Proactive Agents

Market intelligence

The proactive agent landscape.

Tracking who's building proactive agents, how their architectures compare, and what ships next. Analysis scored against the three-primitives framework.

Analysis

News

Notable developments in proactive AI, briefly noted.

  • May 22, 2026 · X / @howietl

    Airtable's Howie Liu puts $10M behind 500 founders building agent-first companies

    Howie Liu announces the Founding 500: $20K in inference credits each for 500 founders building companies where autonomous agents are the primary workforce, not a sidebar feature. The credits run on Hyperagent, Airtable's standalone agent platform where each session gets an isolated cloud environment with browser, shell, filesystem, and enterprise integrations. Agents learn across sessions and operate in fleets. Applications close May 31. The framing is explicit — 'proactive agents will run tomorrow's companies' — and the money signals that Airtable sees agent-first as a market category worth seeding at scale.

  • May 19, 2026 · Google Blog

    Google launches Gemini Spark at I/O 2026, rebranding Remy

    Remy is now Gemini Spark. Powered by Gemini 3.5 on dedicated Cloud VMs with the Antigravity harness. Five surfaces: Gemini app, email, chat, Android Halo, Chrome agentic browser. Third-party integrations via Anthropic's MCP. Beta open to AI Ultra subscribers in the US.

  • May 12, 2026 · Microsoft

    Microsoft Agent 365 adds cross-cloud registry sync with AWS Bedrock and Google Cloud

    Public preview lets IT teams discover, inventory, and govern agents running in AWS Bedrock and Google Cloud from a single registry — basic lifecycle controls across all three clouds. Signals that proactive-agent fleets are starting to need the same governance plane as user identities, and that the buyer is IT, not a single product team.

  • May 12, 2026 · X / @mamagnus00

    Browser Use launches Agency: AI that prompts you instead of the other way around

    Browser Use launches Agency, a proactive agent product that watches your tools, finds useful work, drafts actions, and asks for approval before executing. Runs 24/7 from Telegram with thousands of one-click integrations (Gmail, Slack, DataDog, Linear). Works with Claude Code / Codex subscriptions. The agent edits and improves itself based on your decisions. 27.2K views on the launch tweet.

  • May 12, 2026 · X / @kenanhsaleh

    a16z Speedrun frames 'proactive AI agents' as the next product paradigm

    Kenan Saleh (a16z Speedrun) calls out the shift from 'ask → answer' to 'observe → act' as the defining product paradigm for the next wave of AI. Names OpenClaw and Poke as early movers. The next Speedrun cohort is actively recruiting founders building proactive agents. 47.8K views and replies full of startups claiming to build exactly this. The category now has explicit top-tier VC framing.

  • May 11, 2026 · AWS

    AWS previews Bedrock AgentCore Payments — agents can pay for what they use

    Managed payment capability lets agents autonomously access and pay for APIs, MCP servers, web content, and other agents. Coinbase CDP and Stripe Privy wallets supported, with session-level spending limits. Removes manual billing, credential management, and compliance plumbing. Same release adds Agent Toolkit for AWS (free) with AWS MCP Server GA. Critical infrastructure for proactive agents that act without per-task human approval.

  • May 8, 2026 · VentureBeat

    Block launches Managerbot, a proactive AI agent for Square sellers

    Built into Square POS, Managerbot monitors business data continuously, handles shift scheduling, inventory, and marketing campaigns. Available to 1M+ US sellers in open beta, GA expected June 2026. The strongest vertical proof point for proactive agents delivering measurable business value.

  • May 7, 2026 · Droid Life

    Google's proactive agent 'Remy' spotted in internal testing

    Gemini-powered '24/7 personal agent for work, school, and daily life.' Monitors Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Keep, Tasks, GitHub, WhatsApp, Spotify, and Photos. Currently in employee-only dogfood on phones. Expected to surface publicly around Google I/O.

  • May 6, 2026 · Extreme Networks

    Extreme Networks unveils Agent ONE Coworker, a proactive AI for network operations

    Announced at Extreme Connect 2026. Coworker mode (Q3 2026) continuously monitors the network, investigates anomalies, and executes approved changes; Nudge surfaces context-aware recommendations by urgency. Operator mode follows in Q4 2026 for governed autonomous actions. Per-action pricing on top of Platform One. A clear vertical example of proactive agents moving past chatbot UX in IT operations.

  • May 6, 2026 · TestingCatalog

    Anthropic unveils Orbit, a proactive assistant for Claude Cowork

    Orbit generates personalized briefings from Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Calendar, Drive, and Figma without prompting. Users can deploy 'Orbit apps' and pin favorites for quick access. Announced at Code with Claude conference. Likely Max-tier only. Follows OpenAI's Pulse and Google's Remy into the proactive assistant space.

  • May 6, 2026 · VentureBeat

    Anthropic gives Claude Managed Agents a 'dreaming' phase to self-improve

    A scheduled between-session process that reviews past agent sessions and persistent memory, extracts patterns, prunes stale notes, merges duplicates, and resolves contradictions. Also shipped: outcomes and multi-agent orchestration. Harvey reported a 6x jump in task completion. Available in research preview. Concrete primitive for agents that improve over time without weight updates.

  • May 5, 2026 · Microsoft

    Microsoft reframes Copilot as the operating layer for proactive agents with Agent 365

    Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot reframes AI agents as the foundational operating layer for work. Agent 365 centralizes governance across teams of agents; Copilot Studio adds agent-to-agent communication, Work IQ previews, expanded usage estimator, and early access to GPT-5.5 Reasoning. Direct signal that enterprise procurement is now organizing around proactive, persistent agents rather than chat interfaces.

  • April 29, 2026 · Salesforce

    Salesforce launches Agentforce Operations with an 'anti-bottleneck' engine

    Specialized agents handle back-office work — process coordination, data verification, compliance checks, approval chasing — without being prompted. The anti-bottleneck engine proactively flags delays (e.g., a three-day signature lag) and suggests fixes before they reach the client. Flow-triggered actions enter beta in May 2026. A back-office counterpart to the customer-facing proactive playbooks shipping elsewhere.

  • March 25, 2026 · Writer

    Writer ships event-based triggers for AI Playbooks

    Event-driven triggers from Gmail, Gong, Google Calendar, SharePoint, and Slack let AI agents execute multi-step workflows without human initiation. Customers have deployed 5,000+ playbooks. The shift from reactive to proactive marks a critical inflection point for enterprise AI.

  • April 14, 2025 · Tech.eu

    CodeWords.ai raises $9M seed for proactive-first AI agents

    Led by Visionaries Club with angels from CEOs of Miro, ElevenLabs, Personio, Zalando, and Supercell. Their agent Cody takes natural-language instructions, writes Python, and deploys 24/7 automations. 3,000+ integrations. Explicitly proactive positioning: 'The best operators don't wait to be asked.'

Companies

Companies and startups building background agents and proactive agents, tracked as they surface.

Working on background or proactive agents? Add your company here.