The Manifest
Stanford's AI Index lands the year's defining jobs chart, Microsoft ships seven in-house MAI models, and project44's LunaPath buy marks the first big consolidation of the agentic-supply-chain era.
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Today's Top
- 01Stanford's 2026 AI Index drops the year's defining jobs chartStanford HAI
- 02Mollick: 80%+ of Anthropic's merged code is now Claude-authored@emollick
- 03Microsoft Build ships seven in-house MAI modelsMicrosoft AI
- 04WRITER survey: a bimodal AI workforce is formingWRITER
- 05project44 acquires LunaPath.ai for an AI-native supply chainFreightWaves
Models & Releases
3 storiesMicrosoft launches seven in-house MAI models
MAI-Thinking-1 matches frontier SWE benchmarks and was preferred over Sonnet 4.6 in blind human evals - Microsoft's most aggressive move yet to cut OpenAI dependence.
80%+ of Anthropic's merged code is now Claude-authored
Independent measures corroborate; the bottleneck shifts from typing to deciding, and to absorbing the productivity.
Post-Sora, the AIGC video field consolidates
Runway Gen-4.5, Veo 3.1, Kling 3.0 Omni and Seedance 2.0 absorb the demand left by Sora's shutdown.
Supply Chain & Ops
3 storiesproject44 acquires LunaPath.ai
Moves from visibility platform to AI-native supply chain - the shift from dashboards that tell you to agents that act.
Blue Yonder / o9 / Kinaxis converge on one playbook
Demand sensing + enterprise knowledge graph + concurrent planning. Lenovo's published result: +5% forecast accuracy, +10% delivery accuracy.
Warehouse robotics expands to the mid-market
Robotics-as-a-Service unlocks subscription deployment for sub-enterprise operators; robots are the hands, AI the brain.
Deals & Market
2 storiesFirst big consolidation of the agentic-SCM era
project44 / LunaPath signals an M&A wave as visibility vendors race to call themselves agentic. Watch o9 / Kinaxis next 90 days.
Enterprise AI adoption: 79% hit challenges
A bimodal workforce is forming; 60% of firms plan to lay off non-adopters, yet 80% still report no bottom-line change.
Research & Frontier
3 storiesStanford 2026 AI Index - the jobs chart everyone cites
Dev jobs for 22-25 year-olds down ~20% from 2024; gains of 14-50% land by task, not whole jobs.
Deloitte State of AI in the Enterprise 2026
66% see productivity gains; only 20% see revenue growth. Governance is now the success-or-stall variable.
Stanford Enterprise AI Playbook - 51 deployments
Brynjolfsson-led, case-based patterns for what actually makes enterprise AI compound.
Org & AI Architecture
3 storiesJesuthasan / Mercer: redesign the work, not just the tools
63% of C-suite call work-redesign a top ROI driver. Framework: deconstruct, optimize, automate, reconfigure.
The bimodal-workforce debate sharpens
AI super-users are 5x more productive and 3x more likely to be promoted. Productive sorting, or skipped re-skilling?
Augmentation vs automation, reignited
Is the junior-rung ladder collapsing or being re-bundled? The same question is coming for junior planners in ops.