Research & Development news

• Raising the quality of insights in agentic analytics

  02-11-2026 18:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  In just a few years, generative AI has changed the face of enterprise analytics, notably by making analytics accessible to users across the organization. Agentic AI promises to do even more, by automating entire workflows and taking actions based on agent insights. But there is a problem: The quality of insights that agents currently generate leaves much to be desired.Fewer than half of agent-generated insights at the organizations surveyed for this report lead to business improvement. And while
  
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• The Download: the agentic web arrives and the drive for safer roads

  02-11-2026 14:10 via MIT Technology Review
  
  This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.The agentic web is hereIn 2001, a decade after inventing the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision: an internet navigated by autonomous software agents that address our every need, without requiring us to muck about with browsers and search engines ourselves.At the time, the idea seemed far-fetched. But a quarter-century on, AI agents are
  
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• Stop counting tokens, start counting what ships

  02-11-2026 14:10 via MIT Technology Review
  
  When a developer gives an AI agent a coding task, the agent does more than answer once. It plans, generates code, runs tests, and repeats the process to correct errors. A single task can use 10 to 50 times more tokens than a basic chat prompt. The more useful the agent becomes, the more calls it makes. With per-token pricing, the workflows creating the most value can also become the most expensive.The financial pressure is already visible. Uber reportedly exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget by A
  
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• The agentic web is here

  02-11-2026 10:35 via MIT Technology Review
  
  In 2001, a decade after he invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision. Together with two colleagues, he published an article in the magazine Scientific American in which he outlined what he called the “Semantic Web”: an internet designed to be navigated by autonomous software agents that could address our every need, without requiring us to muck about with browsers and search engines ourselves.To illustrate what this might look like, Berners-Lee and his colleagues
  
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