts that learn customer preferences through natural conversations. Their demo showed an athletic brand's agent suggesting workout gear based on a user's hiking photos, with checkout handled through voice commands. Partner startup Freshflow (Germany) addressed food waste through an AI produce manager for grocery stores. Their system analyzes ripeness using smart cameras and automatically adjusts banana order quantities, already implemented in 120 Edeka markets.

Security-focused AI agents gained traction with TufinMate's (Israel) launch at RSAC 2025. This startup's Slack-integrated agent helped a bank resolve 12,000 firewall change requests last month without human intervention. Engineers simply say "Block phishing attempts from.ru domains" and the agent implements rules across cloud and on-prem systems.

Autonomous coding agents reached new heights as Futurology AR (Canada) released Codex. This AI debugger fixed a memory leak in Linux's filesystem module within 18 minutes of release. Developers report it writes cleaner Python unit tests than junior engineers.

Enterprise platforms fueled startup growth through multi-agent ecosystems. Microsoft's new Azure service lets startups combine logistics agents from Flexport with payment bots from Stripe. Meanwhile, IBM's watsonx Orchestrate offers 150 prebuilt agents, helping a Singaporean fintech launch KYC compliance bots in 3 days instead of 3 months.

Industry surveys confirm the agentic shift. PwC found companies using startups' AI agents saved 41,000 work hours quarterly through automated document processing and 24/7 customer support. Over 75% of startups now list agent interoperability as their top feature request.