From Chatbots to Agents: AI Becomes Infrastructure, Not Hype
Published Jan 4, 2026
Demos aren’t cutting it anymore—over the past two weeks vendors and labs moved AI from experiments into systems you can run. Here’s what you’ll get: concrete signals and dates showing the pivot to production. Replit open‐sourced an agentic coding environment on 2024‐12‐26; Databricks added “AI Tools” on 2024‐12‐27; Google and Meta published on‐device inference updates (12‐27 and 12‐30); Isomorphic Labs and Eli Lilly expanded collaboration on 12‐23 and a bioRxiv preprint (12‐28) showed closed‐loop AI‐driven wet labs; NIH and a JAMA study (late‐Dec 2024/12‐29) pushed workflow validation in healthcare; Nasdaq (12‐22) and BIS (12‐24) highlighted ML for surveillance; quantum roadmaps focus on logical qubits; platform teams and creative tools are integrating AI with observability and provenance. Bottom line: the leverage is in tracking how infrastructure, permissions, and observability reshape deployments and product risk.