Google’s Cloud Next in April 2026 was billed as the arrival of the “agentic era,” complete with an enterprise agent platform and chips designed for it. The word “agent” gets applied loosely enough right now that it’s worth being precise. A chatbot takes an input and returns an output. An agent does something meaningfully different: it holds a goal, plans a sequence of steps to reach it, calls tools or other systems along the way, observes the results, and decides what to do next — often without a human approving each step. That loop, not the underlying language model, is what “agentic AI” actually refers to.
Five Frontier Models in One Month: Choosing When the Ground Keeps Moving
March 2026 saw five significant model launches in a matter of weeks — new releases from Mistral, DeepSeek, OpenAI, Google and xAI, with one open-source model topping reasoning benchmarks within days of release. If you’re responsible for choosing which model your product runs on, that pace is the actual problem to solve, not any individual model.
Anthropic Just Loosened Its Safety Pause Promise. What AI Buyers Should Take From That
In February 2026, Anthropic revised a commitment in its Responsible Scaling Policy that had previously said it would not train more powerful models unless it could guarantee adequate safety measures in advance. The company’s stated reasoning was that with the competitive race accelerating and no global regulation in place, a unilateral pause wasn’t practical. You don’t have to have an opinion on whether that’s right to draw a lesson from it.
AI Search Is Quietly Rewriting B2B Demand Generation
In February 2026, LinkedIn reported that non-brand, awareness-driven B2B traffic had fallen by as much as 60% as AI-powered search experiences answered questions directly instead of sending clicks to websites, and said it was moving away from traditional SEO metrics toward visibility-based measurement. For any business that relies on being found, this is the clearest signal yet that the old playbook is expiring.
When Everyone Gets a Copilot: What University-Wide AI Rollouts Teach the Rest of Us
In January 2026 the University of Manchester became the first university in the world to give every student and staff member access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, paired with training on responsible use. Whatever you think of the specifics, it’s a useful case study in something most organisations are about to face: what happens when an AI assistant goes from a pilot with twenty people to everyone, all at once.





