This Week in AI (7/21 - 7/27)

TL;DR

The only AI recap you need: Agents got smarter, enterprise adoption got real, and the big players (plus a few governments) made bold moves. Fast takes for anyone managing AI teams or just trying to keep up.

This week in AI

Major Headlines & Shifts

• AI becomes national infrastructure: The UK signs a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI to integrate AI into public services. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Defense awards $200M in contracts to OpenAI, xAI, Google, and Anthropic for agentic AI defense use cases. (windowscentral.com)

• Enterprise-scale AI wave: The third wave of generative AI is here. Test-time scaling, reasoning agents, and task-driven workflows are rapidly redefining business processes. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)

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Notable Product Launches & Updates

• ChatGPT Agent Mode (July 17): Still feels early-stage for most enterprise workflows. While it merges Deep Research and Operator for multipath browsing-plus-tool ops, hands-on testing reveals significant overlap with Deep Research. As Agent Mode becomes more autonomous, expect clearer use cases and real differentiation to emerge. (openai.com)

  
  

• New enterprise connectors in ChatGPT (July 24): Canva, Notion, HubSpot, and—another win for MCP—custom Model Context Protocol tools now integrate into chat and research workflows. If you’re not looking at MCP yet, you should start! (help.openai.com)

  
  

• Microsoft Copilot and Dynamics 365 Wave 2: Brings agentic capabilities into CRM, finance, HR, service, and supply chain—slated for Oct 2025–Mar 2026 release. That said, from personal experience, CRM Copilots have left a lot to be desired so far—lots of potential, but real impact just hasn’t materialized. Maybe these new agentic capabilities will finally help them deliver. (microsoft.com)

  
  

• Visual Studio upgrade (17.14.9): Adds support for Anthropic models and Model Context Protocol enhancements for external-data connections in dev workflows. As someone writing C# pretty often, I’m glad to see Visual Studio—not just VS Code—finally getting more AI features. (businessinsider.com)

  
  

Enterprise Adoption & Use Cases

• Globant + OpenAI collaboration: Aims to accelerate secure, scalable AI transformation in large-scale digital engineering projects. (globant.com)

• Cohere partners with Dell and Ensemble Health: Dell offers Cohere North for on-prem deployments; healthcare workflows pilot agentic models. (en.wikipedia.org)

• HCLTech and Salesforce expand: Their partnership now deploys agentic AI services across customer-facing operations in enterprise environments. (ainvest.com)

  
  

Policy, Ethics & Regulation

• U.S. bipartisan AI task force: Formed under Rep. Blake Moore to align federal policy across defense, education, workforce, and innovation. (crescendo.ai)

• Ethics friction rises: Artist backlash halts UGC-based training by WeTransfer; the UK rolls out AI-driven traffic enforcement cameras; and high-risk agent failures reignite the sandboxing debate. (voguebusiness.com, crescendo.ai)

  
  

The Manager’s Angle

• AI-driven workforce reshaping: Microsoft reorganizes its sales org around AI Business Solutions, consolidating teams to push Copilot-first strategies (amid layoffs). (businessinsider.com)

• Real-world productivity stories: ChatGPT pilots in Pennsylvania government saved employees 95 minutes per day; U.S. K–12 teachers saved nearly six hours per week via AI tools—a productivity lifeline. (cdn.openai.com)

• Agentic AI deployment risks: A Replit agent accident wiped databases with false success signals—highlighting weak safety nets across autonomous systems. (crescendo.ai). Probably a good reminder to know what access you are actually giving your agents before releasing to production...

  
  

What to Watch Next

1. OpenAI DevDay (Oct 6, 2025): Expect key new agent features and enterprise governance tools. (openai.com)

2. Microsoft Dynamics Wave 2 rollout: Agent-powered Copilots landing in finance, HR, analytics, and supply chain. (microsoft.com)

3. SoftBank-OpenAI/Stargate infrastructure plays: Localized compute hubs that may redefine enterprise hosting and resilience. (openai.com, cdn.openai.com, crescendo.ai)

   
   

See You Next Week

That’s a wrap for this week’s news! Whether you’re leading R&D, managing teams, or just AI-curious, keep those agentic playbooks open and your risk dashboards ready—next week promises more twists (and, inevitably, a few surprises).

✌️ Steven