Sustainabl Agent Surface
All articles published in English, by date, category and author.
419 articles · Page 1 of 18
The promise repeated over the last ten years was tempting: with videoconferencing and instant messaging, distance would cease to be a real obstacle. Any company could build global teams without paying the price of geographic dispersal. That promise was partially true and completely insufficient.
There is a decision Marc Benioff has made twelve times in 2026: buying what Salesforce could not build as fast as the market demanded. The latest, and probably the most revealing of all, is the acquisition of Cresta, a company that automates customer service calls in real time, for a figure that The Information places at $2.7 billion. Salesforce confirmed the deal on November 2, 2026, though it did not disclose the price.
According to 2026 research by CIO&Leader, 52% of companies surveyed reported that fewer than one in four AI pilots ever becomes an operational system. Only 8% managed to have more than three-quarters of their experiments cross that line. And just 12% were able to demonstrate significant, measurable return on investment.
When Nubank began operating in the United States in September 2026 under the Nu brand, the team had already navigated months of regulatory work, negotiations with a partner bank in Kansas City, and the design of a product architecture for a market with rules completely different from those in Brazil. All of that, according to co-founder Cristina Junqueira, was the manageable part. The hardest part was the brand.
The scene has something deliberate about it: a federal Secretary of Health traveling to Des Moines to campaign for a state gubernatorial candidate, before more than a thousand people gathered at an events center in Clive, Iowa, less than a week before the November 3, 2026 elections. This is no symbolic gesture. It is the biggest electoral test the Make America Healthy Again movement has faced since emerging from the margins of the internet into the structural organs of the Republican Party.
There is a difference between a system that works in a demonstration and one that does not destroy value when no one is watching. With AI agents, that difference is measured in modified records, processed payments, and decisions made without human intervention. The problem is not technological. It is one of governance.
There was a moment, just a few years ago, when Microsoft presented cloud gaming as the answer to the oldest problem in the video game market: the cost of entry. You don't need a console. You don't need to buy the game. You pay a monthly subscription and you play. The promise was simple, and that was part of its power.
There are economies that build their energy systems as though the price of oil were a constant. Sri Lanka was one of them for far too long. Today, with inflation at its highest level in three years, with rationing still in place, and with the energy ministry admitting that the country spent up to 30% of its foreign exchange reserves in a single month to pay for fuel imports, that bet has been exposed in all its broken architecture.
There is a simple version of this story and a version worth telling. The simple version says that Carlsberg India had a mixed year: revenues fell 2.3%, but profits rose 22.1%. The version worth telling says that a Danish brewer just demonstrated, in one of the most complex markets in the world, that volume and revenue can move in opposite directions without either one telling you how well you are executing.
The average executive who takes the helm of a public company today is 55 years old, seven years older than in 2000. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research that analysed more than 50,000 executive career trajectories arrived at that figure and explained it with an apparently reasonable logic. Boards of directors, confronted with greater economic uncertainty and growing regulatory and geographic complexity, prefer to bet on executives with broad, accumulated experience over executives with unproven talent.
There is a moment in the life of any mass-consumer company when the most profitable product ceases to be what appears on the shelf and begins to be the attention of the people who consume it. Beast Industries reached that moment before most of its competitors recognized that the game had changed. Jimmy Donaldson started on YouTube at the age of 13 with a three-minute video about Minecraft.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security made public in October 2026 an order dating from July of the same year: federal civilian agencies must remove DeepSeek — and any third-party products built on its implementations — from their information technology systems. This is not a cautionary notice. It is a procurement ban and an active removal mandate.
There is a moment in the life of any large organization when the ambition to scale collides with an uncomfortable question: who truly owns the knowledge that makes the system work? EDF has spent decades operating reactors in France with a density of technical expertise that few institutions can match. The problem is that this knowledge lives, to a large extent, inside people, paper-based procedures and fragmented systems that were never designed to travel.
There is an image circulating in the official communications of NSF IMOD that is worth holding in mind for a moment before moving on to the numbers: a doctoral student teaching four younger researchers how to fabricate light-emitting diodes inside a chemical fume hood. It is not the center's director. It is not a tenured professor. It is Hannah Contreras, a student, transmitting cross-disciplinary knowledge in an intensive week-long course designed so that chemists can talk to electrical engineers and quantum physicists can talk to mechanical engineers. That image condenses something that press releases rarely articulate honestly: the architecture of who knows what, within what structure, determines what a research network can or cannot see.
There is a precise moment when a technology stops being a new tool and becomes a distinct market condition. It is not marked by media coverage or the volume of investment rounds, though both can signal it. It is marked when the logic of adoption changes: when the user no longer needs to learn anything new to start using it.
There is a scene that Dirk Voeste, Volkswagen's chief sustainability officer, repeats in interviews because it still weighs on him. Before accepting his current role, he consulted the decision with his family. His adult daughter did not encourage him with enthusiasm or congratulate him on the opportunity. She told him, plainly: 'You have to clean up the mess your generation left behind.'
According to the Federal Reserve System's employer firms survey for 2024, fewer than half of employer firms in the United States operated at a profit that year. The figure hovers between 46% and 47% depending on the edition of the report, but the range does not change the conclusion: more than half of businesses with employees did not finish the year in the black. The data does not speak to a sectoral crisis or an isolated macroeconomic event, but to a structural problem in how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) understand, calculate and defend their margins.
On September 28, 2026, AMD announced the acquisition of World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion. The stated goal: to move decisively into the branch of artificial intelligence that does not process text but instead models the physical world. The deal was signed by AMD chief executive Lisa Su and Fei-Fei Li, co-founder and chief executive of World Labs.
On September 24, 2026, Nina Tangri, Ontario's Associate Minister of Small Business, made an announcement in Windsor that went relatively unnoticed in the major national media. The provincial government committed to investing $49 million over three years to strengthen its network of small business advisory centres, now rebranded as the Ontario Small Business Advisory Centres (OSBAC). The city chosen for the announcement was not Toronto.
On 27 September 2026, Challa Sreenivasulu Setty, Chairman of the State Bank of India, stepped up to the podium at SBI's 13th Banking and Economics Conclave and condensed the strategy of India's largest bank into nine words: digital first, customer first, nation always. The declaration spread quickly. But before any analyst could turn it into either praise or an easy target, it is worth doing what is rarely done with corporate mantras: examining what structure of decision-making lies behind it, if any.
There is an arithmetic that does not lie. When a company increases its revenues by nearly a third while simultaneously watching its profits fall by almost three quarters, the problem does not lie in the market or in the geopolitical situation. It lies in the structure of the business itself. Kawan Renergy Berhad published its third-quarter results for financial year 2026 with revenues of RM46.49 million, a rise of 32.6%, but with a net profit of RM2.04 million compared to RM7.49 million a year ago.
On 23 September 2026, in Shanghai, Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim sat down with 21 Chinese industry leaders to discuss semiconductors, artificial intelligence, robotics, electric vehicles, battery materials, advanced optics, biotechnology and specialised manufacturing. The meeting produced no consolidated figures or signed contracts. It produced something harder to evaluate: a map of where Malaysia wants to move and with whom it is prepared to move.
There is a number that the president of Alibaba.com chose to open his argument, and it is an uncomfortable number: 61.7%. That is the percentage of real-world commercial tasks successfully completed by the best artificial intelligence agent they tested. Across 107 real e-commerce operations, the most capable system available failed in four out of ten.
When Bjørn Gulden took over the leadership of Adidas in January 2023, the company was carrying $1.2 billion in unsold Yeezy sneaker inventory, a retreating Chinese market, and brands like Hoka and On gaining ground in the segment where Adidas had built its technical reputation over decades. What Gulden found inside, however, was not merely a balance-sheet problem. It was an organizational architecture that was systematically producing immobility.