The Hallway Track

automation

42 tracked signals on automation.

How to Build an AI-Native Services Company

Y Combinator · Jun 03, 2026

AI-native services companies will rebuild trillion-dollar industries like law, tax, and insurance by delivering outcomes rather than co-pilots.

“Some of the biggest companies of the next decade won't be software businesses at all. They'll be services companies like insurance carriers and law firms rebuilt from scratch with AI doing most of the work.”
Introducing Genie One: the AI coworker that understands your data (with demo)

Databricks · Jun 23, 2026

Databricks launches Genie One, an AI coworker that connects to enterprise data and apps to deliver accurate insights and automate actions.

“Genie 1 is an AI co-worker that can connect to all of your data and all of your apps so that everyone in your organization can get insights and even automate action.”
🔬 The Self-Driving Lab — Joseph Krause, Radical AI

Latent Space Blog · Jun 17, 2026

Radical AI uses self-driving labs with an 'AI scientist' to accelerate materials discovery over 10x.

“In materials, the ground truth is the material itself. You have to be able to test it and characterize it.”
GitHub Agentic Workflows: Automation That Actually Reads the Room | DEM350

Microsoft Developer (Build) · Jun 04, 2026

GitHub is launching Agentic Workflows in public preview, letting developers define automation in markdown instead of YAML.

“instead of having to know YAML for actions, you can define your workflows in markdown, you can even use copilot to create those markdown files that then can be compiled into an agentic workflow”
Schedules for Managed Deep Agents: Cron jobs, prompts, and Slack delivery

LangChain · Sep 23, 2026

LangChain adds cron-based schedules to Managed Deep Agents for recurring, tool-invoking messages delivered to Slack.

“Schedules can be configured and added to your agent to allow it to send recurring or regular messages that invoke its tools or leverage context that it has available.”
Realtime multiplayer, automation, and you! — Idan Gazit, GitHub

AI Engineer · Aug 08, 2026

GitHub Next argues AI's greatest value is enabling team collaboration, not multiplying individual productivity

“the greatest value doesn't come from multiplying me into more me. It comes from enabling groups of people to do more.”
Build the thing that builds the thing | BRK245

Microsoft Developer (Build) · Jun 04, 2026

Your job is no longer to build software faster, but to help your coding agent build software faster by closing the loop.

“it's all about closing the loop”
Create a Genie Agent from Genie One

Databricks · Sep 23, 2026

Databricks demonstrates turning a Genie One workflow into a reusable agent that automates recurring blog-performance reporting.

“I don't need to add additional levels of detail... Genie already knows in the context of my organization what I mean and what is important to me.”
Build a social media agent with Managed Deep Agents

LangChain · Aug 12, 2026

LangChain Managed Deep Agents enables scheduled autonomous agents with Slack and custom tool integrations

“This agent honestly saved me a ton of time. I use it every day to stay on top of the conversation.”
Quoting David Crawshaw's prompt

Simon Willison · Aug 03, 2026

A nightly cron prompt can automate dependency rebasing and validation via coding agents

“Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.”
AI-Native Compliance Infrastructure

Y Combinator · Jul 25, 2026

YC is recruiting founders to build AI-native financial compliance infrastructure replacing manual workflows

“This is an AI-native problem.”
The Agentic AI Engineer - Benedikt Sanftl, Mutagent

AI Engineer · Jun 29, 2026

Mutagent proposes an 'Agentic AI engineer' that automates the build-test-deploy-monitor loop for building AI agents at scale.

“the bottleneck basically becomes the human review and the human yeah, building time”
Transform prior authorization workflows with generative AI on AWS

AWS (re:Invent) · Jun 25, 2026

AWS pitches generative AI to automate healthcare prior authorization, citing $262B in annual denied claims.

“93% of the physicians reported that prior authorization causes care delays, and that number hasn't budged since 2021.”
Optimize blueprint extraction accuracy in Amazon Bedrock Data Automation

AWS Machine Learning Blog · Jun 11, 2026

AWS Bedrock Data Automation adds blueprint instruction optimization to auto-refine document extraction accuracy from 3-10 examples.

“You provide three to ten example documents with expected values, and BDA refines your blueprint instructions to improve accuracy in minutes, not weeks.”
Software Defensibility in the era of AI coding | BRK233

Microsoft Developer (Build) · Jun 03, 2026

As AI drives the cost of building software toward zero, developers must find what remains defensible.

“if the cost of building software is approaching zero does that means that the value of building software is also approaching zero”
AI-Powered Video Editing for Fox Sports | How to Build with AWS

AWS (re:Invent) · Jun 02, 2026

AWS's PACE team built a system that turns live sports broadcasts into verticalized clips in under 30 seconds for Fox Sports.

“it's like a endto-end system that takes a live sports broadcast and automatically produces verticalized video clips in under 30 seconds”
Will Robots Take Blue-Collar Jobs?

No Priors · Aug 03, 2026

Robotics replacing blue-collar workers remains far off due to unstandardized physical environments

“if robotics is going to do what we're doing with these companies today, every single of those buildings need to be either 3D printed or completely like standardized. I don't see that happening.”
Automating customer retention workflows in Amazon Quick

AWS Machine Learning Blog · Jul 29, 2026

Amazon Quick automates customer retention pipelines, shrinking churn-response time from five days to minutes.

“Automating customer retention workflows in Amazon Quick can turn a five-day churn-response cycle into one that takes minutes.”