Workday AI Agent Adoption Doubles, Stock Jumps 10%

Roboticists are celebrating incremental progress toward AI-powered robots that can perform multiple tasks without task-specific training, drawing parallels to the GPT-2 era of language models. At the Actuate robotics conference in San Francisco, Physical Intelligence demonstrated a robot arm making a latte using a single AI model trained on diverse tasks. The field remains early, with robots still struggling with basic manipulation, but venture funding and optimism about a breakthrough moment are high.

Serval made its Catalyst AI agent generally available Thursday, enabling it by default for customers. Catalyst acts as an administrative layer that can discover repetitive IT work from ticket history, automatically build workflows to handle it, and create background agents that proactively identify and fix problems before tickets are filed. The distinction from competitors like ServiceNow and Atlassian is Catalyst's ability to move from opportunity discovery through deployment of governed automation to continuous proactive agent creation.

Binance has launched Agent OS, a platform that enables AI agents to execute trades on the exchange using tools like ChatGPT, Claude Code, and Cursor. The system delegates risk management and safeguards primarily to users rather than implementing centralized controls. This move opens cryptocurrency trading to autonomous AI systems while raising questions about oversight and user responsibility.

Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, has open-sourced Berd, a desktop application for managing AI agents across different models and tools. Originally built for Block's internal use, Berd is now available under Apache 2.0 license for macOS, Windows and Linux, with version 0.6.2 released on August 18. The application stores conversation history locally and emphasizes visible operational state, configuration transparency, and persistent projects rather than functioning as a generic chatbot wrapper.