Alibaba unveiled a full-stack enterprise platform it calls AgentCore, together with an 'agentic cloud' roadmap for running autonomous AI agents at scale. The pitch is a single stack for building, deploying and governing agents rather than stitching together separate tools.
The move mirrors a wider industry shift from one-off chatbots to persistent agents that carry out multi-step tasks, and from ad-hoc scripts to managed platforms that handle memory, permissions and monitoring.
What it means: the big cloud providers are racing to own the layer where business agents run. For companies adopting AI, that promises more reliable foundations, but also a familiar risk worth watching early: being locked into one provider's way of doing things.