The day's AI agents, and the questions a buyer should ask

What we're tracking

• •What buyers now expect to pay for an agent For most of the SaaS era, software was sold by the seat. You counted the people who would log in, multiplied by a monthly price, and that was the bill. Seat pricing is easy to forecast, which is why finance teams like it, but it rests on an assumption that no longer holds: that value scales with the number of humans using the tool. An agent breaks that assumption. One agent can do the work of many people, or sit idle for a week, and neither case maps cleanly onto a headcount.
• •Deploying AI because there is pressure to, not a problem to solve The second theme of the day is a useful corrective to the first. Not every AI deployment is driven by a need. In a new episode of its CX series, Zoom opens with the observation that "Every contact centre leader is under pressure to deploy AI — often before anyone has asked what problem it's actually solving" [2]. That sentence is worth keeping on a wall.
• •Trusted numbers, pulled into the moment you ask The third item is about where AI meets data you already rely on. Xero announced an integration with Google Gemini, framed around a familiar friction for people who work with accounts. As the company puts it, "As an accountant, bookkeeper or small business owner, getting a quick read on your numbers can mean interrupting your workflow" [3]. The promise of the integration is that a question about the numbers can be answered without leaving the task at hand.
• •The self-driving company, and what it asks of you The fourth item is the most ambitious, and the most worth reading sceptically. TechCrunch reports that Replit's CEO sees the future of work as the "self-driving company": "Replit CEO Amjad Masad envisions a future of 'self-driving companies,' where AI agents handle day-to-day tasks and people focus on higher-level decisions" [4].
• •Security you will never click The last item is the kind of change that matters precisely because no one will notice it. Google announced that Meet now uses post-quantum cryptography. In its own words, "Calls in Google Meet will use post-quantum cryptography (PQC) for extra protection, starting now with laptop web clients and meeting room hardware, with mobile support coming soon" [5].