I never thought I’d say this about a nearly 50-year-old company, but Microsoft is turning out to be a trendsetter.

First, Microsoft’s $10 billion investment and partnership with OpenAI early last year prompted rival cloud providers to team up with conversational artificial intelligence developers—namely, Amazon Web Services’ similar pact with Anthropic. Then Microsoft’s Copilot AI products set the roadmap of Google. Now, Microsoft seems to be teaching Amazon how to do an acquisition-like deal with a well-funded AI startup without making it a formal acquisition (in theory helping avoid regulatory scrutiny although that strategy hasn’t quite worked out.)

Late Friday, Adept, a startup that develops computer-using agents, said its cofounders and some other employees would join Amazon's AGI team, which would license the startup’s tech. Adept’s announcement said it had to do the deal because otherwise it would have had to focus too much time on raising money “rather than bringing to life our agent vision.” (Read more about CUAs here.)

What Adept’s statement really means is that launching AI for enterprises (or consumers) is hard if you don’t already have a lot of customers, because companies that have a lot of customers are implementing cutting-edge AI rather quickly. This is becoming an old theme, so wake us up when you see any counter-examples.