Manulife expanded its partnership with Microsoft, adopting the Microsoft Frontier Suite to advance AI agents across its global insurance and financial operations.1 "Our partnership with Microsoft is a critical enabler of Manulife's continued evolution into a truly AI-driven organization," said Shamus Weiland, describing the move as the next phase of the company's AI transformation.1
Box unveiled new administrative controls designed to let enterprises safely deploy AI agents across their content systems.2 Nomura Research Institute, a Box customer, said the multi-vendor support was key. "We've found it extremely reassuring that Box offers multi-vendor support, allowing us to flexibly switch between AI models, while providing security management capabilities that span prevention, detection, and response," said Tatsutoshi Murata.2 Nomura called the added layer critical to keeping content protected "as we expand our use of AI."2
Snowflake introduced CoCo, an agentic control plane the company describes as giving enterprise builders "a unified, governed environment to manage workflows across data, models, and apps."3
On the startup side, Casap is building AI agents to automate dispute resolution for fintech firms. Founders Shanti and Sayisi built the company after encountering the problem directly at large fintech employers, where resolving disputes required heavy internal effort "even with a really strong engineering team," according to investor Emily Man.4 Man said her firm was drawn to the founders' backgrounds before the company had a fully formed product.4
The pattern across these moves — large enterprises embedding agents into core workflows while new AI-native startups target narrow verticals — is accelerating faster than internal governance structures can keep pace. Enterprise leaders broadly report unclear ownership models and a lack of pre-deployment roadmaps for agentic systems, even as deployment continues.
The gap sets up a coming reckoning: partnerships like Manulife-Microsoft and platforms like Box and Snowflake CoCo are betting that security and admin tooling can substitute for the change-management processes enterprises haven't yet built.