Step aside, hardware: Software was the star of the show at CES 2025.

As expected, much of the mobility-focused elements of CES focused less on vehicles themselves and more on the ways emerging tech is reshaping the in-vehicle experience, from seamless EV route planning to automated driving system improvements.

“If I had even a quarter for every time they used the term ‘software-defined vehicle’ over the course of the week…I would have walked away a much wealthier person,” C.J. Finn, partner and US automotive industry leader at PwC US, told Tech Brew. “That was a key focus point.”

All about the software: Software-defined vehicles have been top of mind for auto industry leaders for years now, but the shift is coming into better focus.

“Where I think we’re still early days is then determining, who are the new industry players coming in and how do they partner with the OEMs?” Finn said. “And where’s the right to the data, who really controls the information flow, and how do you share some of that source code to make sure that the over-the-air updates are occurring timely and safely?”

Keep reading here.—JG

In case you missed the chorus of prognostications over the past few weeks, AI-powered agents are set to have a big year. Experts expect generative AI systems that can perform tasks beyond the bounds of a chatbot to come into their own in 2025.

Few companies have bet quite as big on this potential new era as Salesforce. The enterprise giant rebranded its Einstein Copilot platform as Agentforce last year, calling the concept of a copilot “outdated.” CEO Marc Benioff ran an essay in Time Magazine, which he also owns, laying out his vision for an agent-powered “digital workforce” in grandiose terms. “This isn’t just an evolution of technology,” Benioff wrote. “It’s a revolution.”

Salesforce is now rolling out the second generation of its Agentforce platform, which promises a host of new pre-built skills for this “digital labor,” like building marketing campaigns or sales coaching, as well as better reasoning capabilities and data retrieval. Employees will now also be able to talk to these agents in Salesforce-owned Slack.

Keep reading here.—PK

The months after ChatGPT’s release might have seemed like peak hype for generative AI, but it wasn’t until 2024 that the excitement translated into a real breakout year for startups built on the technology.

AI startups pulled in $101 billion last year, a more than 80% jump from the $55.6 billion invested in 2023, according to a recent year-end report from Crunchbase. That marks the biggest year in a decade for AI startups, which previously clocked an $83 billion record in 2021.

But the funding frenzy around AI skewed an otherwise lukewarm venture market; overall funding grew only 3%—$10 billion—from 2023 to $314 billion, well below the boomtime highs of 2021 and 2022.

A hopeful endnote: Despite the lack of huge growth in the overall funding market, Crunchbase senior data editor Gené Teare told Tech Brew an uptick in the final quarter of 2024 generated some optimism going into the new year.

“What’s changed year over year is the mood in 2024 is very, very different, and we saw a big pickup in Q4,” Teare said. “There’s a little bit more excitement this year than there was a year ago in the venture markets, even though year over year, it kind of looks the same.”

Keep reading here.—PK

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

Seeking alternatives: News that Meta planned to scrap third-party fact-checking has advertisers thinking twice and users considering abandoning the platform. But how will we get our daily dose of cat videos?

Perhaps Bluesky will help scratch that itch. TechCrunch reported earlier this week that “an independent developer is building a photo-sharing app for Bluesky called Flashes.” If they build it, and it has cats, we will come.

And with a TikTok ban looming in the US, “TikTok refugees” are seeking a fix elsewhere: “The short-form video and photo platform known in China as Xiaohongshu became the Apple App Store’s most downloaded app last week after the Supreme Court signaled it would allow the TikTok ban to go through on January 19,” Morning Brew reported.