Agentic AI is still up for grabs

Welcome to Runtime! We're back! Today: Workday jostles for position in the race to bring agents to the enterprise, a new type of software supply-chain attack is spreading, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.

(Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Runtime each week.)

Rising tides, no boats

2025 was supposed to be "the year of the agent," the year when generative AI applications would move beyond their chatbot origins to autonomously execute any number of business tasks and transform the way enterprise software is built and sold. Gartner recently declared that it is safe to take the over on that prediction, which rather than deterring the enterprise software vendors who have placed big bets on agentic AI only gives them more time to hone the pitch.

Workday is one of many companies trying to convince enterprises to use its software as the foundation for their agentic AI strategies, and Tuesday at Workday Rising it unveiled several new tools that it hopes will close the deal. "The era of one-size-fits-all enterprise software is over," said Workday CTO Peter Bailis in a press release, and Workday's plan is to help current customers make more of their existing investments in its software.

Workday Build is a new software-development platform that promises to give "customers and partners the power to create, share, and scale AI-powered solutions directly on Workday," the company said in a press release.
Customers will be able to use a new low-code tool built around technology from Flowise, which Workday acquired earlier this year, called Workday Flowise Agent Builder.
The idea is to give customers easy-to-use tools to build and manage agents that work around the HR and finance data stored in Workday's systems, which is a relatively new concept for the company according to Phil Wainewright of Digimonica.
"Workday has historically been very cautious about allowing customers and partners to build out their own custom functionality," Wainewright wrote. "With the introduction of Build … there's a massive expansion of freedom for developers to build on the platform."

One big reason why AI agents have yet to hit the mainstream is that many enterprises don't have the proper data management tools and strategies in place to help unlock unstructured data. Anyone who wants to sell an agentic AI platform to those companies needs to deal with that reality first, and Workday rolled out a new data service Thursday that could help.

Workday Data Cloud will give customers "zero-copy" access to their Workday data inside Databricks, Snowflake, and Salesforce, which means they can share that data with their other data management tools without having to actually move it into those tools.
"For example, a retailer could combine Workday data on employee engagement with Snowflake data on store performance to help them understand which teams are driving the most sales," the company said in a press release.
If agents are ever going to live up to the hype, they'll need fast and easy access to a variety of data sources to operate autonomously.
Every vendor likes to think of the customer data stored on its platform as the "single source of truth" for their customers, but that's rarely the case, and "this partnership model could become a template for other enterprise software companies looking to participate in the data platform market without building competing infrastructure," Moor Insights & Strategy's Melody Blue told CIO.

Workday is no different from enterprise software competitors such as Salesforce and ServiceNow in that it became a huge part of its customers' business operations long before anybody was talking about generative AI. Upstarts built around the generative AI era are nipping at their heels, and Workday took one of those companies off the board Tuesday by announcing a $1.1 billion deal to acquire Sana.

Sana sells slick enterprise AI agent-building tools as well as a learning-management system that helps companies pull data from different sources used by their organization to train employees.
However, given that Workday unveiled a new agent-building tool on the same day it shelled out $1.1 billion to acquire a new agent-building tool, it's safe to say that vendors are still searching for the magic combination of features that will make agents easier to build.

Package deal

Millions of software developers use NPM, a software package repository owned by GitHub, to find open-source code they need to build or update their applications. A new type of malware spreading through packages stored on NPM is stealing private credentials from developers that install the packages and publishing those secrets to GitHub, according to Krebs On Security.

Those secrets are being published to a GitHub repository called Shai-Hulud, or the name of those huge sandworms in the Dune novels and movies. "Beyond data theft, the malware exhibits worm-like behaviour: when a compromised package encounters additional npm tokens in its environment, it will automatically publish malicious versions of any packages it can access - spreading across the npm ecosystem," according to Wiz Research.

Security experts believe the new malware threat is similar to one that spread a few weeks ago across NPM, which Ars Technica said "is likely to be the world’s biggest supply-chain attack ever." Nicholas Weaver, a researcher with the International Computer Science Institute, told Krebs on Security that package repositories like NPM need to insert a human in the package-publishing loop: “Allowing purely automated processes to update the published packages is now a proven recipe for disaster.”

Enterprise funding

Invisible Technologies raised $100 million in "growth funding" for its AI infrastructure software, which includes a data platform and an observability tool.

Remedio scored $65 million in its first funding round to date after six years of operating profitably as a cybersecurity startup focused on device posture management, which helps companies manage PCs, Macs and other devices on their networks.

CodeRabbit landed $60 million in Series B funding for its code-review software, which helps developers spot and fix problems with AI-generated code.

Airia raised $50 million in new funding from co-founder John Marshall, who previously invested a separate $50 million round in the enterprise AI orchestration startup.

Micro1 scored $35 million in Series A funding for its AI data-labeling services, which are in demand after Meta invested $14.5 billion in Scale AI, forcing rival model developers to look for new labeling partners.

Druid AI landed $31 million in Series C funding as it builds out a platform for building and managing enterprise AI agents.

The Runtime roundup

Salesforce announced the creation of a new business unit called Missionforce that will sell AI services to U.S. military customers, and we can't wait to see which furry mascot gets selected for the new division.

Nvidia will purchase any computing capacity that CoreWeave isn't able to sell through 2032, a deal that is worth $6.3 billion up front according to Reuters.

Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!