Paid Content: This is ad content, written and produced by ZDNET in collaboration with the sponsor. If you buy a product featured here, we may earn a commission. There are shadow agents running in almost every environment we look at, warns Cisco's VP of product for identity, who oversees the company's Duo Agentic Identity product designed to solve the problem. Cisco / Matt Caulfield Agentic AI promises to transform business strategy from the ground up. But it also poses a serious challenge to IT leaders.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to mimic human-like intelligence has led to a surge in LLM-based autonomous agents. Though recent LLMs seem capable of planning and reasoning given user instructions, their effectiveness in applying these capabilities for autonomous task solving remains underexplored. This is especially true in enterprise settings, where automated agents hold the promise of a high impact. To fill this gap, we propose WorkArena++, a novel benchmark consisting of 682 tasks corresponding to realistic workflows routinely performed by knowledge workers. WorkArena++ is designed to evaluate the planning, problem-solving, logical/arithmetic reasoning, retrieval, and contextual understanding abilities of web agents. Our empirical studies across state-of-the-art LLMs and vision-language models (VLMs), as well as human workers, reveal several challenges for such models to serve as useful assistants in the workplace. In addition to the benchmark, we provide a mechanism to effortlessly generate thousands of ground-truth observation/action traces, which can be used for fine-tuning existing models. Overall, we expect this work to serve as a useful resource to help the community progress towards capable autonomous agents.

The promise of autonomous agentic AI requires significant changes in the governance landscape. Parents of young children face a lot of fears about developmental milestones, from infancy through adulthood. The number of months it takes a baby to learn to talk or walk is often used as a benchmark for wellness, or an indicator of additional tests needed to properly diagnose a potential health condition. A parent rejoices over the child's first steps and then realizes how much has changed when the child can quickly walk outside, instead of slowly crawling in a safe area inside. Suddenly safety, including childproofing, takes a completely different lens and approach. Generative AI hit toddlerhood between December 2025 and January 2026 with the introduction of no code tools from multiple vendors and the debut of OpenClaw, an open source personal agent posted on GitHub.

Y et, to our knowledge, every metric for alignment is a posteriori, i.e., a system is deemed aligned as

Among the research topics in multi-agent learning, mixed-motive cooperation is one of the most prominent challenges, primarily due to the mismatch between individual and collective goals.

Much of this effort has focused on the single-agent setting, in which an agent maximizes a predefined extrinsic reward function.

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Autonomous agents will soon run thousands of enterprise workflows, and only organizations with unified, trusted, context-rich data will prevent chaos and unlock reliable value at scale. AI agents are moving beyond coding assistants and customer service chatbots into the operational core of the enterprise. The ROI is promising, but autonomy without alignment is a recipe for chaos. Business leaders need to lay the essential foundations now. Agents are independently handling end-to-end processes across lead generation, supply chain optimization, customer support, and financial reconciliation. A mid-sized organization could easily run 4,000 agents, each making decisions that affect revenue, compliance, and customer experience.