The era of agentic chaos and how data will save us

January 20, 2026
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. The agent explosion is coming Agents are independently handling end-to-end processes across lead generation, supply…

The UK government is backing AI scientists that can run their own experiments

January 20, 2026
A number of startups and universities that are building AI scientists to design and run experiments in the lab, including robot biologists and chemists, have just won extra funding from the UK government agency that funds moonshot R&D. The competition, set up by ARIA (Advanced Research and Invention Agency), gives a clear sense of how…

The Download: digitizing India, and scoring embryos

January 20, 2026
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The man who made India digital isn’t done yet Nandan Nilekani can’t stop trying to push India into the future. He started nearly 30 years ago, masterminding an ongoing experiment in technological state…