Agents become buyable and the cost of running them lands

What we're tracking

• •The agent moves from promise to product An AI agent is not the same thing as a chatbot. A chatbot answers a question. An agent is given a goal, decides on the steps, uses tools to carry them out, and reports back. For the past two years that distinction lived mostly in keynotes and waitlists. A review of the field this week frames the shift plainly: "AI agents were the promise of 2024, the hype of 2025, and the expectation of 2026 and beyond" [1].
• •When the buyer is an agent, not a person There is a sharper version of this argument doing the rounds. It starts from Jeff Lawson's 2021 book Ask Your Developer. The summary of that argument is that "developers had become the real buyers of a huge slice of B2B software" [2]. The engineer picked the tool, wired it in, and brought the budget along behind them. The new claim is that the agent is becoming the developer: the thing that decides which tool to call when a task needs doing.
• •Why a small group of users drives most of your AI cost The cheerful version of agents skips the bill. The honest version does not. A long piece on pricing this week comes from someone the writeup describes directly: "Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt has worked on pricing full time for about ten years" [3]. The point of the piece is that AI usage is not spread evenly across a customer base. A thin slice of heavy users can account for the large majority of what it costs a vendor to run the feature.
• •Moving from a meeting to the task that follows it Most of the value of a meeting is lost in the gap between the meeting ending and anyone acting on it. Decisions get made, and then they sit in someone's memory until the next meeting. Google Workspace is pushing at that gap. In its own words, "To make it easier for teams to move from planning to action, we're introducing meeting recaps in Google Chat" [4].
• •Giving an assistant access to your own notes An assistant is only useful if it can see your material. A general model knows the world. It does not know your notebook. Google is connecting those two with its notebook tool, where "This new integration allows you to manage and query notebooks directly within your chats using natural language" [5].
• •A note on the contact centre One recognition is worth logging for anyone shopping in this area. Zoom reports that its contact centre product appears in this year's Gartner analysis, and invites readers to "See how we believe AI-first design and unified communications define our approach to CX" [6]. An analyst placement is one input among several, not a verdict. It tells you a product is being tracked seriously. It does not tell you whether it fits the way your team actually handles customers.