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Not just hype — here are real-world use cases for AI agents

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Just seven or eight months ago, when a customer called in to or emailed Baca Systems with a service question, a human agent handling the query would begin searching for similar cases in the system and […]

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More


Just seven or eight months ago, when a customer called in to or emailed Baca Systems with a service question, a human agent handling the query would begin searching for similar cases in the system and analyzing technical documents. 

This process would take roughly five to seven minutes; then the agent could offer the “first meaningful response” and finally begin troubleshooting. 

But now, with AI agents powered by Salesforce, that time has been shortened to as few as five to 10 seconds. 

“That’s a big [reduction],” Andrew Russo, enterprise architect at Baca Systems, told VentureBeat. He emphasized that, “for us, it’s not about how do we eliminate headcount, reduce staffing. Our goal is, how do we make sure the customer is back up and running as quickly as possible?”

Closing time gaps, delivering faster time to resolution

BACA Systems, a Michigan-based robotics manufacturing company, first implemented Salesforce in 2014, eventually adding Service Cloud to replace its “vanilla, or maybe more like strawberry ice cream, basic service cloud,” Russo explained. The company then did a “giant digital transformation” in 2021, bringing on Salesforce’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. 

Team members soon began working with predictive AI for sales and manufacturing forecasts; then the company evolved to AI agents, implementing Salesforce’s Agentforce within the last year. 

An initial key use case was service calls. Russo explained that about 57% of questions coming in from customers are hardware-related (for instance, a machine falling or requiring calibration). 

Now, instead of having to sift through databases for previous customer calls and similar cases, human reps can ask the AI agent to find the relevant information. The AI runs in the background and allows humans to respond right away, Russo noted. 

AI can also support preventative maintenance. For instance, a circuit breaker might be continually tripping, indicating that there’s a short in the wire that should be investigated, Russo explained. This could help eliminate ongoing issues that haven’t been resolved in the past. 

“It’s all about how do we deliver faster time to resolution for customers,” said Russo.

AI agents generating sales leads, handling customer inquiries

Another critical use case is sales, because as a small company, Baca naturally doesn’t have hundreds of sales people or even dozens (in fact they have less than 10). 

“We have a boatload of leads that we haven’t had time to actually make a reachout to,” said Russo. “Our goal is: How do we start to engage those?”

AI can serve as a sales development representative (SDR) to send out general inquires and emails, have a back-and-forth dialogue, then pass the prospect to a member of the sales team, Russo explained. Bringing on additional salespeople to handle such tasks would require tens of thousands of dollars for salaries, but if AI can develop new deals, its upfront cost is “very easy to justify.”

In coming months, the company plans to deploy customer-facing service agents that can interact with human users via text message to open and handle cases without initial need for human intervention. If the AI agent isn’t able to solve a problem, it will escalate the issue to a human rep. 

The intent is, “How do we keep delivering more value to customers on the service side and create more deals on the sales side?” Russo noted. 

Outside sales and service, Baca is using AI to generate emails, create receivables and craft “very stern collections letters” when required. Russo, for his part, is using the technology for part deduplication checking, leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with prompt builders to detect duplicates to prevent bad data from porting into Salesforce. 

There’s been little to no pushback from employees, he reports: The company started small, initially giving a select group of users access. Others then quickly began inquiring. “They actually started to beg [us] to give them access,” Russo noted. “No one’s scared of it; they like using it because it helps make their job better.”

The company is keeping that deliberate, incremental approach as it further incorporates AI so it can remain agile. “Our goals are not changing, it’s just how we get there and the road we’re taking,” said Russo. “It’s a different road, it’s a better road — it’s the highway.”

AI serving up savings for ezCater

Corporate catering is more complicated than it might sound. There can be shifts in headcounts, food preferences and dietary restrictions as well as other logistical challenges. This sometimes has organizers at ezCater scrambling. 

“Concierge agents have really struggled to keep up with the pace,” Erin DeCesare, CTO of the workplace catering platform, told VentureBeat. 

But once the company implements Salesforce’s Agentforce, a customer needing to modify an order will be able to communicate their needs with AI in natural language, and the AI agent will automatically make adjustments. When more complex issues come up — such as a reconfiguration of an order or an all-out venue change — the AI agent will quickly push the matter up to a human rep. 

“This is a huge cost savings for us,” said DeCesare,

Another intended use case is “restaurant discovery” — that is, AI agents will be able to guide users to the best venue based on inputs about their food preferences, budget, location and other factors. This will be supported by data from millions of workplace food orders. “This is what NLP and AI is perfect for,” said DeCesare. 

ezCater is initially incorporating AI agents in-house to assist concierge agents, and the human agents love it, she reports. “We’re giving them tools to be better, and be able to handle more calls.”

There’s been a shift in the comfort level of engineers, too, as they are able to conceive of agents more structurally. “They can test and trust in a way that feels like software development,” said DeCesare. “It’s more like what they would expect in the software development lifecycle.”

Business partners are also excited about the possibilities for tasks such as business analysis or process maps. “The technology has become so accessible in the last six months,” said DeCesare. “You can easily see how this is going to rapidly become the norm. We’re going to be in a very different world 12 months from now.”

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Ubuntu namespace vulnerability should be addressed quickly: Expert

Thus, “there is little impact of not ‘patching’ the vulnerability,” he said. “Organizations using centralized configuration tools like Ansible may deploy these changes with regularly scheduled maintenance or reboot windows.”  Features supposed to improve security Ironically, last October Ubuntu introduced AppArmor-based features to improve security by reducing the attack surface

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Tamboran, Arafura Sign LOI for Future Beetaloo Basin Gas Supply

Tamboran Resources Corporation has signed a non-binding Letter of Intent (LOI) with an Arafura Rare Earths Limited company to advance discussions for potential gas supply from Beetaloo Basin assets to the latter’s Nolans Rare Earth project in the Northern Territory. Under the agreement, Arafura intends to support the development of Tamboran’s Beetaloo Basin acreage by purchasing 18-25 terajoules per day (TJd) (18-26 MMcfd) of gas for up to 10 years, Tamboran said in a media release.  Through its subsidiaries, Tamboran is the largest acreage holder and operator in the Beetaloo Subbasin, with approximately 1.9 million net prospective acres, according to Tamboran. Arafura’s Nolans Rare Earth project is located 404 miles (650 kilometers) south of Tamboran’s Beetaloo Basin acreage. Arafura’s proposed downstream rare earth processing facility is situated adjacent to the existing Amadeus Gas Pipeline (AGP), Tamboran said. Tamboran added that the two parties will work in good faith to negotiate a full-form term sheet and definitive form documentation. “Tamboran’s LOI with Arafura demonstrates our company’s ongoing commitment to support jobs and industry within the Northern Territory. Arafura’s operations require reliable and affordable gas volumes to operate their rare earths project, which is of national strategic importance”, Joel Riddle, Tamboran managing director and CEO, said. “The Nolans Rare Earth Project has received credit approved terms for more than $1 billion in debt finance from nine export credit agencies and commercial lenders and A$200 million ($125 million) investment commitment from Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation”, Riddle added. “Tamboran looks forward to building a long-term relationship with Arafura and supplying natural gas to a project of national significance”. To contact the author, email [email protected] WHAT DO YOU THINK? Generated by readers, the comments included herein do not reflect the views and opinions of Rigzone. All comments are subject to editorial review. Off-topic, inappropriate

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RWE signs power deal with five Co-ops

RWE has signed a 10-year corporate power purchase agreement (CPPA) with five independent retail co-operatives to supply electricity from renewable energy sources to over 400 locations across the UK. The deal with Lincolnshire Co-op, Scotmid Co-op, East of England Co-op, Southern Co-op and Central Co-op will provide up to 53GWh of green electricity per year, starting from 1 April 2025. The power will come from the London Array offshore wind farm in the outer Thames Estuary and will offer savings to the five co-operatives throughout the lifetime of the CPPA. The offshore wind farm London Array is operated by RWE and owned by a consortium of four partners: RWE (30%), Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Greencoat UK Wind, and Masdar Energy UK. It has 175 wind turbines and an installed capacity of 630MW. From the time of its fully commissioning in 2013 until September 2018, it was the largest offshore wind farm in the world. Ørsted was previously a stakeholder in the London Array project, but sold its last remaining 25% stake in 2023 to Greencoat in a deal worth £717m. When the wind farm entered into commercial operations in 2013, it was the largest such project in the world until it was overtaken in 2018 by the 659MW Walney Extension. Energy and sustainability advisor Inspired PLC negotiated the CPPA while Shoosmiths LLP led the legal negotiations. Notably, this deal was executed in just three months, less than half the usual timeframe, demonstrating the expertise and efficiency of the partnerships involved.

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SSE expects renewables output to have risen 17% in 2024

SSE expects its renewables output to have increased by around 17% year-on-year in 2024, the company said. In a market update ahead of the publication of its 12-months results to 31 March 2025 on 21 May 2025, SSE said that this increase is expected to amount to around 13TWh of renewables output. The increase reflects capacity additions and the effects of variable weather conditions, which continued in the final months of the year. The Perth-headquartered firm had previously cautioned that its full year performance remains subject to a number of factors, including the weather. SSE’s update also stated that the company remains on course to deliver investment of around £3 billion this financial year, reflecting the capital allocation underpinning SSE’s NZAP Plus investment programme. The investments are underpinned by a strong and stable balance sheet, SSE said, with adjusted net debt and hybrid capital expected to be around £10bn at 31 March 2025. The company said that its regulated networks businesses have continued to deliver strong operational performances, with operating profit expectations for the group’s other business units remaining unchanged. In addition, the company said that it expects its 2024/25 adjusted earnings per share to be in the range of 155-160 pence. SSE added that it is focused on delivery of NZAP Plus and reaffirms its target of 175-200 pence adjusted earnings per share for fiscal year 2026/27.

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Saipem Gets Green Light to Start Work on CCS Project in Sweden

Engineering and construction specialist Saipem has received a notice to proceed with the EUR 600 million ($647.3 million) contract for a large-scale carbon dioxide (CO2) project in Sweden. The company said in a media release that it will implement the CO2 capture project at Stockholm Exergi’s existing bio-cogeneration plant. Saipem said the contract entails detailed engineering, procurement, construction, and commissioning of the carbon capture, storage, and ship loading systems. These actions follow the successful conclusion of the initial engineering and procurement services carried out following the Letter of Intent announced on July 26, 2023. Once the plant is operational, it will capture 800,000 tonnes of biogenic carbon dioxide each year from the biomass-fueled Värtaverket power plant in Stockholm, allowing for a net reduction of CO2 from the atmosphere. Saipem stated that this contract allows it to play a part in executing one of the globe’s most significant large-scale carbon capture projects, reinforcing its role in promoting the decarbonization process in Europe. Stockholm Exergi, which has obtained funding from the European Innovation Fund and the Swedish Energy Agency’s reverse auction for its project, will be among the first companies globally to develop a Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) model, Saipem said. This will allow for the combination of decreased carbon dioxide emissions with “negative emissions,” accompanied by Carbon Removal Certificates that can be traded on the voluntary market, the contractor said. In its media release, Stockholm Exergi said the investment decision marks a major milestone in a SEK 13 billion ($1.3 billion) project which is set to be operational in 2028. “This is a historic moment for Stockholm Exergi and for the green transition. We have worked purposefully for many years to make bio-CCS a reality, and today’s decision means that we are moving from plans to action. With

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Dallas Fed survey shows capex plans holding up despite uncertainty

And yet: Despite those generally upbeat readings, respondents’ comments to Fed analysts were very focused on the uncertainty that the Trump administration’s energy and trade policies have created over the past 10 weeks. That instability, they said, as well as the downward trend in oil prices has many taking a more cautious view of the future even if those attitudes aren’t yet showing up in capex intentions. “Planning for new development is extremely difficult right now due to the uncertainty around steel-based products,” one executive wrote. “Oil prices feel incredibly unstable, and it’s hard to gauge whether prices will be in the $50s per barrel or $70s per barrel. Combined, our ability to plan operations for any meaningful amount of time in the future has been severely diminished.” WTI thresholds for opex, investment Fed researchers this quarter also asked E&P companies some one-time questions about where they need West Texas Intermediate prices to be to cover the operating costs of existing wells as well as to profitably drill a new well. While the central bank asked the same question early last year, the timing of this survey was especially topical given recent comments by US Secretary of Energy to the Financial Times that the industry could still grow production profitably even if WTI fell to $50/bbl.  Not so fast, respondents to the Dallas Fed poll said: On the opex question, their responses averaged $41/bbl (up from $39 a year ago) and ranged from $26 in the Eagle Ford to $45 in parts of the Permian outside the Delaware and Midland basins. But when it comes to justifying investments in new wells, respondents said they need at least $61 (in the Midland) to $70 in the ‘other’ parts of the Permian. The average price they need to profitably drill a new

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Equinor, Shell, TotalEnergies take FID on Northern Lights CCS expansion

Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies have made a final investment decision (FID) to progress phase two of the Northern Lights carbon capture development.  The investment by the Northern Lights JV owners (Equinor, Shell, TotalEnergies) is about $714 million. The expansion project received €131 million from the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) in June 2024. The news comes following a signed commercial agreement with Stockholm Exergi to transport and store 900,000 tonnes/year (tpy) of biogenic CO2 for 15 years. The Northern Lights project comprises transportation, receipt, and permanent storage of CO2 in a reservoir in the northern North Sea. Northern Lights phases The first phase includes capacity to transport, inject, and store up to 1.5 million tpy of CO2. Once the CO2 is captured onshore, it will be transported by ship to the receiving terminal in Øygarden, pumped via pipeline to a subsea structure at the seabed and injected into a geological formation some 2,500 m below the seabed in the North Sea for permanent storage. Phase one operations are planned for this summer, with CO2 from Heidelberg Materials’ cement factory in Brevik expected to arrive at the receiving terminal near Kollsnes on Norway’s west coast. Additionally, Northern Lights will store CO2 from the Hafslund Celsio waste-to-energy plant in Oslo, as part of the Longship project (OGJ Online, Oct. 9, 2024).

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European cloud group invests to create what it dubs “Trump-proof cloud services”

But analysts have questioned whether the Microsoft move truly addresses those European business concerns. Phil Brunkard, executive counselor at Info-Tech Research Group UK, said, commenting on last month’s announcement of the EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud,  “Microsoft says that customer data will remain stored and processed in the EU and EFTA, but doesn’t guarantee true data sovereignty.” And European companies are now rethinking what data sovereignty means to them. They are moving beyond having it refer to where the data sits to focusing on which vendors control it, and who controls them. Responding to the new Euro cloud plan, another analyst, IDC VP Dave McCarthy, saw the effort as “signaling a growing European push for data control and independence.” “US providers could face tougher competition from EU companies that leverage this tech to offer sovereignty-friendly alternatives. Although €1 million isn’t a game-changer on its own, it’s a clear sign Europe wants to build its own cloud ecosystem—potentially at the expense of US market share,” McCarthy said. “For US providers, this could mean investing in more EU-based data centers or reconfiguring systems to ensure European customers’ data stays within the region. This isn’t just a compliance checkbox. It’s a shift that could hike operational costs and complexity, especially for companies used to running centralized setups.” Adding to the potential bad news for US hyperscalers, McCarthy said that there was little reason to believe that this trend would be limited to Europe. “If Europe pulls this off, other regions might take note and push for similar sovereignty rules. US providers could find themselves adapting to a patchwork of regulations worldwide, forcing a rethink of their global strategies,” McCarthy said. “This isn’t just a European headache, it’s a preview of what could become a broader challenge.”

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Talent gap complicates cost-conscious cloud planning

The top strategy so far is what one enterprise calls the “Cloud Team.” You assemble all your people with cloud skills, and your own best software architect, and have the team examine current and proposed cloud applications, looking for a high-level approach that meets business goals. In this process, the team tries to avoid implementation specifics, focusing instead on the notion that a hybrid application has an agile cloud side and a governance-and-sovereignty data center side, and what has to be done is push functionality into the right place. The Cloud Team supporters say that an experienced application architect can deal with the cloud in abstract, without detailed knowledge of cloud tools and costs. For example, the architect can assess the value of using an event-driven versus transactional model without fixating on how either could be done. The idea is to first come up with approaches. Then, developers could work with cloud providers to map each approach to an implementation, and assess the costs, benefits, and risks. Ok, I lied about this being the top strategy—sort of, at least. It’s the only strategy that’s making much sense. The enterprises all start their cloud-reassessment journey on a different tack, but they agree it doesn’t work. The knee-jerk approach to cloud costs is to attack the implementation, not the design. What cloud features did you pick? Could you find ones that cost less? Could you perhaps shed all the special features and just host containers or VMs with no web services at all? Enterprises who try this, meaning almost all of them, report that they save less than 15% on cloud costs, a rate of savings that means roughly a five-year payback on the costs of making the application changes…if they can make them at all. Enterprises used to build all of

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Lightmatter launches photonic chips to eliminate GPU idle time in AI data centers

“Silicon photonics can transform HPC, data centers, and networking by providing greater scalability, better energy efficiency, and seamless integration with existing semiconductor manufacturing and packaging technologies,” Jagadeesan added. “Lightmatter’s recent announcement of the Passage L200 co-packaged optics and M1000 reference platform demonstrates an important step toward addressing the interconnect bandwidth and latency between accelerators in AI data centers.” The market timing appears strategic, as enterprises worldwide face increasing computational demands from AI workloads while simultaneously confronting the physical limitations of traditional semiconductor scaling. Silicon photonics offers a potential path forward as conventional approaches reach their limits. Practical applications For enterprise IT leaders, Lightmatter’s technology could impact several key areas of infrastructure planning. AI development teams could see significantly reduced training times for complex models, enabling faster iteration and deployment of AI solutions. Real-time AI applications could benefit from lower latency between processing units, improving responsiveness for time-sensitive operations. Data centers could potentially achieve higher computational density with fewer networking bottlenecks, allowing more efficient use of physical space and resources. Infrastructure costs might be optimized by more efficient utilization of expensive GPU resources, as processors spend less time waiting for data and more time computing. These benefits would be particularly valuable for financial services, healthcare, research institutions, and technology companies working with large-scale AI deployments. Organizations that rely on real-time analysis of large datasets or require rapid training and deployment of complex AI models stand to gain the most from the technology. “Silicon photonics will be a key technology for interconnects across accelerators, racks, and data center fabrics,” Jagadeesan pointed out. “Chiplets and advanced packaging will coexist and dominate intra-package communication. The key aspect is integration, that is companies who have the potential to combine photonics, chiplets, and packaging in a more efficient way will gain competitive advantage.”

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Silicon Motion rolls SSD kit to bolster AI workload performance

The kit utilizes the PCIe Dual Ported enterprise-grade SM8366 controller with support for PCIe Gen 5 x4 NVMe 2.0 and OCP 2.5 data center specifications. The 128TB SSD RDK also supports NVMe 2.0 Flexible Data Placement (FDP), a feature that allows advanced data management and improved SSD write efficiency and endurance. “Silicon Motion’s MonTitan SSD RDK offers a comprehensive solution for our customers, enabling them to rapidly develop and deploy enterprise-class SSDs tailored for AI data center and edge server applications.” said Alex Chou, senior vice president of the enterprise storage & display interface solution business at Silicon Motion. Silicon Motion doesn’t make drives, rather it makes reference design kits in different form factors that its customers use to build their own product. Its kits come in E1.S, E3.S, and U.2 form factors. The E1.S and U.2 forms mirror the M.2, which looks like a stick of gum and installs on the motherboard. There are PCI Express enclosures that hold four to six of those drives and plug into one card slot and appear to the system as a single drive.

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Executive Roundtable: Cooling Imperatives for Managing High-Density AI Workloads

Michael Lahoud, Stream Data Centers: For the past two years, Stream Data Centers has been developing a modular, configurable air and liquid cooling system that can handle the highest densities in both mediums. Based on our collaboration with customers, we see a future that still requires both cooling mediums, but with the flexibility to deploy either type as the IT stack destined for that space demands. With this necessity as a backdrop, we saw a need to develop a scalable mix-and-match front-end thermal solution that gives us the ability to late bind the equipment we need to meet our customers’ changing cooling needs. It’s well understood that liquid far outperforms air in its ability to transport heat, but further to this, with the right IT configuration, cooling fluid temperatures can also be raised, and this affords operators the ability to use economization for a greater number of hours a year. These key properties can help reduce the energy needed for the mechanical part of a data center’s operations substantially.  It should also be noted that as servers are redesigned for liquid cooling and the onboard server fans get removed or reduced in quantity, more of the critical power delivered to the server is being used for compute. This means that liquid cooling also drives an improvement in overall compute productivity despite not being noted in facility PUE metrics.  Counter to air cooling, liquid cooling certainly has some added management challenges related to fluid cleanliness, concurrent maintainability and resiliency/redundancy, but once those are accounted for, the clusters become stable, efficient and more sustainable with improved overall productivity.

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Airtel connects India with 100Tbps submarine cable

“Businesses are becoming increasingly global and digital-first, with industries such as financial services, data centers, and social media platforms relying heavily on real-time, uninterrupted data flow,” Sinha added. The 2Africa Pearls submarine cable system spans 45,000 kilometers, involving a consortium of global telecommunications leaders including Bayobab, China Mobile International, Meta, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone Group, and WIOCC. Alcatel Submarine Networks is responsible for the cable’s manufacturing and installation, the statement added. This cable system is part of a broader global effort to enhance international digital connectivity. Unlike traditional telecommunications infrastructure, the 2Africa Pearls project represents a collaborative approach to solving complex global communication challenges. “The 100 Tbps capacity of the 2Africa Pearls cable significantly surpasses most existing submarine cable systems, positioning India as a key hub for high-speed connectivity between Africa, Europe, and Asia,” said Prabhu Ram, VP for Industry Research Group at CyberMedia Research. According to Sinha, Airtel’s infrastructure now spans “over 400,000 route kilometers across 34+ cables, connecting 50 countries across five continents. This expansive infrastructure ensures businesses and individuals stay seamlessly connected, wherever they are.” Gogia further emphasizes the broader implications, noting, “What also stands out is the partnership behind this — Airtel working with Meta and center3 signals a broader shift. India is no longer just a consumer of global connectivity. We’re finally shaping the routes, not just using them.”

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Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs).  In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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