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Following in Shopify’s footsteps, Duolingo announced this week it’s going “AI-first” as it starts to replace human contractor roles with AI agents.
Expect many more such headlines.
Business teams are being asked to justify headcount in a world where AI can handle increasingly complex tasks across coding, customer support, sales, and more.
Per CB Insights estimates, the enterprise AI agents & copilots space did over $5B in revenue last year, and it’s expected to grow 155% to reach $13B in 2025.
This shift isn’t just about productivity tools — it’s a fundamental reorg of the workforce, where human workers now have to earn their place alongside increasingly autonomous agents.
This week, several major players announced AI buying features:
OpenAI rolled out new shopping features in ChatGPT, including links to buy directly in search.
Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal all announced agentic payments solutions. While they’re all at different phases of development, the end goal is to allow AI agents to handle transactions while giving consumers control over how agents spend.
These solutions address 2 friction points in agentic commerce: the seamless integration of buying (and eventually, branding) in AI search; and, perhaps most importantly, the ability for agents to make payments securely and with guardrails in place.
So what’s next as consumer-facing agentic solutions roll out? Whose data reigns supreme on AI search? What happens to all that SEO? And who’s set to win the battle for the customer relationship?
The US economy shrank 0.3% in the first 3 months of 2025, per a Bureau of Economic Analysis report published yesterday. This was the first quarterly decline seen since 2022.
Industry experts chalk it up primarily to businesses and consumers preparing for tariffs.
CB Insights analysts recently broke down how evolving trade policies are reshaping key sectors from industrials to retail and consumer goods.
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