AI corporations are pushing brokers as the following Nice Office Disruptor, however specialists say they’re nonetheless not prepared for prime time. AI brokers typically wrestle to make choices by themselves, hallucinate steadily, can’t cooperate with different brokers, fail at confidentiality consciousness, and combine poorly with current programs.
Business pioneers like Andrej Karpathy and Ali Ghodsi have stated that, just like the deployment of autonomous automobiles, people must be within the loop to ensure that brokers to succeed.
A startup referred to as Mixus desires to handle that with its AI agent platform that not solely retains people within the workflow, it additionally lets customers work together with brokers instantly from their e-mail or Slack.
“We’re meeting customers where they are today,” Elliot Katz, Mixus’ co-founder, informed TechCrunch. “Where is every person in the workforce today? For the most part, they’re on email. And so because we can do this through email, we believe that’s a way we can democratize access [to agents].”
If Mixus works reliably, it might remedy a giant downside within the AI agent area. Most AI corporations as we speak both offer you a pre-built assistant, à la ChatGPT or Gemini, or builders should construct customized brokers utilizing frameworks like LangChain, AutoGen, or crewAI.
Mixus launched in beta out of Stanford solely in late 2024, but it surely has already raised $2.6 million in pre-seed funding and introduced on some prospects, together with clothes retailer chain Rainbow Retailers, in addition to others throughout finance and tech.
The startup says its greatest promoting level is ease of use, from the way it helps you create brokers to how one can work together with them. Customers can use textual content prompts to arrange their brokers inside Mixus’s platform by way of a chat operate, or by merely emailing directions to [email protected]. Then Mixus will construct, run, and handle single- or multi-step brokers instantly from the inbox.
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For instance, a salesman might use a immediate that reads so:
Create an agent that finds all open duties in Jira in venture mixus-dummy, and ship me a report with info on all duties which are overdue. Draft emails to all of the assignees who’ve overdue duties, and have me evaluation them within the chat and with easy clear formatting for e-mail (no attachments/docs). As soon as I confirm, ship the emails. Run it now. And shifting ahead, run it each Monday at 7am PST.
Katz and his co-founder Shai Magzimof demoed the brokers for TechCrunch, displaying how you can add human verifiers on your brokers by merely instructing at which step the agent ought to ask you for oversight.
For instance, they ran an agent to do analysis on TechCrunch reporters earlier than pitching them. The agent recognized and gathered know-how information and traits, analyzed the knowledge to establish potential story angles, and compiled a analysis report summarizing the findings. On the final stage, the agent was directed to ship the knowledge to Katz for verification. As soon as accredited, the agent would ship the finished analysis report back to Magzimof.
The founders famous that people might be within the loop as a lot or as little as required — Magzimof stated organizations can arrange company-wide guidelines, like making certain an e-mail will get checked by a human if it’s being despatched exterior the corporate.
Bringing different colleagues into the workflow is as straightforward as tagging them within the chat with an AI agent, or copying them on the e-mail to the agent. That’s one other standout in comparison with brokers on the markets as we speak: Most fashions are single-user, and whereas Notion AI and Slack permit customers to collaborate in shared areas, they don’t let the AI handle conversations and duties between teammates in actual time.
One other core function of Mixus is its skill to recollect information, chats, prompts and brokers.
“We created Spaces so that every team, every person, every group of people can have a shared memory,” Magzimof stated. “Then all my agents, all my files, all the people can be in that very specific Space’s memory.”
Whereas ChatGPT and Claude each assist reminiscence, their enterprise plans don’t but assist shared agent reminiscence throughout customers.
What else can Mixus do?
In our interview, the founders ran by an hour-long demo displaying a variety of use instances and talents. Mixus’ brokers do appear succesful, reflecting a excessive diploma of autonomy and reminiscence that locations the corporate in the direction of the upper finish of the AI agent spectrum. That’s, if the product works as reliably because it did within the demo.
Like different brokers, Mixus can combine with different instruments, from Gmail to Jira, and customers can set off brokers to run instantly or on a schedule. Brokers can run and edit paperwork or spreadsheets inline — just like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini, however these are sometimes restricted to sandboxed environments.
Mixus additionally lets brokers autonomously navigate organizational context — like determining who in a company owns a job by trying by Jira tickets.
Constructed on a mix of Anthropic’s Claude 4 and OpenAI’s o3, Mixus brokers even have entry to the net, which Magzimof says might be tapped for duties like stay analysis or monitoring. He described it as “Google Alerts on steroids.”
Taken collectively, Mixus seems to be much less of a productiveness instrument and extra like a tireless digital colleague – one more formidable try to reimagine AI as a collaborator. If it really works as marketed, your subsequent “coworker” won’t be human, but it surely would possibly get by your inbox sooner than you do.
Correction: This text was up to date to mirror how a lot Mixus has raised up to now.
Obtained a delicate tip or confidential paperwork? We’re reporting on the internal workings of the AI trade — from the businesses shaping its future to the individuals impacted by their choices. Attain out to Rebecca Bellan at [email protected] and Maxwell Zeff at [email protected]. For safe communication, you’ll be able to contact us by way of Sign at @rebeccabellan.491 and @mzeff.88.
