AI agents move into the store, the office and the books

If you sum up this week's business news about AI, one word keeps coming up: agent. An AI agent is a program that doesn't just answer questions but completes multistep tasks on its own and can act on your behalf.

This is now happening in practice. The insurer Kin Insurance lets paying ChatGPT users get a home insurance quote, but the purchase still takes place with Kin, and the agents cannot assess gaps in coverage. Walmart has launched Agent Gateway, so approved agents can search inventory and shop at Walmart and Sam's Club. For now it is only in beta for invited users, and Agent Profiles won't be rolled out until November 2026. According to TechCrunch, Amazon is taking the opposite approach and blocking agent purchases. Retail, in other words, is split on whether to open the doors or keep them shut.

The agent in the office

Agents are also moving in behind the office door. OpenAI's ChatGPT Work can handle tasks across work applications, and Uber is giving all of its roughly 30,000 employees access. Oracle wants to let companies build their own agents with little or no code, but the tool is not expected to be available in the US until within 12 months. The data platform ClicData has launched a so-called MCP server, a kind of plug-in connector that links a company's data to assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT, so you can ask about the numbers without writing SQL. It starts as early access for existing customers.

A look inside Anthropic shows where this could lead. According to the company's own report, AI agents now work more hours than the human employees, and the share of juniors in technical roles has fallen. The figures are not independently verified and apply to only one company, so they are a signal, not a definitive answer. At the same time, according to the Financial Times, Anthropic and the private equity firm Hg plan to set up a consulting firm to help European companies get started with AI. That suggests the implementation itself is a bottleneck.

The bill and the power

All of this requires computing power, and it is expensive. Google's Sundar Pichai says the whole industry is short of it. At Meta, free cash flow turned negative in the third quarter, the first time since 2012, because investments exceeded what operations earned. There is an environmental bill too: one report models that nitrogen oxide emissions in Texas could rise markedly toward 2031 if data centers get power from gas generated on site. These are scenarios, not measurements.

In that light, the price of AI is interesting. A widely shared comparison pits DeepSeek's $0.15 against Claude's $4 per million tokens, but the figures cover different models, time periods and usage, so the comparison falls short. And DeepSeek is reportedly developing chips together with Huawei.

What to watch for

If you use AI at work, try agents on small, well-defined tasks where you can check the result yourself. Ask vendors to explain what the agent is allowed to do and what it cannot assess, as in the insurance example. Also keep an eye on whether more big players follow Walmart or Amazon, and whether the large investments begin to show up on the bottom line.