Category: agentic ai

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Mitigating vendor lock-in with Sakana AI Fugu multi-agent models

Sakana AI launched Fugu to orchestrate multi-agent operations and mitigate single-vendor dependency risks in enterprise deployments.

Enterprises face operational vulnerabilities when relying entirely on monolithic AI APIs. Japanese AI firm Sakana AI designed Fugu as a response to these concentration risks by creating an orchestration language model that calls upon a pool of varied models to complete multi-step tasks.

Users access this ecosystem through a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Fugu routes queries internally, deciding whether to resolve a prompt directly or to assemble a coordinated team of expert models for deeper analysis. The system handles model selection, delegation, verification, and synthesis internally. Engineering teams interact with what appears to be one model while a background system of specialists executes the actual computation.

Sakana AI targets the geopolitical and regulatory risks associated with AI sourcing. Recent export controls affecting Anthropic models like Fable and Mythos demonstrated that access to specific foundational architectures can vanish based on foreign policy decisions.

Fugu functions as a hedge against these sudden supply chain disruptions. The platform relies on a completely swappable agent pool. Fugu dynamically routes traffic around any restricted or degraded provider to maintain service continuity. Sakana AI states this capability provides the resilient architecture required for AI sovereignty.

Fugu deployment tiers

Two tiers are available to accommodate different operational latency requirements.

The standard Fugu model prioritises low latency for daily tasks, integrating into standard developer tools like Codex for live coding and code review. Organisations subject to strict data governance or privacy mandates can manually opt specific underlying models out of the standard Fugu routing pool.

Fugu Ultra targets complex, multi-step analytical problems that demand maximum accuracy. The Ultra variant coordinates a deeper pool of expert agents for intensive tasks such as academic paper reproduction, literature investigations, and patent analysis.

Sakana AI reports that Fugu Ultra performs competitively against leading closed models like Fable 5 and Mythos Preview across scientific, engineering, and reasoning benchmarks:

The orchestration method ensures companies can access top-tier computing capabilities without carrying the vendor concentration risk or export control exposure inherent to those closed models.

Implementation in cybersecurity

Almost 500 early users tested the system during an extended beta program focused on lengthy, multi-step computational workflows. With cybersecurity such a focus for models like Claude Mythos, engineering teams deployed Fugu Ultra to automate complete security assessment cycles.

Human operators issued one scoped instruction, and the orchestration engine executed the entire reconnaissance phase. The model successfully conducted cross-site scripting and SQL injection checks alongside thorough authentication reviews.

A participating cybersecurity engineer confirmed the model stayed strictly within its operational parameters and avoided initiating destructive actions against the target infrastructure. Fugu concluded the automated engagement by generating a clean vulnerability report complete with verifying evidence and exact retest steps for human remediation teams.

The implementation demonstrated that multi-agent routing maintains strict compliance boundaries while executing complex penetration testing sequences.

Software development teams also integrated Fugu Ultra into their primary code review pipelines to compare defect detection rates against established monolithic tools. The orchestration engine consistently outperformed baseline models in identifying logic flaws and security vulnerabilities within complex enterprise codebases.

“For code review, Fugu Ultra is significantly better than GPT-5.5. It gives comprehensive answers and finds the bugs others miss,” reported a software engineer involved in the beta deployment. “Where other tools flag about three issues, Fugu surfaced more than twenty. It’s become the model I run all my reviews through.”

Automated research and persona stability

Data science units deployed the system in an almost fully-automated research mode. Fugu Ultra successfully explored mathematical hypotheses, executed experimental code runs, interpreted failure states, and revised its own approaches to sustain progress over extended periods with minimal human intervention. This capability directly addresses the operational limitations of single-call models that require constant human prompting to recover from logic errors.

Leadership at an unnamed enterprise platform company identified long-term persona stability as a primary advantage during these extended sessions. Conventional monolithic architectures often suffer from context degradation and identity drift when processing extensive conversational histories.

“Raw output quality is on par with top frontier models, but Fugu showed unusually strong persona stability across long sessions, holding its identity where other models drift,” the executive stated. “For agent products, that may matter more than raw benchmark scores.”

Extended benchmark validation

Sakana AI built the internal routing logic upon extensive research into learned model orchestration. The technical foundation for the product stems from findings published in the company’s ICLR 2026 papers, specifically the Trinity and Conductor frameworks.

These academic foundations allow Fugu to process requests by understanding precisely when a task requires delegation versus direct resolution. The internal language model dictates communication protocols between the individual agents and structures the final synthesis of their separate computational outputs.

Validation testing against frontier AI competitors covered complex, open-ended disciplines ranging from financial time series prediction to mechanical design. Fugu also demonstrated high proficiency in niche physical logic tests and visual interpretation tasks, including solving the Rubik’s Cube and performing Japanese handwriting analysis. The capacity to excel in both quantitative financial modelling and qualitative image processing confirms the efficacy of the multi-agent orchestration approach.

Sakana AI designed the system to scale organically as the broader AI hardware and software market matures. Because the product relies entirely on learned orchestration logic rather than fixed operational rulesets, it automatically benefits from third-party innovations. Sakana AI plans to continuously expand the available pool of expert agents.

The engineering team will fold newly-released open-source tools and proprietary Sakana AI models into the routing pool as they become available. Both the standard Fugu and Fugu Ultra models are available to enterprise clients today.

See also: SAP and Google Cloud deploy agentic commerce architecture

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.

AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.

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June 22, 2026
SAP and Google Cloud deploy agentic commerce architecture

SAP and Google Cloud are deploying agentic commerce architecture to automate multi-agent marketing and retail operations at enterprise scale.

SAP research indicates 78 percent of businesses consider AI essential for retaining customers in 2026. However, the same data reveals fewer than two in five companies share customer data across customer experience (37%) or CRM (39%) platforms.

Addressing this structural data failure requires direct infrastructure intervention. SAP and Google Cloud expanded their partnership to build an agentic customer experience architecture, connecting data, AI, engagement, and commerce operations.

The deployment relies on restructuring how AI interacts with backend commercial platforms. Most digital commerce infrastructures rely on fragmented APIs. SAP Commerce Cloud adopts the Universal Commerce Protocol to standardise data exchange among retailers, payment gateways, and autonomous agents. This framework allows software to independently execute the full retail sequence, spanning initial search, transaction processing, and post-sale resolution.

Deploying the Universal Commerce Protocol

Engineering teams integrating the Universal Commerce Protocol facilitate direct interactions between intelligent agents and commerce platforms. The standardisation lowers integration costs and accelerates onboarding into AI-driven channels.

SAP plans to collaborate with Google to ensure merchant products surface organically across the Gemini application and Google Search, specifically incorporating AI Mode functionalities. Consumers interact with these interfaces while the backend architecture processes inventory checks, cart management, and payment processing without requiring retailers to rebuild existing infrastructure.

SAP Commerce Cloud integrates Google Gemini capabilities to power a designated Shopping Assistant. Brands deploy the assistant directly to their consumers to facilitate chat, voice, and text engagements. State retention remains active throughout the complete shopping cycle. The deployment ingests live behavioural inputs, current warehouse capacities, and active marketing data to assemble distinct merchandise pairings, including full event configurations. By continuously refining recommendations, the application ensures high relevance and strict physical fulfilment capability.

Enterprise systems often fail when promotional campaigns trigger demand that physical inventory cannot satisfy. Frontend interfaces failing to synchronise with backend warehouse systems frequently halt digital purchases. Users regularly click promotional emails, load the associated mobile application, and face sudden out-of-stock notices during checkout. Fulfilment updates experience severe delays, leaving support agents without a complete operational picture. SAP and Google Cloud engineered their joint solution to correct these specific systemic customer experience failures.

Instead of managing disconnected points of contact, the architecture unifies the entire sequence. Traditional commercial setups require consumers to repeatedly input previously shared information. Support staff frequently lack access to unified records, preventing them from resolving issues efficiently. The integration targets these operational breakdowns, ensuring the system recognises the user and their precise context instantly across all digital properties.

Bidirectional data flows

Marketing execution demands highly accurate data pipelines. SAP Engagement Cloud partners with Google Cloud to formulate an autonomous multi-agent framework. The technical foundation relies on SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery. The deployment relies on bidirectional, zero-copy data linking secured by strict administrative controls. Leaving vast data stores in place rather than duplicating them drops storage expenses and network latency.

BigQuery ingests live variables like weather conditions, precise locations, and active advertising interaction rates. SAP Customer Experience solutions supply the internal behavioural context, tracking customer profiles, exact transaction histories, specific service interactions, and consented engagement records. SAP Engagement Cloud activates the combined intelligence, deploying autonomous agents to orchestrate personalised interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.

Routing information through the Business Data Cloud while BigQuery handles the logic forces immediate inventory synchronisation. The Shopping Assistant actively queries live warehouse records before displaying any product. Software checks physical supply against consumer requests, verifying availability prior to making the suggestion.

Generative execution in production environments

Advanced generative models dictate the localised output of the marketing campaigns. Google Gemini models, specifically including the Nano Banana 2 iteration, provide specialised agentic skills. The models dynamically generate localised messaging, customised imagery, and campaign variations based on the exact specifications provided by the bidirectional data flow.

The deployment upgrades standard text messages into immersive and interactive interfaces via Google Rich Communication Services. Advertising creatives evolve continuously based on incoming engagement data. The system processes the interaction, evaluates the response against the user profile, and instructs the Nano Banana 2 model to adjust the subsequent communication.

Marketing departments achieve high efficiency by abandoning manual execution. Instead of configuring rigid campaign parameters, teams establish business goals and provide enterprise data access to the SAP Engagement Cloud. The autonomous agents coordinate the necessary steps, segmenting audiences based on Google BigQuery analytics and generating specific content variations through Google Gemini models.

Evaluating the infrastructure impact

Deploying the architecture restructures standard commerce operations. Consumers dictate their purchasing intent to search engines and conversational interfaces. The embedded AI agents process the intent, navigate the Universal Commerce Protocol connections, and complete the purchase directly against the enterprise backend.

Retailers retain full ownership of the customer relationship despite the transaction occurring within a third-party environment. The architecture captures the consented engagement data, feeding the transaction history back into the SAP Customer Experience solutions. The system updates the localised customer profile, providing the Google Gemini models with fresh context prior to the next engagement cycle.

The system continuously improves campaign performance without requiring direct human intervention. The multi-agent framework evaluates the success of a generated Rich Communication Services text message, adjusting the variables prior to the next automated dispatch.

See also: Computer vision deployments drive retail productivity gains

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.

AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.

The post SAP and Google Cloud deploy agentic commerce architecture appeared first on AI News.

June 19, 2026
HarmonyOS 7 steps into the AI gap Apple left open in China

Four days after Apple confirmed that Siri AI would not launch in China, Huawei took the stage in Dongguan and declared HarmonyOS 7 the beginning of the agent era. The gap Apple could not fill, Huawei has moved into with an architecture built specifically for it.

What HarmonyOS 7 actually changes

The headline change is the HarmonyOS Intelligent Agent Framework 2.0, which restructures the OS around what Huawei calls an “intent-as-service” model, compressing what previously required multiple app navigation into a single natural-language command.

At the centre of this is Xiaoyi, Huawei’s AI assistant, rebuilt from a conventional voice tool into what the company describes as a system-level intelligence agent. Xiaoyi now controls over 2,100 system-level capabilities and coordinates with more than 2,000 third-party AI agents developed across Huawei’s developer ecosystem.

Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, framed the release as a generational inflexion point: “In 2019, HarmonyOS was born. In 2023, native HarmonyOS apps began. In 2026, HarmonyOS enters the Agent era.”

Underneath sits openPangu 2.0, Huawei’s updated foundation model, with 505 billion parameters in its Pro version and 92 billion in the Flash variant, both supporting 512K context windows. On-device models at 30 billion parameters are due on Kirin chips by autumn 2026. HarmonyOS 7 also delivers a 15%-plus performance improvement over HarmonyOS 6.1, according to Huawei’s own benchmarks.

The task execution rate claimed is above 90%, though that figure is Huawei’s own and has not been independently verified.

The market position is consolidating

The numbers shared at HDC 2026 reflect a shift that has already happened. In Q1 2026, HarmonyOS held 19% of China’s smartphone OS market against Apple iOS at 16%, with Android at 65%. HarmonyOS first overtook iOS in China in Q2 2025, according to Counterpoint Research.

That trajectory matters more than any single feature because China is simultaneously the market Apple cannot currently operate in at the AI level and the one Huawei has fully optimised for. The agent network Xiaoyi coordinates includes partnerships with Ctrip for travel planning and Ant Medical for health data analysis, services woven into the Chinese consumer stack that Apple’s architecture does not reach.

Where the limits are

The scope of the challenge to Apple needs calibrating. HarmonyOS 7 is currently in developer beta, with the stable consumer release expected this autumn. The 2,000-plus AI agents are anchored in the Chinese app ecosystem.

The platform counts more than 400,000 applications and services, which is significant but still a fraction of what Apple’s App Store carries. Huawei’s ambitions to take HarmonyOS international remain aspirational for now.

There is also a design note that softens any clean divergence narrative: HarmonyOS 7 adopts the same Liquid Glass aesthetic Apple introduced with iOS 26, and Samsung brought to One UI 9. Visual language converges even as underlying architectures and regulatory environments pull in opposite directions.

The longer arc

HarmonyOS exists because of US sanctions. When Huawei lost access to Google’s Android in 2019, it built its own OS from necessity. By January 2026, over 90% of Huawei devices were running the fully homegrown version. That forced independence is now a structural advantage in the one market where Apple cannot currently deploy its headline AI feature.

Sanctions built the platform. Regulatory friction cleared its path.

See also: Siri AI arrives with Google inside, and much of the world is locked out

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.

AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.

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June 15, 2026
Visa ChatGPT integration enables AI agent retail purchasing

Visa has linked its payment infrastructure to ChatGPT, enabling AI agents to recommend retail products and execute financial transactions.

The deployment removes human intervention from the final stages of the retail funnel. Autonomous agents will now process user prompts, evaluate merchant catalogues, and complete the checkout process using Visa’s payment rails at any supporting merchant.

Previous retail AI integrations restricted automated purchasing to single-vendor environments. Retailers built proprietary chatbots confined entirely to their own inventory. Visa’s integration bypasses closed-loop architecture.

The payment giant connects the open-web reasoning capabilities of a large language model directly to a universal transaction network. Users simply command the agent to procure an item, and the model handles the vendor selection, product comparison, and financial settlement.

Enterprises should be aware that commercial transactions will increasingly execute without a human buyer ever seeing a retailer’s website, digital advertisement, or promotional email.

Restructuring retail data for AI agent buyers

Marketing departments design campaigns around human psychology, emotional triggers, and visual merchandising. AI agents operate on pure data evaluation.

When ChatGPT receives a mandate to purchase a specific product type, it parses technical specifications, aggregated sentiment scores, and pricing structures. Display ads and user interface optimisations hold zero weight in the model’s selection criteria.

Retailers will need to expose machine-readable inventory data. Search engine optimisation transitions into language model optimisation. The algorithms driving ChatGPT rely on structured data feeds, clear API documentation, and explicitly-formatted product attributes to evaluate whether an item meets the user’s parameters. Merchants failing to maintain high-quality, structured metadata will find their products invisible to the autonomous agent.

Personalisation occurs entirely on the user’s device or within the user’s secure LLM profile. The AI retains the consumer’s past preferences, sizing requirements, budget constraints, and brand affinities. Instead of the retailer attempting to guess the consumer’s needs through tracking cookies and site behaviour, the agent arrives at the digital storefront with a highly-specific procurement mandate.

Completing a transaction without human intervention requires a secure, automated handshake between the reasoning engine and the payment gateway. Visa provides the financial layer necessary to establish trust in an inherently untrusted agentic environment. Traditional checkout flows require manual data entry, CAPTCHA verification, and two-factor authentication loops. These mechanisms block autonomous agents.

Visa implements programmatic tokenisation to solve the authentication problem. The user pre-authorises the ChatGPT environment with specific spending parameters. When the LLM decides on a purchase, it generates a single-use payment token through the Visa network. The agent transmits this token via API to the merchant’s backend systems. The transaction settles exactly like a standard digital wallet payment, bypassing the visual user interface completely.

A digital storefront requiring multi-page navigation or mandatory account creation introduces failure points for the agent. Enterprises actively deploying headless commerce architectures possess an advantage. They can process the agent’s payload, confirm stock levels, and execute the payment token in milliseconds.

Enterprises track bounce rates, session durations, and cart abandonment to understand consumer behaviour. An AI agent does not browse—it queries an endpoint, extracts the necessary data, and either executes the payment or terminates the connection.

Retailers must develop new telemetry to measure agent interactions. Tracking the frequency of API queries from known LLM IP addresses replaces tracking unique human visitors. Understanding why an agent selected a competitor’s product will require analysing the structural differences in product data feeds rather than running A/B tests on website layouts.

Customer retention strategies also need adjustment. An autonomous agent evaluates the market fresh with every prompt unless explicitly instructed by the user to reorder a specific brand. Loyalty programmes must be engineered into the payment token or the user’s LLM profile. If the AI cannot automatically apply a loyalty discount during its background calculation, the merchant loses the pricing advantage intended to secure the repeat purchase.

Managing and securing the agentic AI supply chain

Prompt injection attacks could theoretically manipulate an agent into purchasing from malicious vendors or authorising inflated transactions. Visa’s network acts as the final validation layer, applying fraud detection models to the incoming token requests.

Businesses face the secondary challenge of managing automated returns and customer service queries initiated by the AI. If the delivered product fails to meet the parameters defined in the original prompt, the user can instruct the agent to reverse the transaction.

In this scenario, the AI will autonomously navigate the merchant’s return policy, initiate the refund request, and generate the necessary shipping labels. Retail customer service operations must deploy their own automated systems capable of negotiating directly with the consumer’s agent.

Visa’s ChatGPT integration confirms the enterprise transition from human-operated software interfaces to autonomous digital proxies. The customer is no longer necessarily a human navigating a web browser, but an algorithm executing a script.

See also: Aviva deploys AI to stop £230M in sophisticated insurance fraud

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.

AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.

The post Visa ChatGPT integration enables AI agent retail purchasing appeared first on AI News.

June 11, 2026
How C3 AI agents will automate predictive maintenance for Shell

Shell will use agents from C3 AI to shift from basic anomaly detection towards fully-automated predictive maintenance.

The global energy giant is building on their current use of the C3 AI Reliability Suite, which already keeps tabs on more than 30,000 crucial pieces of equipment across upstream and downstream operations. Shell now intends to lean heavily into autonomous AI agents, putting them in charge of the entire maintenance lifecycle.

Going from that first warning sign all the way to a completed repair, this level of automation strips away the need for constant human oversight and makes sure the company’s resources are pointed exactly where they are needed most.

“This expanded partnership with Shell proves what’s possible when enterprise AI is fully operationalised at global scale for predictive maintenance—reducing unplanned downtime and delivering hundreds of millions of dollars in economic value,” said Stephen Ehikian, President of C3 AI.

“Shell has built mature AI predictive maintenance programs on our platform, and together we’re now pushing into agentic AI, advancing how this technology can further transform reliability, safety, efficiency, and operational performance.”

C3’s AI agents help Shell move past basic anomaly detection

In the beginning, Shell used machine learning simply to spot odd patterns in sensor data, giving engineers an early heads-up before things broke. To pull this off, the system ingests a massive amount of real-time operational technology (OT) data and mixes it with business context from ERP platforms such as SAP.

The next step introduces AI agents built for actual reasoning and independent action. While older systems stopped at pinging an engineer when things looked unusual, this next-generation framework independently investigates why an alert fired in the first place.

Once it pinpoints the root cause, the agent steps up to draft precise work orders, confirm part availability in the inventory, and generate procurement requests.

C3 AI’s platform handles the heavy lifting, providing a model-driven space to easily integrate high-frequency sensor feeds with structured financial and maintenance logs. These AI capabilities are trained to learn the normal operating baselines for specific gear, like pumps, turbines, and compressors.

The agentic layer sits on top of this foundation. Operators configure an individual agent for a given piece of equipment by defining its objectives and permitted responses. If the core machine learning models detect a deviation from normal operations, this agent activates, gathering extensive contextual data to build a complete picture of the situation. This context usually includes recent maintenance history, environmental conditions, and upstream process variables.

Using all that information, it suggests a fix backed by solid evidence. Human operators can then easily approve or override the plan. As the system proves itself over time, Shell can fully automate its responses to certain types of alerts. Connecting straight into systems like SAP is critical here, allowing the agent to work inside the exact same workflows that human planners already use.

The real impact of agentic AI for predictive maintenance

Putting agentic AI to work at this scale tackles the classic “last mile” headache in predictive maintenance. Many industrial companies can predict failures just fine, but turning those insights into fast, efficient action remains a challenge. Usually, engineers still have to manually dig through alerts, investigate the causes, and write up the work orders themselves.

Shell wants to shrink that timeline. By letting AI handle root cause analysis and work orders, the delay between a predicted failure and the actual fix drops. That directly improves equipment uptime and protects production.

Moving to a model where repairs only happen when the equipment condition actually demands it naturally saves money, simply because nobody is wasting time tinkering with perfectly fine machinery. Leaving healthy hardware alone also means it lasts much longer.

On top of the cost savings, stepping in before a catastrophe hits makes the whole operation much safer and cuts down on environmental risks, which is always top of mind in the energy sector.

“What Shell and C3 AI have built on Azure over the past several years is exactly what enterprise AI should look like—real applications, running in production, delivering measurable value at global scale,” commented Sandy Gupta, VP GISV, Software Development Companies at Microsoft.

This expanded rollout shows that we are finally talking about practical industrial AI production workflows instead of just algorithms. Rather than just the prediction itself, the real value comes from the system’s ability to act on it with barely any human oversight.

See also: Meta Business Agent drives AI-powered conversational commerce

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.

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June 9, 2026