Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More. Last year, Cognition started the AI agent wave with a product called Devin — the world’s first AI engineer. The offering was under wraps for several months, but now it’s generally available and learning new chops very quickly. Case in point: the Scott Wu-led startup has just released Devin 1.2, which brings a bunch of new capabilities to take the AI engineer’s ability to handle entire development projects to a whole new level.The biggest highlight of Devin 1.2 is its improved in-context reasoning, which makes the agent better at handling and reusing code. It also includes the ability to take voice messages via Slack, which gives users a more seamless way to tell Devin what it has to do.The development comes at a time when AI-powered agents are being touted as the future of modern work

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn MoreIn the past year, the race to automate has intensified, with AI agents emerging as the ultimate game-changers for enterprise efficiency. While generative AI tools have made significant strides over the past three years — acting as valuable assistants in enterprise workflows — the spotlight is now shifting to AI agents capable of thinking, acting and collaborating autonomously. For enterprises preparing to embrace the next wave of intelligent automation, understanding the leap from chatbots to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications to autonomous multi-agent AI is crucial. As Gartner noted in a recent survey, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI by 2028, up from less than 1% in 2024.As Google Brain founder Andrew Ng aptly stated: “The set of tasks that AI can do will expand dramatically because of agentic workflows.” This marks a paradigm shift in how organizations view the potential of automation, moving beyond predefined processes to dynamic, intelligent workflows.The limitations of traditional automationDespite their promise, traditional automation tools are constrained by rigidity and high implementation costs. Over the past decade, robotic process automation (RPA) platforms like UiPath and Automation Anywhere have struggled with workflows lacking clear processes or relying on unstructured data

Cognition, a startup backed by $200 million, is developing an AI tool named Devin that can autonomously handle programming tasks. Founded by Scott Wu, 28, and his team, Devin recently demonstrated its capabilities by configuring a complex data server, impressing its creators. Devin now manages basic engineering tasks like error detection and code updates. This marks a shift in software engineering, differing from larger players like Github.