289 | The Agent invasion is in full swing, AI is savings lives and putting lives at risk, OpenAI and Microsoft are not exclusive anymore, and many more important news for week ending on May 1, 2026

0:00Hello and welcome to a weekend news episode of the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and we have two big stories that we're going to focus on today. The first one is the agent invasion is in full swing. Basically, almost every major platform in the AI space or the office space have introduced or enhanced their agent offering in the past week and a half or so. All the major tech companies have announced their earnings this week, which is fully aligned with this story as well.

0:40So we're going to discuss that. The second topic is going to be about AI in healthcare and how it's starting to have significant and important and really valuable impacts on the AI space. Or at least it is possible to do that. How much it is going to actually impact the real life of the medical field is probably going to take a little longer. But the opportunity is incredible. And then we have a lot of small rapid fire things to happen. But let's focus on the big two stories and let's get started. As you know, if you want to really understand what's happening in anything in the business world, you first of all follow the money.

1:20So all the major labs or companies or whatever you want to call them that are in the AI space have released their earnings this week. The first one we're going to talk about is Microsoft. So for fiscal year 26Q3, because they're in a weird fiscal year, they've ended with$82.9 billion in revenue. That's an 18 % year-over-year increase. Azure, their cloud services, has grown 40 % year-over-year, which has been obviously the biggest driver to the overall growth in the Microsoft revenue. Now, that was beating both Microsoft's own guideline range as well as the analysts, which is obviously a good thing, and it's showing that Microsoft is growing in a very healthy way.

2:03The interesting and not surprising news is that Microsoft cloud revenue was$54.5 billion, which is a 29 % increase year over year. This is insane. Again, think about what I'm saying. These are numbers in tens of billions with a almost 30 % growth year over year. Now, Microsoft's AI business surpassed$37 billion in annual run rate, which is 123 % year over year. And in this same quarter, they also invested$34.9 billion in CapEx to grow their infrastructure in order to stay competitive and keep on growing in the business. The overall CapEx investment expected for the year is supposed to cross or be around$190 billion, which is about$55 billion above what the analyst consensus was before the announcement.

3:00Now, why is that important? It's important because one of the things that Microsoft shared in this earning call is that it is going to be capacity constrained at least through mid this year. So June 2026, most likely even beyond because the demand is growing at the same pace. Tia Satchanadella, the CEO, framed the spending on the earning call the following way. The company's planet scale cloud and AI factory, that's how he called it, is driving broad diffusion and real world impact. And that is why, and I'm continuing with the quote, Microsoft continues to increase our investment in AI across both capital and talent.

3:39So huge growth for Microsoft Cloud, big growth in the AI space, and a big, big increase in CapEx investment because they're currently constrained with compute, which means they could have made more money if they had more compute. And you'll see that as something that will repeat with the other companies as well. Alphabet, also known as Google, has shared their Q1 2026 earnings, and their revenue for the quarter was$109.9 billion, a 22 % increase year-over-year. Again, it is insane to grow at that pace at that scale of companies. Income was$62.6 billion, an 81 % increase year-over-year. Google Cloud revenue was$20 billion, a 63 % increase year-over-year.

4:26cloud operation income tripled to$6.6 billion. Cloud backlog nearly doubled quarter over quarter. So from Q4 of last year to Q4 of this year, their backlog to provide cloud services has grown to$460 billion. And like we've seen from before, Q1 CapEx spent was$35.7 billion. Again, in one quarter to buy additional compute and capacity with a full-year guidance between$180 billion to$190 billion. So same ballpark as Microsoft. And their CFO, Anand Ashkenazi, told analysts that 2027 CAPEX will be significantly increased compared to the current numbers. So they're planning to invest almost$200 billion this year, and it's going to grow significantly in the following year.

5:19Now, Sundar Pichai said on their earning call, and I'm quoting, our enterprise AI solution have become our primary growth driver for cloud for the first time. Revenue from products built on Google Gen AI models grew nearly 800 % year over year in this quarter. Again, these are insane numbers and we are just getting started. What I mean by just getting started is I work with these companies all the time, like with companies who buy this compute. Most companies haven't deployed any agents. Most companies are just playing with the development of the very first AI capacity. So everything we're learning right now is just showing you how much demand there is still to come and how much this investment of, again, $200 billion or more in a year is just trying to keep up with the current demand and with the expected demand, which I think is going to grow significantly faster than we've ever seen before.

6:19Amazon also reported their earnings for Q1 of 2026. AWS revenue for the quarter was$37.6 billion, a 28 % increase year over year. It's the fastest growth they've seen in 15 quarters. And they've spent$43.2 billion in that quarter in CapEx in order to grow with the guidance for capex spend for the end of the year to be roughly$200 billion, again aligned with the other two big players. Similar to Google, AWS backlogs to the$364 billion at the end of the quarter. And that does not include the$100 billion deal that they signed with Anthropic just immediately after that that will increase that number from$364 to$464 billion in backlog for AWS.

7:12And all of that or not all of that, but a big chunk of that is driven from the demand for AI capabilities. Another interesting news from Amazon is that their custom chip business has grew 40 % quarter over quarter to a$20 billion annual run rate. And they're new to this game, right? They're not like Nvidia or even Google that have been developing chips for a while. They started with their training chips recently, and they're already seeing a$20 billion a year business. Out of that, growing at a very, very rapid pace. Now, what all of these news do to their stock? Well, at least 14 Wall Street firms have raised the price targets to$310 to$350 after they released these earnings.

7:57CEO Andy Jassy said to analysts that AWS must invest ahead of demand because the company lays out cash for land, power, buildings, and hardware 6 to 24 months before we can start billing customers. And he also added that most of this growth is justified saying, and I'm quoting, customer commitments for substantial portion of it. So again,$200 billion, most of it is already spoken for. Now, to explain how crazy they demanded, Andy Jesse said something else. For perspective, AWS AI revenue run rate is now over$15 billion, nearly 260 times larger than AWS revenue run rate three years after its launch.

8:44Now, it's not a fair comparison because AWS was a new thing that didn't exist and nobody exactly knew how to use it. And yes, AI is a new thing, but it rides on top of all the infrastructure and cloud stuff that exists already. But it is still 260 times larger. It's not two or three times larger, which tells you that the demand right now is basically endless for AI capabilities. Meta also announced their earnings for the quarter. Revenue was$56.3 billion, a 33 % increase year-over-year. 2020 Catex guidance rose to$125 to$145 billion, which is smaller than the other players. but you need to remember that Meta is not selling compute as a service.

9:31That's not their business. So when they're buying$125 to$145 billion in compute is to run their own businesses and to provide their own services and not to sell that to other companies. So it's not generating revenue for them. And it is a significant consecutive raise in two separate quarters. In addition, Meta reported that Reality Labs generated$402 million in revenue which generated a$4.03 billion operating loss. Now, the cumulative Reality Labs losses since its launch in 2020 is approximately$80 billion. So you understand that they lost a lot of money, but at a much higher rate previously.

10:15So$4 billion is an improvement compared to how much they lost previous years. Now, their stock fell roughly 7 % to 10 % across Wednesday after hours and Thursday trading, mostly because the analyst thinks that their CapEx investment is too high for what it is supposed to yield. Again, it's a very different scenario than the other players that are investing a lot more, but they're investing it to sell it to customers versus Meta that is buying it for their own internal usage. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, obviously defended their spending, and he is known to defend really crazy spending. We all remember the crazy investment in the metaverse that didn't really pay off.

10:56But he said, and I'm quoting, over the past 10 months, we have built the strongest research team in the industry and established the scientific and technical foundations to scale very advanced models. As I mentioned, that didn't really convince the industry or the investors and their stock fell pretty badly as a result of that. But again, I think Mark Zuckerberg is known to keep on doing what he believes he needs to do. And hence, he's going to keep on doing this. And as we discussed, when they released the latest models, they're actually pretty good. So as a first model of a new lab to be in the top three or top four, depending on specific benchmarks, is definitely not bad.

11:37So what's the bottom line? the bottom line is that these companies combined are going to invest between$655 and$725 billion in AI infrastructure CapEx in 2026. This is an insane amount. And that tells you that the demand for a lot more AI compute is there. But now I told you that almost every major company out there also made big announcements about agentic capabilities and how it's going to impact our future. The first one I want to talk about, because it is very significant, because it's things I mentioned several times in the past, is Salesforce. Salesforce just announced what they called Headless 360.

12:18What that means is it means that you can now use any and any capability that exists on Salesforce through API, MCP, or CLI. So first of all, let's define what these acronyms are. API is old school connecting to the software through traditional software to software language, which is what API stands for. The second one, MCP, is a protocol that was developed by Anthropic about a year and a half ago, and now everybody's using it, which allows AI to access the API without actually having to develop the API documentation. So it's a much more efficient way to connect, but in the backend, it's using a very similar kind of process, just with an overlay that knows how to translate your requests to the API calls, which makes it less efficient, but very, very easy to connect to.

13:06And the third one is CLI, which stands for command line interface, which is basically being able to talk to the platform through command lines, the same way you do in your terminal, which is very, very efficient and becoming more and more the norm right now when everybody can use Vibe coding tools and just go straight to terminal and do whatever you want. And so they have exposed everything in Salesforce, literally every function that you could do with a user interface, you can now do through agents. Mark Benioff, the CEO, said, and I'm quoting, our API is the UI. UI stands for user interface.

13:41So basically the backend connection, which enables systems and AI tools to run Salesforce is the new user interface of Salesforce. Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris said, why should you ever log into Salesforce again. Now, this comes from the company that invented SaaS, right? So SaaS did not exist before Salesforce. They were the one fighting old school on-premise large servers and pushed the concept of SaaS forward. And they're basically now saying that user interface is dead and the future is all AI energetic usage and the user interface of software is not relevant anymore. And let's continue to the other companies and I will provide my summary in the end.

14:27AWS Bedrock now have a managed agents solution with OpenAI inside. So Amazon launched a production-ready managed agents on Bedrock with OpenAI frontier models embedded straight into AWS, plus the AWS security wrapped all around them to make it safer to use that environment from a cybersecurity and data security perspective. So they are planning both from a compute capacity, as we defined before, as well as from a software infrastructure for a huge growth in agents in the next few months. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, have added nine new Claude connectors. This time the focus was mostly creative professionals.

15:10So these connectors are to Blender and Adobe and other similar companies with the goal is the same thing. You are going to use Claude Anthropic agents in order to actually run and create the creative outputs that you want instead of using the tools directly on the tools and the software and the user interface as you're used to. Sounds familiar, right? From just a previous message. Meta ads just added connectors to Meta, which is now allowing advertisers to create, manage, and analyze ad campaigns from inside whichever AI tool they want to use. So if so far you had to run your campaigns through Meta only on the Meta platform, now because there's a key connection to it or an AI connections, you can now run and manage and optimize your campaigns using whichever agents you want, still having full access to everything the Meta ad environment enables.

16:05This is a huge change from having a closed garden to understanding that the future of running ads from Meta's perspective or the future of being a software company in any perspective is not going to be managed by humans. It is going to be managed by agents from the outside world. And hence, Meta is basically saying, if we can beat them, join them. That's the way of the future. And we're enabling it from this moment on. So these are software companies opening their products, but the productivity layer of everything we know is also moving in that direction. So just in the last week and a half, several companies made big announcements on what kind of additional agentic capabilities they're going to provide, OpenAI introduced workspace agents in ChatGPT, which are powered by Codex, their coding platform, but you don't need to know how to code.

16:50That's the whole point. And it's agents that run in the cloud and automate complex multi-tool workflows and allow teams to scale whatever cross across whatever the tech stack is. Very similar to what you can do with Cloud Code and Cloud Core. Or as Sam Altman said, agents represent a new level of capability for AI systems. And then it continued saying that they're capable of accomplishing, and I'm quoting, remarkable complex tasks for you using its own computer. Microsoft 365 Copilot also added agentic Outlook. Microsoft pushed new agentic experiences into Outlook for both email and calendar. So you can now use agents to help you run your email and your calendar straight from within the productivity tools you're already using.

17:37And the big shift is obviously from Copilot suggests while you're chatting with it to Copilot actually acts and does things for you is the big jump right now. They're also added almost all the agents that are available on ChatGPT are now available on the Microsoft Copilot environment as well. Now, they're also adding vertical specific agents into the different tools. As an example, they've added a legal agent straight into Microsoft Word, which means you can now analyze, create and make changes to legal documents with a agent that is trained specifically on legal information straight from Microsoft Word.

18:17And you don't need to go to other tools and then import it into Word. These are just examples of day to day things of agents being embedded into everything that we know. Want to talk about a different user interface that is getting AI built into it? Google just announced that they're bringing Gemini into cars as an operating system for the car. It's going to be built in into a big screen on future cars, and you will have multiple agents doing different things that allows you to just talk to the car and get it to do different aspects, whether to control car systems or help with navigation or anything else.

18:53And then obviously there is the top frontier, which has been the frontier the whole time, which is the developer stack and developer capabilities. So just this week, Lovable launched a coding app on iOS and Android, meaning you can now use coding agents to build software and applications straight from your phone. You don't even need a computer anymore to do that. Poolside released Laguna XS2, which is a free open source, high performing model built for local agentic coding. So again, more coding, more with agents, more fast, more private, all happening all at the same time. Cursor released what they call Security Review, which is an agent that automatically scans code for security bugs and vulnerabilities in the editor itself.

19:40Cloud Security is a very similar product, comes from Cloud themselves, which is now in public beta and is available and allows you to use the anthropic building thing to look for end risks in your code using another set of agents. Now, in addition, there are many technological breaks in the agent field to drive efficiency significantly higher. The most notable that won this week came from Alibaba. They announced what they call Metis, not named after me, sadly, but still not a bad name, which is a new methodology that helps agents use tool calls in a much more efficient way. So the AI tool calls dropped from 98 % to 2%.

20:22I don't know exactly what it's measuring and how, but that's a very, very, very significant decrease in calls that are required in order to drive similar results. And they're doing it while getting more accurate results in the process. So if you generalize this, This basically removes the largest cost driver in agent systems used right now, which is calling and working with different tools. That was based on this new methodology. They're able to decrease that very close to zero or a huge reduction compared to everything that we know so far. Now, if you want other examples in the same direction, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, and I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly, even though I assume I'm not, is known to have solid internal information when it comes to AI companies and specifically OpenAI.

21:13And he's saying that one of the devices that OpenAI is building is similar to a phone, but instead of having apps in it, there's going to be agents in it basically doing the work for you. So instead of the way we're working right now, when we open specific apps and we do specific actions straight from our phones, you'll be able to talk to the phone, ask it to do something, and it will figure it out. That is a very different kind of approach to everything that we're doing. And it's very similar to how I'm doing everything right now, just from my computer and or through remote for cloud code or dispatch for cloud co-work.

21:49But it will be for everything. thing. So we will not use any applications, which aligns perfectly with what we talked about in the beginning, coming from the user interface being not relevant based on the announcements from Salesforce. So what does this mean as a quick recap for this section? CapEx of these companies are going to keep on growing in the next 12 to 24 months for sure, and maybe potentially after, with numbers that are absolutely insane. And I say insane because just to put things in perspective that we can understand. We're talking about roughly 700 billion investment in new compute.

22:25Currently, the global semiconductor industry worldwide annual revenue is about$627 billion. So the increase this year is going to be more than the current revenue. It is absolutely insane. The other thing that is clear is that we're going to have more and more agents accessing more and more tools and online capabilities, and we're going to be accessing them less and less. I can tell you for myself right now that most of the documents that I'm creating are created by AI. Most of the presentations that I'm creating are created together with AI, not completely, but mostly with AI. Most of the excels and calculations and analysis that I'm creating is done by AI.

23:12And the amount of time I go to the user interface is to verify and make final tweaks versus doing the creation of the things I need to create. And I think it is going to become more and more extreme. I will take it to the next step. When I started using Cloud Cowork and other tools at scale to build different things, there are reports are being generated every single step. There are designs are being generated every single step. I used to read all of it and now I skim through it to kind of see what's there. but then I'm allowing AI to just take it and move forward with it without me reading every single word.

23:46And I think that's going to be the case moving forward. So our level of depth of the actual work is going to decrease dramatically and we will strategize and we will plan together with AI and we will allow AI to execute and we will verify a lot in the beginning and we're going to verify less and less as AI is going to get better. In the middle term, in the short term, we're going to see more and more AI embedded into the tools we already use, including our productivity stack, such as Outlook and Word and the Google parallels of that. We're just going to have more and more AI built into all of them.

24:23But over time, as I mentioned, I think these will slowly disappear or be reduced dramatically as AI is just going to do the work. We're going to talk to the agent and they will generate the documents and the emails and the summaries and the detailed analysis of financial information and so on. What does it also mean for you as a business? It means that you may or may not need the same kind of website that you have right now. And we talked about this many times in the past. Less and less people will come and visit your website. More agents will come and visit your website, which means the structure of the back end of your website needs to be built differently, which also means that in the short term, you need to keep two separate kind of websites, one that is optimized for agents and the other one that is optimized for humans.

25:12And this way you can win through the transition period as well, while learning a lot on how to serve agents in a better way. So if you are depending on web traffic for a significant portion of your revenue, you better start thinking about it and experimenting and figure out what tools and technology and strategies you need to use in order to serve agents in a more effective way and you need to start right now. The other thing that I will say that if all of this is above your head and you heard about agents and you maybe tried experimenting with it but you're not 100 % sure how to do this, come and join our multi-agent orchestration course.

25:50It's an incredible course. It will transform your entire understanding regardless of where you are in your journey from kind of thinking maybe I understand how this works or maybe you don't have a clue to you can build multi-ager orchestration solutions that connect to everything in your tech stack and can automate practically anything in the digital aspect of your business. This is probably the best investment you're going to make your entire life as far as the ROI that it gives you. I am building new teams to run more and more things in my business every single day. And I'm doing this while running two and a half businesses, which means I'm really, really busy, which means I'm not investing all my time in doing that, which means you can do the same thing as well.

26:34You just need to know how. Think about the ability to automate everything in the digital space. Anything you do, anything your team does, anything your company does in the digital universe can be automated at a very high level with very high success and go beyond efficiency. So a lot of the things that I'm developing are not doing things that I'm already doing, just doing them faster, better, cheaper. It's things that I couldn't do before. I'm generating new revenue streams. I'm generating new opportunities. I'm going into new markets. I'm developing new products and services that could not exist before the agents could build them for me because I couldn't have the capacity, the resources, the knowledge, the skill, the money, whatever the case may be.

27:17And now I do. And the same thing is true for you and your business. So if you don't know how to do this right now and you want to open an unfair gap over your competition, come and join the course. There's a link in the show notes and the next cohort that we're selling. So we sold out the first two. Cohort number three is selling out fast and it's on June 22nd. So if you want to join us sooner rather than later, come and sign up right now while you're still listening to this episode because it will sell out as well. And the next course is probably going to be in the second half of July, which is a whole quarter away.

27:50And I don't think you want to wait. Now back to the news. As I mentioned, the second story that we're going to dive into is going to be around healthcare. And a lot of things around healthcare happened in the past week or so with some very significant, interesting stories that is showing how this is going to have a really positive, significant impact on healthcare. And we'll start with the first story, and we're going to get stories to cover this angle from multiple aspects of healthcare, both good and bad, as well as some projections for the future. And we're going to start with Mayo Clinic. So Mayo Clinic have performed a research that they published on April 28th about a system that is called Radio Mix Based Early Detection Model, or for short, REDMOD.

28:38And what they shared is that RedMod can detect pancreatic cancer on routine abdominal CT scans up to three years before clinical diagnosis. They've done the research across nearly 2 ,000 CT scans across several different years, across similar patients. And what they were able to find is that RedMod, again, the software is called RedMod or the system is called RedMod, identified 73 % of pre-diagnostic cancers at a median of about 16 months before the actual human diagnosis happened. That is nearly double the rate that human specialists reviewing the same scans could detect. On scans that are more than two years old, AI was nearly three times more effective than the human readers.