Gusto is betting that small businesses need more than another AI assistant. The company’s new product, Gusto Cofounder, is designed to act as a proactive business partner that helps owners manage and grow their companies, drawing inspiration from the traditional mom-and-pop partnership that co-founder and CTO Eddie Kim witnessed growing up. Unlike reactive chatbots, Cofounder can take action across payroll, HR, benefits, scheduling, insurance, and accounting workflows by leveraging data already stored within Gusto.

WeAreDevelopers, the Berlin-based developer conference founded in 2015, has grown into a major global event, attracting 15,000 developers from over 70 countries each year. In 2026, it expands beyond Europe with new editions in San Jose, California, and Bengaluru, India. Co-founder and CEO Sead Ahmetovic says the conference was created to give developers a stronger voice in an industry where marketers, salespeople, and entrepreneurs often receive more recognition.

At a recent MCP developer summit, The New Stack spoke with Till Döhmen, AI lead at MotherDuck, about the company’s growing role in the evolving DuckDB ecosystem. Backed by investors including Tomasz Tunguz, MotherDuck is commercializing the open-source analytical database DuckDB while also expanding how employees interact with data through AI agents rather than traditional dashboards.

JetBrains is positioning itself as the last major independent AI coding-tool vendor in a market increasingly tied to hyperscalers and foundation model labs. Speaking at Google Cloud Next, JetBrains VP of business development Mikhail Vink argued that competitors such as Microsoft Copilot, Anysphere Cursor, and Windsurf are all tied to either AI labs or cloud providers. By contrast, JetBrains says its independence allows customers to switch freely between models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Cloud without being locked into one ecosystem.

What began as an internal developer tool at Block has evolved into a broader open-source initiative with industry backing. Goose, Block’s AI coding agent, followed a path similar to Amazon’s transformation of internal infrastructure into Amazon Web Services. After deploying Goose companywide, Block open-sourced the tool under a permissive license, leading to rapid adoption across the developer community.

At Google Cloud Next 2026, Fivetran Chief Product Officer Anjan Kundavaram argued that enterprise data systems are unprepared for the scale of AI-driven analytics. Unlike humans, AI agents can generate exponentially more queries, often routing them through the same expensive compute infrastructure. Kundavaram compared it to “using a Lamborghini to mow the lawn.” To address this, Fivetran introduced its “Open Data Infrastructure” vision and a benchmark designed to expose hidden AI workload costs in closed ecosystems.

At Google Cloud Next 2026, Finout co-founder and CEO Roi Ravhon and Google Cloud FinOps lead Pathik Sharma discussed how FinOps is rapidly evolving for the AI era. Ravhon argued that while cloud FinOps had a decade to mature, AI economics are forcing the industry to adapt within a year. Unlike traditional cloud workloads, AI costs are unpredictable because token usage varies even for identical prompts, while advanced reasoning models consume significantly more tokens despite falling prices.

Managing Kubernetes at fleet scale introduces significant complexity, especially as organizations expand from a few clusters to hundreds or thousands across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. While GitOps remains the dominant model for declarative management, its traditional one-to-one repository-to-cluster approach struggles to handle multi-cluster realities such as global traffic routing, shared secrets, and unified observability. As Stephane Erbrech, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft explains, the challenge shifts from deployment to governance—maintaining consistency, security, and compliance across a vast distributed system without manual intervention.

In this episode ofThe New Stack Makers, Matthew O’Riordan, CEO of Ably, explains how infrastructure originally built for human collaboration is now well-suited for long-running AI agents. While Ably initially resisted positioning itself as an AI company, the rise of agents that reason, call tools, and operate over extended periods revealed a natural fit for its real-time communication platform.

Agentic AI is advancing rapidly, with open-source projects racing to keep pace with real-world deployment. To accelerate progress, the Linux Foundation consolidated key technologies—Model Context Protocol (MCP), Goose, and AGENTS.md—under the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) in late 2025. At the MCP Dev Summit in New York City, Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin and newly appointed AAIF executive director Mazin Gilbert discussed this transition. Zemlin explained that leading both organizations was unsustainable, prompting a careful search for a leader with both technical expertise and collaborative leadership skills.