Autonomous Agent AI News & updates this week

With Amazon And Salesforce As Customers, Agentic AI Startup AppZen Lands $180M To ‘Transform’ Finance Teams

news.crunchbase.com • Sep 22, 2025

AppZen, which has built an agentic AI platform for finance teams, has raised $180 million in a Series D round, the company told Crunchbase News. River...

TL;DR

AppZen, an agentic AI startup, raises $180M in a Series D round from Riverwood Capital, citing its mission to 'transform' finance teams with AI agents.

Key Takeaways:

AppZen has raised a total of $290 million over its lifetime and counts over 500 global enterprise companies, including Amazon and Salesforce, as customers.
The company claims its proprietary AI models, combined with its Mastermind AI Studio, provide a more effective solution than traditional LLMs and automation tools.
AppZen's agentic AI platform automates manual work for finance teams, allowing companies to manage growing complexity without adding headcount.

50 AI agents get their first annual performance review - 6 lessons learned - ZDNET

www.zdnet.com • Yesterday

50 AI agents get their first annual performance review - 6 lessons learned ZDNETThe agentic organization: Contours of the next paradigm for the AI era...

TL;DR

A year-long experiment with 50 AI agents by McKinsey revealed six key lessons, emphasizing the need for careful planning, human oversight, and collaboration.

Key Takeaways:

Agentic AI efforts should focus on injecting agents to boost workflows and address key user pain points.
AI agents aren't the best answer to every business need, and simpler options like rules-based automation or large language model prompting may be more suitable.
Companies should invest in agent development, onboard agents, and provide continual feedback to improve their performance and address issues like 'AI slop' or low-quality outputs.