#16: AI talent wars
Hey, it’s Marc.
AI agents are scaling fast — and so is the talent war.
Salesforce’s Agentforce has crossed 1M customer conversations, resolving 85% of them without human input.
Meanwhile, the AI talent race heats up: Apple’s AI Chief just left to join Meta. Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs team, led by Alexander Wang and Nat Friedman, consists of poached team members from OpenAI and Google:
👉 Get your brand in front of 30,000+ decision-makers — book your ad spot now.
Top Agent signals this week:
Replit partners with Microsoft
Cognizant launches “Agent Foundry” to automate enterprise workflows
Ramp launches its first AI agents to cut finance errors and block fraud
Natterbox launches AI Agents to handle over 70% of customer support tasks
Airship launches 4 agents to optimise customer journeys
Sigma360 launches its AI Investigator Agent
KPMG partners with Hippocratic AI to deploy generative AI healthcare agents
Top Boardroom Reads This Week
TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Tasks (Cornell)
A Primer on AI Data Centres (Eric Flaningam)
Principles of Building AI Agents (Mastra)
Bitcoin Miners Pivot to AI Data Centres (Insights VC)
AI Data Centers Growing Globally in Financing Needs (Reset to Zero)
Power Moves
Grok 4 is here — $300/Month AI ‘Smarter Than PhDs
xAI’s Grok 4 is out. Musk claims it can debug entire codebases, solve scientific problems, and outperform PhDs — now available via a $300/month subscription on X. It’s also facing scrutiny after generating offensive content. [ANNOUNCEMENT]
So what? Grok 4 is outperforming tools like Cursor, per xAI engineers. Enterprises exploring internal copilots should evaluate Grok 4 for advanced technical tasks — but need to build in serious guardrails.
Demo:
Vendor Spotlight: Comet
Perplexity has launched Comet, an AI-powered web browser for its MAX users. It helps you search, summarise, and take action — all in one place. It’s not just another Chrome clone; it’s built to act like your personal assistant while you browse.
What it does:
Summarises emails, calendar events, web pages, and videos
Answers questions about anything on your screen
Books meetings, shops online, sends emails — all through voice or text
Automates tasks like trip planning, product comparisons, and research
Offers full Chrome extension support + ad blocking
Why it matters: In May 2025, it processed 780M search queries in a single month. It is emerging as an alternative to Google, and with this browser, it has taken a step forward to replace traditional browsing and search.
Who gets it: Right now, it’s exclusive to Perplexity Max users ($200/month). Waitlist access is rolling out this summer.
Perplexity wants to build a full AI-powered workspace. It is focusing on consumer and enterprise AI applications and rapidly making it simpler and easily accessible.
Be smart: OpenAI will also launch its AI-powered browser.
Top AI Vendors This Week
👉 We’re tracking 1000s of AI and blockchain vendors so you find the right vendors, partners, and bet on the right tech. Sign up for early access.
More from 51:
That’s all for today.
Thanks,
Marc & Team