AITrending
The state of AI agents in 2026: the year tools become teammates
Agents stopped being a demo this year. We talked to fourteen founders shipping them in production about what changed, what broke, and what's next.
Alex Rivera8 min
Trending
•Sarvesh Kumar Tiwari on Doordripp: "Why can't fashion be delivered as quickly as groceries?"•Ravi Mehta on building reasoning models that actually reason•StellarPay raises $40M to make cross-border payments invisible•The state of AI agents in 2026: the year tools become teammates•Small models are eating the enterprise — and saving fortunes doing it•SaaS margins are back — but only for the top quartile•Europe's $500M+ megarounds are back — three in the last sixty days•The first 100 customers playbook — what actually works in 2026•Sarvesh Kumar Tiwari on Doordripp: "Why can't fashion be delivered as quickly as groceries?"•Ravi Mehta on building reasoning models that actually reason•StellarPay raises $40M to make cross-border payments invisible•The state of AI agents in 2026: the year tools become teammates•Small models are eating the enterprise — and saving fortunes doing it•SaaS margins are back — but only for the top quartile•Europe's $500M+ megarounds are back — three in the last sixty days•The first 100 customers playbook — what actually works in 2026
Author
Alex Rivera
Senior Writer · AI & SaaS
Senior writer covering AI infrastructure, vertical SaaS, and the people building both. Wrote one of the earliest deep-reported pieces on autonomous agents in 2024. Holds a CS degree from Stanford and previously led product at a Y Combinator-backed dev tools startup. Writes from San Francisco.
Published stories
Interviews
Marcus Cole on the humanoid robotics bet nobody is talking about
The Northwind Robotics co-founder lays out a thesis the rest of the industry quietly disagrees with.
Alex Rivera9 min
AITrending
Small models are eating the enterprise — and saving fortunes doing it
Enterprises running smaller fine-tuned models are reporting 80% cost reductions with no quality loss on focused tasks. The frontier model honeymoon is ending.
Alex Rivera7 min
Business
Hiring the second operator: the most underrated decision in early-stage
The hire most founders treat as administrative is the one that quietly determines the next eighteen months.
Alex Rivera9 min
Technology
Edge compute is becoming the most boring — and most profitable — story in tech
The companies wiring the edge are the picks-and-shovels of the AI era. Nobody talks about them.
Alex Rivera8 min