Hi all,

Spring is almost here! It feels like a good time for a meetup soon.

Events elsewhere are also heating up - I'd expect more intentional agent meetups this year.

Also: I've been considering running brief hands-on workshops about how to build and use agents with the latest technology. If you're interested, let me know - would be a great addition to AGT events.

Events

• Mar 3 - OpenClaw Show and Tell Night
• Mar 3 - The CISO Table: Deploying AI Agents Inside the Enterprise
• Mar 4 - ClawCon NYC
• Mar 9 - AgentCon New York
• Mar 11 - ON_Discourse Meetup 'Claw & Order': The Agent Interface is Here!
• Mar 11 - YouCode Forum: Building What's Next in The Agentic Era
• Mar 11 - NYC Product Leaders Breakfast: Let the AI Agents Work (but on what?)
• Mar 12 - Build Agents, Not Cars
• Mar 15 - Build & Deploy Voice Agent Workshop + Hackathon
• Apr 8 - Tech Talk: Building Agentic Media Buying Platforms
• Apr 10 - Enterprise Agents Hackathon
• May 4 - AI Agent Conference

News

• Anthropic launches new push for enterprise agents with plug-ins for finance, engineering, and design
• OpenAI partners with McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, and Capgemini to push its Frontier AI agent platform
• Perplexity launches 'Computer' AI agent that coordinates 19 models
• Announcing the "AI Agent Standards Initiative"
• New Relic launches new AI agent platform
• AI agents are hiring human 'meatspace workers', including some scientists
• PwC engineers built an AI agent to tackle the corporate world's least sexy task: spreadsheets
• Vouched Launches Agent Checkpoint to Establish Trust in the Age of AI Agents
• New agent framework matches human-engineered AI systems
• This AI Agent Is Designed to Not Go Rogue

There's a clear recent trend of enterprises starting to adopt agents. It's interesting to see the difference in approaches across customers and vendors. In the end, I wonder if the results are going to differ all that much.

Deals

• Basis ($100M) - agents for accounting
• Cogent ($42M) - agent vulnerability remediation
• Fiddler ($30M) - agent control plane
• Sapiom ($15M) - agent tool payments
• Simple AI ($14M) - voice sales agents
• Concourse ($12M) - finance team agents
• MedScount ($10M) - commercial MedTech agents
• Sphinx ($7M) - financial compliance agents
• Cognee ($7M) - memory for agents
• Toyo AI ($4M) - OpenClaw for founders
• Trace ($3M) - agent enterprise adoption
• Reload ($2M) - agent hiring platform

Yet another healthy bunch of funding rounds in the AI agent space has closed recently. It's surprising to see an OpenClaw company already raising money, given how young the project is. What's not surprising is that infrastructure and enterprise plays round out most of the dollars raised - no bold bets just yet.

Articles

• How Fast Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy? in NYT
• AI Agents Are Taking America by Storm in The Atlantic
• The Rise of the Agent Runtime by Work-Bench
• OpenAI’s Latest Moves Speak Volumes About the Future of AI Agents in Inc.
• AI Agent Invasion Has People Trying To Pick Winners by Thomas Urbain
• The end of experimentation with AI agents in Fast Company
• AI agents are fast, loose, and out of control, MIT study finds in ZDNET
• Your Agent Framework Is Just a Bad Clone of Elixir by George Guimaraes
• I Want to Love AI Agents, But I'm Tired of Their Shortcomings in PC Mag
• Agentic AI Is a Massive Opportunity for B2B Software by Jean-Marc Prunet
• Agentic cloud operations: A new way to run the cloud by Microsoft
• The emerging agent platform by Ivan Malopinsky 👋

Opinions about agents are all over the place. The consensus seems to be that agents are being widely adopted, they're not perfect yet, and they present multiple opportunities. I think this is the year we find out just how good this tech really is.

Projects

• zeroclaw - tiny OpenClaw alternative
• nanoclaw - tiny OpenClaw alternative
• IronClaw - secure OpenClaw alternative
• memU - memory for proactive agents
• Poncho - web agent harness
• pilo - AI web automation
• pentagi - penetration testing agent

Web automation and OpenClaw alternatives dominate recent agent projects, but these seem like the agent frameworks of early 2026. We'll likely settle on a couple of alternatives and move on to the next piece of the puzzle soon.

Learning

• Building a LangGraph Agent from Scratch
• A developer's guide to production-ready AI agents
• Evaluating AI agents: Real-world lessons from building agentic systems at Amazon

There's a little less learning material than usual this time. If you want more, check out the learning section on AGT NYC 2025 Wrapped.

Research

• Measuring AI agent autonomy in practice
• The AI Agent Index
• CommerceBench
• PA Bench
• Agent SDKs for the Rest of Us
• 5 heavy lifts of deploying AI agents
• A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents
• LLM Agents in Law
• Insight Agents: An LLM-Based Multi-Agent System for Data Insights
• SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

Really interesting batch of research resources this time around: benchmarks, surveys, and reports. If you're building agents, now would be a good time to dive into real world results.

Invite a friend to join AGT NYC at agtnyc.com!

Cheers,
Ivan