Good morning. What if you could just tell your AI agent to do your job while you took a nap? Or better yet, have the agent toil away all night? Would you use it to double your productivity, essentially combining the work you do during your waking hours with the AI’s night shift? Or would you simply turn your job over to your agent and forget about working altogether?
It’s a fun quandary to ponder. And as the buzz over OpenClaw and AI agents gains steam, particularly in the tech-heavy economy of San Francisco, a lot of coding work is being delegated to these bots. But, as Sharon Goldman explains, the reality is not quite as utopian as it sounds. These agents have a lot of promise but they also require a lot of supervision—like babysitting a toddler. In other words, don’t quit your day job yet.
Alexei Oreskovic
@lexnfx
alexei.oreskovic@fortune.com
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IBM gets the Anthropic treatment
On Monday, it was IBM's turn.
The grandaddy of tech companies saw its stock take a double-digit licking, plunging more than 13%, following a blog post by—you guessed it—an AI company. The author of IBM's woes was Anthropic, which decided to begin the week by bragging about Claude's skills modernizing old Cobol computer code.
Cobol, or Common Business-Oriented Language, dates back to 1959. It's a relic of the Doo-Wop age but it's still in use in some mainframe computers (most notably, the giant machines that IBM sells) for jobs where reliability is critical—95% of ATM transactions in the U.S. for example, are handled by Cobol, according to Anthropic.
With the number of programmers fluent in the old language shrinking, it's tough for companies to maintain their Cobol-based applications and onerous to migrate to newer languages. That's why Claude is coming to the rescue: "With AI, teams can modernize their COBOL codebase in quarters instead of years," Anthropic wrote in the blog post.
While IBM has long offered services and tools, including AI-based tools, to help customers modernize their Cobol applications, Wall Street reacted the same way it has to every report about AI learning a new trick in recent weeks: it panicked.
According to Bloomberg, it was the biggest single-day drop for IBM's stock since October 2000. The vibe coding vibe has claimed another victim.
While we're on the subject of Cobol, don't miss this fascinating 2023 story by Fortune's Ben Weiss about the 'Cobol Cowboys.' Will they ride again?—AO
OpenAI teams up with the consultants
OpenAI is enlisting some of the world’s biggest consulting firms in its fight to dominate the enterprise AI market.
On Monday the AI company announced partnerships with Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Co., Accenture, and Capgemini that will see the consulting firms helping sell and implement OpenAI’s new Frontier platform, a system that allows businesses and organizations to build, deploy, supervise, and govern AI agents. The consultants will help their clients redesign workflows; integrate AI agents with software tools and systems; help clients with change management; and provide industry-specific expertise OpenAI doesn’t have in-house.
Under these new partnerships, which OpenAI has deemed Frontier Alliances, each consulting firm is investing in dedicated practice groups and building teams certified on OpenAI technology. Meanwhile OpenAI says its own “forward deployed engineers” will work alongside the teams from the consultancies in client engagements.—Jeremy Kahn
About all that AI capex...
Spending on AI infrastructure now forms a significant part of U.S. GDP growth, and corporate capital expenditure (capex) would be negative without it, according to a recent research note from Pantheon Macroeconomics.
“We’ve got a situation where large sums of money are pouring into AI infrastructure, providing a meaningful boost to GDP,” Pantheon analyst Oliver Allen told Fortune recently.
Overall capex rose by 2.6% in Q4 2025, Allen wrote in a research note this morning. Within that, intellectual property and software spending (i.e., spending likely linked to AI) was up 7.4%, and computer and communications equipment was up 61%. But all other segments declined: “Investment in other equipment plunged by 17%, a decline that was worryingly broad-based,” he wrote. —Jim Edwards
More tech
—Citrini Research warns of 2028 AI crisis: "Ghost GDP" recession.
—Robotaxis in London. Can they pass the 'knowledge' test?
—Pentagon to use xAI's Grok in classified systems. Elon goes where Dario will not.
—Uber acquiring SpotHero. Coming soon to Uber, parking reservation.
—PayPal attracts takeover interest. Blame it on the stock slump.
—Framework Ventures to take $45M stake in Better.com. Get ready for the 'Home Token.’
