Stripe launches Agent SDK, Generalists struggle to find their place, and more.
Five things that caught my eye this week
Hey all, been a minute here but focused on spinning the newsletter back up. Each Friday I’ll share the top five stories, anecdotes, and updates in the world of tech and business. Working on some longer form pieces that will be dropped in throughout the week. Let’s get to it.
Stripe launches an SDK built for AI Agents. Massive news. AI Agents will continue to dominate headlines in 2025. Autonomous systems that replace backend business functions and achieve goals determined by human operators. Now, Stripe has provided Agents access to financial rails.
Agents to find vendors, negotiate contracts, handle payments, and more; all on your behalf. Per the press release, “Agentic workflows need not have exclusively virtual outcomes. Imagine a travel agent that can book flights for your company. Using LLMs and function calling we can assemble a set of agents that can search for flights online, return options, and ultimately identify a booking URL. With Stripe, you can embed financial services and enable the automation of the purchase flow as well.” The innovation in this space will be incredible and I’m excited to see the use cases that pop up.
Related, does this kill AI Agents + Stablecoin dreams? I don’t think so, getting rid of the 3% credit card fee is still a massive opportunity.
Speaking of crypto. Bitcoin had a week, touching $93K in a new all time high. Investors seem to preparing for a new administration that is expected to provide clear guidelines for crypto based companies to operate. Additionally, a potential 1 million Bitcoin US Strategic reserve is on the horizon. Time to shift back to crypto?
The group at Generalist World published a report on the state of work for Generalists. I believe that as AI becomes more proliferated throughout our personal and professional lives, the skills that generalists provide will become sought after. The ability to solve problems across disparate domains, connect dots and spot opportunities, integrate new tools across the organization, provide education, and work effectively with AI across skill sets. The issue? It seems like the current ways that organizations operate and hire are not prepared. What they found, 84% of generalists report being filtered out of traditional hiring processes. More here.
More on AI. I was delightfully surprised on Thursday when I opened up ChatGPT and saw a new update. A new feature called Work With enables the app to now integrate with native mac apps. Instead of copying and pasting across your computer, ChatGPT has access to the contents of your other apps. What does this mean? Well, it’s another step in the path towards OpenAI providing an always on agent that works across your apps and workflows. They’ve even begun to tease this with their new Operator agent, expected to be released in January next year.
6 hours on the history of Facebook. The wonderful due at the Acquired podcast released a full oral history of Facebook, starting from Mark’s childhood and ending with the development of Llama models. It’s a wonderful listen and paints an incredible picture of one of the most controversial and amazing companies of our time.
That’s my top 5 for this week. See you again next Friday!