My Two Cents
Insights From the Crossroads of Tech and Business
Latest Posts
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You Can Now Use Upwork in ChatGPT to Find Freelancers
Upwork is doubling down on its partnership with OpenAI by integrating its Work Marketplace directly into ChatGPT. Using natural language, businesses can describe their project needs, discover relevant talent, and draft job posts—all without leaving the AI platform. From there, they’re guided to Upwork, where Uma, the company’s own AI work agent, picks up to…
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Visa Wants to Be the Payment Rail for the Agentic Economy
Visa is looking to position itself as the payments backbone for agentic commerce. On Wednesday, the global payments network debuted Intelligent Commerce Connect (ICC), a platform designed to help AI agents discover merchants and complete purchases on behalf of users. Notably, despite it coming from Visa, it works across any card network or credential infrastructure…
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Slackbot Steps Into the AI Spotlight
For more than a decade, Slack has positioned itself as a place where work happens (remember this commercial?). It has become a central part of how teams communicate and collaborate. But one of its most overlooked features—the Slackbot—is now stepping into a much bigger role and becoming what Salesforce describes as the “ultimate teammate.” Slackbot…
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Intercom Turns Fin Into a Developer Platform
Three years after launching its Fin customer service agent, Intercom is opening it up to third-party developers via an API. There’s a catch: It’s open to anyone spending at least $250,000 on Intercom, but the company promises usage rates that are “by far the cheapest in the industry.” Until today, Fin had been confined to…
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HubSpot Moves Breeze Agents to Outcome-Based Pricing
HubSpot is restructuring how it charges for its Breeze AI agents, moving to a model in which customers pay for results rather than by usage. It’s a significant bet that the company can deliver measurable value at a moment when business leaders are scrutinizing every AI line item. “Businesses are being asked to make big…
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Microsoft Debuts MAI-Transcribe-1 Speech-to-Text Model That Tops Whisper, GPT, Gemini Flash
Microsoft’s AI division has been notably active in building out its first-party portfolio. It has developed everything from foundation models and vision capabilities to speech and image generation and diagnostic orchestration. Now, the company is adding another piece: MAI-Transcribe-1, a multilingual speech-to-text model that’s now available in public preview on Microsoft Foundry. MAI-Transcribe-1 is trained…
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Claude Users Say Tokens Are Disappearing Too Fast. Anthropic Isn’t Saying Much.
The more I think about it, the more I see rate-limit toggling by Anthropic and its peers as similar to the era before unlimited talk, text, and data on our smartphones. Back then, we scrambled to tell people to contact us outside peak hours so we wouldn’t use all of our allotted monthly minutes. This…
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AWS’s Frontier Agents Are Now GA—Ready to Automate Your DevOps and Security Headaches
AWS’s “Frontier Agents,” autonomous programs capable of building, securing, and operating software, have launched—well, two of them, at least. Coming nearly five months after their introduction at last year’s re:Invent conference, developers can use the AWS DevOps and Security agents to automate their delivery pipelines and protect their apps from vulnerabilities. But, for those hoping…
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Microsoft Expands Copilot Cowork to Frontier Program, Upgrades Researcher With Multi-Model Intelligence
Microsoft is opening Copilot Cowork to a broader set of enterprise customers through its Frontier program, the company announced today—the latest step in its bet that AI should stop answering questions and start finishing work. Powered by Anthropic’s Claude, Copilot Cowork lets users delegate complex tasks to an AI agent that plans and executes work…
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Bluesky Thinks AI Can Fix What Platforms Broke on Social Media
Bluesky has introduced an agentic social app on the AT Protocol called Attie. It’s a standalone experiment that lets users create custom feeds by describing in plain language what they want to see. Announced at the ATmosphere conference, Attie is currently invite-only and appears to be Bluesky’s inaugural foray into AI. Jay Graber, who recently…