2025 was a breakthrough year for GenAI. From the looks of Q1, 2026 is set to be the year of agentic AI.
Agentic AI builds on the standalone capabilities of the foundational LLMs to offer companies a fleet of autonomous agents that can handle operational tasks, manage workflows and collaborate with one another to produce unprecedented results.
While much of the narrative around so far has focused on their ability to build entire apps, these agents in fact represent the next frontier of digital service solutions across industries.
The advertising industry, for one, is the latest to benefit from autonomous AI following the launch of Revenue OS from ADvendio. Despite spending over $1 trillion, the global advertising industry has spent a decade tethered to software that is dependent on human intervention to manage complexity. The Revenue OS for Agentic Advertising is an entirely new category of technology designed to reclaim 28% of the workday that is currently spent on human middleware tasks.
According to CTO Julian Ahrends, “The market is at a tipping point. The shift from chatbots to autonomous agents is exciting, but speed is a liability without guardrails. Most AI isn’t built to understand the consequences of a bad trade or a compliance error.”
As Agentic AI continues to pick up pace across industries, let’s take a closer look at some of the other important AI headlines this month:
The release of Claude Opus 4.6
Anthropic builds its lead in the agentic AI revolution thanks to the release of Claude Opus 4.6. The launch will make multi-agent a feature for users, with “agent teams” that allow multiple AI agents to coordinate and divide complex, long-horizon tasks.
It plans more carefully, sustains agentic tasks for longer, can operate more reliably in larger codebases, and has better code review and debugging skills to catch its own mistakes.
Big Tech heads to India for AI Impact Summit
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 kicks off this month in New Delhi. Scheduled to run Feb 16-20, the summit this year will focus heavily on the impact of AI and how the benefits and risks can be fairly managed.
This includes democratizing access to resources associated with AI, removing barriers to adoption on an international scale by creating over 200 indigenous models, and bridging the digital divide for the Global South.
According to Ivan Mehta of TechCrunch, “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said India accounts for more than 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, second only to the U.S.”
OpenAI introduces “Frontier” service
Keeping pace with the demand for AI Agents, OpenAI also made an important release this month with the launch of its new “Frontier” service which is designed to help enterprises build, manage, and deploy AI agents within their existing infrastructure.
Frontier gives agents the same skills people need to succeed at work: shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback, and clear permissions and boundaries with HP, Intuit and Uber, some of the first companies to adopt Frontier across the enterprise.
Ads could soon be coming to ChatGPT
This month also saw an interesting development in the business models surrounding AI.
Although OpenAI offers a variety of subscription tiers, many people around the world rely on the free option as their gateway into AI as a tool. However, each query comes with associated costs and overheads.
To maintain the free option for users, OpenAI is currently testing the use of ads to maintain broad access to its model. According to the company, these ads will be clearly labeled as sponsored and visually separated from the organic answer but the news signifies the first step towards monetizing conversational AI.
Ness Digital Engineering announces new CEO Sudip Singh
Ness Digital Engineering, a leading global provider of intelligent data and software engineering services, announced today the appointment of Sudip Singh as Chief Executive Officer, effective March 1, 2026.
Sudip is an accomplished executive who brings deep experience in technology, product and client service as Ness enters its next phase of growth in the AI economy.
He will succeed Dr. Ranjit Tinaikar, who steps down after six years of success in the role.
Expert suggests AI in healthcare is unsustainable
Grace Chang is the founder and CEO of Kintsugi, a mental health AI startup that developed clinically validated voice biomarkers. Despite raising $30 million and conducting a pivotal study with 1,600 participants over four years, the highly promising company had to close its doors for good.
In an interview with Forbes’ analyst Victor Dey, Chang explains why she believes AI in healthcare is fundamentally unsustainable for the classic startup model, where investors expect returns on revenue in ever-shorter cycles. The development has important lessons for startups in other highly regulated industries.
Planno named solar startup of the year
As AI increases in popularity, its demand on energy resources is also set to grow significantly in the years ahead, stimulating the need for alternative ways to power the AI economy.
Planno AI was named as solar startup of the year at the MESIA Solar Awards 2026, recognizing the company’s contribution to accelerating commercial and industrial solar development through geospatial intelligence and AI.
Its technology helps to make the most efficient use of preexisting infrastructure to capture more solar energy, helping to offset the surging demand placed on energy grids worldwide.
Only 15% of IT leaders are considering deploying fully autonomous AI: QuickBlox
There will always be room for handholding when employing AI to make financially impactful decisions, but that marginal gain grows as systems are given more autonomy. If it takes the same time for humans to act on information presented by AI, this caps profit. Even so, Gartner indicates that only 15% of IT leaders are considering deploying fully autonomous AI.
According to QuickBlox CEO Nate Macleitch, “Leaders need to trust the system enough to let go of the reins, and that confidence only comes when they can see AI operating without errors at scale. For that to happen, workflows must be redesigned around AI capabilities. Leaders must stop asking what AI can do and start asking what decisions AI can handle consistently.”
Anthropic’s latest AI triggers response in traditional legal software stocks
Anthropic’s new legal plug-in for Claude has already sent shockwaves through the legal software market. In the first week of February, shares of Thomson Reuters and RELX, the major providers of legal software, fell by 15% each, reflecting investor concerns about this new AI tool.
However, the reality is that most law firms today are not constrained by a lack of technology. They are constrained by workflows built for a pre-AI environment. Traditional legal practice follows a linear model: documents are gathered, lawyers interpret them, and decisions follow.
“Legal software is moving beyond document storage toward decision support,” says Mariano Jurich, Senior Product Leader at Making Sense, a Silicon Valley–based software development company with more than 15 years of hands-on experience driving digital transformation across U.S. midmarket companies. “Artificial intelligence will also force changes in how legal value is measured. As the time required to complete tasks decreases, software will increasingly track risk reduction, outcome probability, and negotiation leverage, not just hours worked.”
Legal platforms will evolve into shared intelligence environments between lawyer and client, rather than remaining internal firm tools.
