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MIT Technology Review

How an overlooked geothermal plant got a second chance

In June 2024, a small company called Zanskar purchased a geothermal power plant in New Mexico that was failing fast. The water coming from the underground reservoir was getting colder by the day, making the plant uneconomical to run. Now, two years later, that plant is running at full capacity again, thanks to a new…

1h ago

VentureBeat

Nimble claims its new, domain-specialized Web Search Agents cut token costs in half while boosting retrieval accuracy

Nimble , a New York City-based tech startup VentureBeat previously covered for its efforts to re-invent web search for enterprises by using multiple AI agents to improve accuracy and depth, is taking another step toward its vision of a world in which agents do most of the web searching instead of us typing and reviewing the results manually. Nimble today launched Web Search Agents , a new retrieval system designed to help AI agents perform more 21% more accurate web research while using significantly fewer tokens — 51% less compared with leading AI search alternatives on comparable, according to the firm. While Nimble did not disclose its specific benchmarking methodology or competitors evaluated, the results underscore a growing trend in enterprise AI: optimizing retrieval has become as important as improving the underlying language models themselves. Nimble's leadership says the product combines self-learning retrieval strategies, proprietary web indexes, and live web access to deliver domain-specific search capabilities that outperform general-purpose web search services for enterprise workloads. "Our research team built self-learning retrieval algorithms that learn a customer's domain," said Nimble CEO and co-founder Uri Knorovich in an interview with VentureBeat. "They find the exact information more efficiently, reduce the amount of multi-hop reasoning required, and lower token usage while improving accuracy." Rather than positioning itself as another general search engine, Nimble is targeting developers building autonomous agents that require continuously updated information from the public web for research, lead generation, competitive intelligence, compliance, and other business-critical workflows. It's also designed to slot in seamlessly to an enterprise's existing systems and workflows. "You can run the agent directly through the Nimble API with zero infrastructure," Knorovich said. "For large enterprises, we're partnering with Microsoft, Oracle, Snowflake, and others so customers can deploy these agent systems inside their own infrastructure." How does it work and stack up to other, existing AI-powered search and agentic systems? Read on to find out. Moving beyond generic AI web search into specialized search agents that fit your enterprise's needs Most AI applications today rely on general-purpose search application programming interfaces (APIs) for search engines and public knowledge bases that return broad collections of files, leaving the language model responsible for determining which sources are relevant. That process often requires multiple retrieval steps, additional reasoning, and significant token expenditure before an agent produces an answer. This is obviously inefficient and raises the cost spent to run AI search looking through irrelevant sources. Nimble argues that before long, every enterprise will need its own methods for searching, retrieving, and validating external information since each enterprise relies on its own distinct preferred sources, signals, and standards of trust. As such, instead of applying one search strategy to every workload, Nimble's Web Search Agents are designed to learn the characteristics of a specific domain and adapt how information is retrieved, providing agents with structured, relevant context rather than forcing them to sift through large amounts of generic search results. "Instead of one generic retrieval model, we build specialized retrieval models for each customer's domain, making them faster, cheaper, and more accurate," Knorovich explained. "A single enterprise can run hundreds of different agents. Each one has its own domain expertise, guardrails, goals, and search algorithm. The optimization starts with the second search, without requiring any setup from the customer." Its goal is not only to reduce redundant retrieval, but also to shorten multi-step research paths and avoid repeatedly sending raw pages through a language model for parsing, resulting in the 51% reduced token figure the company cites. The distinction is particularly relevant for long-running enterprise agents performing research over hours or days rather than answering simple consumer questions. In those scenarios, reducing unnecessary tool calls can significantly lower operating costs while improving answer consistency. That emphasis reflects a broader shift occurring across the AI tooling ecosystem. As foundation models become increasingly capable, infrastructure vendors are competing on everything surrounding the model—including retrieval, orchestration, memory, observability, and governance. Optimizing retrieval for production AI The launch builds on Nimble’s broader strategy of becoming an enterprise web intelligence platform rather than simply a web scraping provider. Earlier this year, the company introduced its broader Agentic Search Platform following a $47 million Series B financing , positioning itself as infrastructure that transforms the live web into structured, machine-readable data for AI systems. The company’s latest release extends that vision with a concept it calls “Harness as a Tool,” which powers its new domain-specialized Web Search Agents. Rather than requiring engineering teams to assemble separate search APIs, browser automation, extraction pipelines, validation logic, memory systems, and orchestration code, Nimble packages those capabilities behind a managed interface. The harness can determine what to search, navigate pages when conventional indexes are insufficient, extract relevant information, validate the results, and return the final context in a form designed for downstream agents. Nimble also says the system retains domain-specific memory and builds proprietary indexes that improve as customers run more searches. "The biggest research breakthrough is adding semantic memory and a caching layer to the agent," Knorovich told VentureBeat. "The agent learns usage patterns and domain expertise over time, so every subsequent search becomes faster and more efficient." As for what domains Nimble can tackle, the company says it can address virtually any knowledge work domain. "We've seen customers build investment banking analysts, competitive intelligence agents for product managers, go-to-market research agents, newsroom monitoring, insurance applications, life sciences research, and supply chain optimization," Knorovich said. "Our customers surprise us every day with new agent use cases." However, for enterprises concerned about data privacy and retention, Knorovich assured VentureBeat that: "Nimble is zero-data-retention by design. Customer queries are never stored in our environment, and when customers deploy semantic memory and self-learning models, that knowledge stays in their own tenant—not ours." Customer deployments point to operational gains Nimble supported the announcement with early customer examples from AI-native software vendors and enterprise users. AI-native CRM company Rox reported achieving a 20× reduction in token costs after adopting Nimble’s retrieval infrastructure while simultaneously improving the quality and completeness of information available to its AI agents. Although the company did not disclose detailed workload measurements or a reproducible baseline, the example illustrates the operational savings retrieval optimization can provide for high-volume agent deployments. Nimble says its infrastructure currently supports more than 90 million searches each day across Fortune 500 enterprises and AI-native companies operating mission-critical workflows where accuracy, completeness, and enterprise control are essential. API, SDK and MCP support target AI builders The platform is immediately available through an API, SDK, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration, allowing developers to connect Nimble directly into AI agents regardless of the orchestration framework they use. Developers can use the platform for several categories of web intelligence, including: Low-latency live web search Deep multi-step web research Web crawling Structured dataset generation Domain-specific information retrieval The company also provides documentation and pre-built agents for common web extraction tasks while allowing developers to build custom retrieval agents using natural-language descriptions instead of manually maintaining scraping logic. Nimble is offering two notably different consumption models. Developers can begin with a pay-as-you-go Agent API priced from $0.025 per Web Search Agent request at the listed low-effort setting. Companies that want Nimble to configure and manage custom data delivery can instead buy annual managed plans beginning at $2,500 per month. Where Nimble fits in the emerging agentic search stack Nimble enters a market that has rapidly expanded beyond traditional web search into autonomous research agents capable of planning, browsing, reasoning, and synthesizing information. Products such as ChatGPT Deep Research , Google Gemini Deep Research , Alibaba’s Tongyi DeepResearch , Perplexity , and Sakana Marlin all seek to automate knowledge work that previously required hours—or, in Marlin’s case, potentially weeks—of human research. Rather than competing head-to-head as another end-user research assistant, however, Nimble is positioning itself one layer lower in the AI stack—as the web intelligence infrastructure that powers those agents or custom enterprise applications built on leading foundation models. That distinction reflects an increasingly important architectural shift in enterprise AI. Most “Deep Research” systems optimize the overall research workflow, generating search plans, iteratively gathering information, and producing synthesized reports. Nimble instead argues that the retrieval layer itself has become the primary bottleneck for enterprise AI deployments. If an agent retrieves too many irrelevant pages or performs unnecessary search iterations, token consumption, latency, and operating costs all increase before the model even begins its main reasoning process. "Customers across life sciences, insurance, healthcare, pharma, retail, and digital-native companies are all telling us the same thing: we need to feed our agents with more accurate context, and we need to reduce the amount of tokens every task consumes," Knorovich said. The launch blog makes that argument more concrete by describing how teams frequently rebuild the same retrieval stack themselves. A production agent may start with a search API, then accumulate browser controls, parsers, extraction components, validation steps, memory, caching, evaluations, and custom workflow logic. Nimble is positioning its harness as a managed alternative to that growing engineering burden. In Nimble’s view, improving retrieval before reasoning begins is more valuable than simply giving a language model more documents to analyze. The company’s Web Search Agents therefore adapt retrieval strategies to a particular workload, combining proprietary indexes with real-time web retrieval and task-specific search policies rather than applying the same search algorithm across every domain. That makes Nimble less of a direct competitor to OpenAI’s or Google’s research assistants than to developer-focused retrieval infrastructure such as Exa and Tavily. Those platforms also provide AI-native search APIs and research capabilities, but Nimble differentiates itself by emphasizing self-learning retrieval strategies, proprietary indexing, enterprise governance, managed delivery, and token efficiency for production agents. For organizations building their own AI systems, the distinction could become increasingly important. Foundation models are becoming more capable across the industry, shifting competitive differentiation toward the infrastructure surrounding them—including retrieval, orchestration, memory, observability, and governance. Nimble’s strategy reflects that broader trend, betting that better web intelligence can deliver larger operational gains than incremental improvements in model reasoning alone. Enterprise infrastructure versus AI research assistants The different positioning is also reflected in pricing.While consumer-facing AI research assistants are generally sold as productivity subscriptions for individual users or teams, Nimble is pricing its managed service as enterprise infrastructure designed to power production applications. Its pay-as-you-go API, however, gives developers a lower-cost path to test the underlying agent technology before committing to a managed deployment. Platform Primary audience Primary focus Lowest publicly available price (USD) Nimble Developers and enterprises Managed web retrieval and orchestration infrastructure combining specialized search, browsing, extraction, validation, proprietary indexing, and memory $0.025 per Agent API request (low-effort setting). Managed service starts at $2,500/month (Startup plan, billed annually). ChatGPT Deep Research Professionals, enterprises, and knowledge workers Autonomous multi-step research with iterative browsing, synthesis, and citations $20/month (ChatGPT Plus). Higher limits are available with Pro, Team, Enterprise, and Edu plans. Google Gemini Deep Research Consumers and enterprises Research planning integrated with Gemini, Google Search, and Google's productivity ecosystem $19.99/month (Google AI Pro, U.S.). Higher-capacity AI Ultra and enterprise Workspace offerings are also available. Tongyi DeepResearch Developers and AI researchers Open research model for long-horizon information-seeking and agentic search Free (open source). Users are responsible for their own infrastructure and cloud compute costs. Perplexity Consumers, professionals, and enterprise teams AI-powered web search and cited research Free entry tier. Perplexity Pro starts at $20/month with Enterprise Pro available separately. Exa Developers and AI platform builders AI-native search, content retrieval, and asynchronous research agents Free developer tier (includes monthly credits). Paid Search API pricing starts at approximately $7 per 1,000 requests while Agent runs range from $0.012 to $1.00 per run depending on effort level. Tavily Developers building AI agents Search, extraction, crawling, and research APIs for agents and RAG workflows Free developer tier (1,000 monthly credits). Pay-as-you-go usage starts at approximately $ 0.008 per credit. Sakana Marlin Enterprises, strategy teams, financial institutions, and research organizations Ultra Deep Research for hours-long strategic reasoning and executive-grade reports Pay-as-you-go from approximately $0.61 per credit (¥98/credit) with with 100 credits required per research run (approx $61 per run). The first subscription tier is Pro at approximately $936/month (¥150,000/month) followed by Team at approximately $2,495/month (¥400,000/month) with Enterprise pricing available by quote. The comparison reveals three increasingly distinct markets. ChatGPT Deep Research, Gemini Deep Research, and Perplexity operate primarily as user-facing research assistants. Exa and Tavily provide developer-facing retrieval and research APIs. Nimble and Sakana Marlin occupy more enterprise-oriented territory, but at different layers: Nimble supplies retrieval infrastructure, while Marlin performs long-horizon strategic analysis. Sakana Marlin is particularly useful as a counterpoint. It is positioned as a "Virtual CSO" rather than a search API, running autonomous research loops for as long as eight hours and producing executive-ready reports, references, and supporting materials. Nimble, by contrast, is designed to sit beneath those kinds of systems, supplying the specialized retrieval, browsing, extraction, validation, and orchestration that enterprise agents need to gather reliable external information before reasoning begins. The comparison therefore should not be read as a direct price-to-price evaluation. A $20/month ChatGPT Plus or $19.99/month Google AI Pro subscription buys an individual AI workspace with Deep Research capabilities. Nimble's $2,500/month managed plan funds concurrent production agents, managed ETL, MCP integration, web-page capacity, storage, and hands-free data delivery. Sakana Marlin's approximately $936/month (¥150,000/month) Pro plan pays for extended, compute-intensive strategic research workflows. Each price reflects a fundamentally different product boundary and deployment model rather than simply a different level of AI capability. Why retrieval is becoming the next AI battleground As enterprise AI systems mature, the industry is increasingly recognizing that model quality alone does not determine application performance. Large language models frequently fail not because they cannot reason, but because they lack timely, trustworthy external information. That reality has fueled rapid investment across retrieval-augmented generation, AI-native search, web intelligence platforms, knowledge graphs, browser automation, and agent infrastructure. Nimble’s launch reflects this evolution by focusing less on building another frontier model and more on improving the quality of information flowing into existing ones. Whether the company’s reported 21-point improvement in answer quality and 51% reduction in token usage hold up across a broad range of enterprise deployments remains to be independently validated. The larger strategic bet is that, as frontier models become more interchangeable, companies will differentiate themselves through the data, retrieval policies, trusted-source rules, memory systems, and orchestration layers surrounding those models. Nimble is not trying to build the researcher that sits in front of the user. It is trying to become part of the infrastructure that determines what the researcher can find, how efficiently it can find it, and whether the resulting evidence is complete enough to support production decisions. Web Search Agents are available through Nimble’s API, SDK, and MCP integrations, with a free trial available for developers evaluating the platform.

2h ago

Google Cloud Blog

What’s new in Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform

Since we launched Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform a few months ago, we’ve seen inspiring progress from businesses and builders alike. To stir up development, we’ve also shared 13 demos that can walk you through the versatility and power of Agent Platform, and 20 questions you can ask your teams about building a solid agentic foundation. Meanwhile at Google Cloud, our teams have been hard at work to make more features available and continue delivering on our promise to give you better ways to simply and securely scale your agents. That’s why today, we are announcing some of our most popular capabilities are available for everyone, from Agent Runtime to Agent Identity. We also recently just announced CodeMender , our new managed code security agent to help you advance from passive scanning to automated code remediation, and reduce zero-day risk. Read on to learn more. Automate your long-running agents faster and with better memory Think about your long-running agentic workflows. Maybe it’s managing a sales prospecting sequence, continuously monitoring vendor supply chains for compliance risks, or orchestrating IT incident response and root-cause patching across your infrastructure. If you want to move past a basic chat function, you’ll need the stamina to execute multi-step agents over time, and the contextual memory to keep the experience personal and relevant. To help you get there, we’re bringing these capabilities to everyone: Agent Memory Bank: Enable low-latency agent personalization by defining structured schemas that automatically extract and maintain critical conversation context for maximum efficiency. This ensures your agents retain key user preferences, past decisions, and account history across long-running tasks, allowing them to pick up right where they left off without losing context or slowing down response times. Agent Runtime: Automate complex, multi-day agents and reasoning tasks with agents capable of running continuously for up to 7 days. This means you can delegate entire asynchronous processes, like executing a week-long sales sequence or orchestrating a multi-stage onboarding process — letting agents make decisions in the background without requiring constant human intervention or lost context. Scale AI agents with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform Secure, audit, and centralize your agent operations Once you run an agent with a solid memory and dependable runtime, you have to make sure it’s safe and secure. Especially for enterprise work, security must be embedded across all your work, no matter the workflow or human behind it. To help your team work safely, we’re making three features available to help you secure, audit, and centralize your agents. Agent Identity: A new native IAM type built on open standards that enforces a least-privilege approach to agent permissions. It mitigates token theft by binding access directly to the agent runtime, provides non-repudiable auditing of all agent actions, and automatically manages the identity lifecycle to eliminate dormant credentials. Agent Gateway: This gives you a central control point where you can secure and govern all interactions across your agent ecosystem. From this point, you can enforce granular access controls through IAM conditions and natural language rules, while integrated inline protection with Model Armor safeguards against prompt injection, tool poisoning, and data leakage. Agent Registry: We want to give power to every individual to build agents, and we need a single glass pane view of all agents built across the organization. Agent Registry is that view. It serves as a single library for all the AI agents, servers, and connections across your organization. It allows teams to easily find and reuse agents rather than building them from scratch, keeping your systems organized, as well as provide administrators to monitor agent sprawl See how Broadcom , Palo Alto Networks , and Ping Identity all leverage Agent Gateway to simply and securely govern their agents at scale. Govern AI agents with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform Improve performance and optimize agent decisions Once your AI agents are live, you’ll need clear visibility into how they make decisions on your behalf. Observability tells you what your agent did. Evaluation tells you whether it was any good. Agent Platform now gives you both on one engine, so the metric you iterate against while building is the same one grading the agent after it ships. Agent evaluation: Continuously monitor and evaluate agent performance in production with online evaluation monitors that proactively identify performance degradation and behavioral drift. There are many metric options: pre-built, custom Python, LLM-as-a-judge, or adaptive rubrics co-developed with Google DeepMind. Agent observability: Gain deep, end-to-end visibility into agent reasoning, tool utilization, and execution performance through comprehensive tracing and real-time observability dashboards. Optimize AI agents with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform How customers are achieving more with Gemini Enterprise "At AT&T, as we are leveraging Agent Memory Bank for long-term memory, our autonomous & intelligent AI Sales Agents in the App channel can resume conversations after a gap by synthesizing key facts from prior customer interactions, effectively moving from guessing to remembering. As we extend this capability to IVR [Interactive Voice Response], we’re building toward a seamless cross-channel sales journey where customers can continue conversations across app, voice, and web experiences without losing context or having to repeat themselves." - Jeff Dixon, AVP Digital Product Management & Development at AT&T . "At Best Buy, we see as more organizations adopt AI agents, agent identity is becoming just as important as human identity. In the past, we've struggled with orphaned service accounts, unclear ownership, and permissions that kept growing over time. Agent Identity helps bring accountability and governance to autonomous systems by making it clear who an agent is, what it can access, and who is responsible for it. From a security standpoint, applying least-privilege access to agents reduces risk while giving organizations the confidence to scale AI safely." - Kishor Patil, Senior Manager, Cloud Platform Engineering at Best Buy . "At Commerzbank AG, we are building a secure foundation for responsible Agentic AI on Google Cloud. To bring this vision to scale, we are actively evaluating Google Cloud’s new Agent Registry and Agent Gateway Services. These services are key to our governance strategy, offering vital controls for agent discoverability, policy enforcement, and access management. Furthermore, they provide the deep observability and auditability essential for us to scale our AI platforms in a compliant and trustworthy manner." - Seenuvasan Devasenan, Cluster Architect / AI Transformation Office, Strategisches Programm AI, AI Platforms & Services at Commerzbank AG . "At Liberty Global, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform provides the high-speed engine our developers need to rapidly create and deploy specialized AI capabilities. When it comes to governance, which is paramount in a multi-entity environment, features like Agent Gateway and Agent Registry are absolute game-changers. They allow us to enforce strict security protocols and maintain centralized oversight, ensuring AI is deployed safely and compliantly across all our diverse companies." - David Mortimer, Director of AI Architecture, Liberty Global . "At WellSky, responsible AI scaling means staying ahead of governance. As we expand our Gen AI capabilities across health and community care platforms, our platform engineering team established a proactive framework to catalog, version, and lifecycle-manage AI agents in our ecosystem. Partnering with Google Cloud, we've implemented a centralized Agent Registry that enforces compliance policies and ensures only fully vetted agents reach production, while remaining architected for flexibility as our technology evolves. The result is the foundational visibility our teams need to accelerate AI innovation without compromising the security and governance standards our healthcare clients depend on." - Joel Dolisy, Chief Technology Officer at WellSky . Get started with Agent Platform today Ready to scale your agents simply and securely? Dive into the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform documentation to get started with these newly generally available features today. Watch our recent livestream to guide you through the entire agentic lifecycle step by step.

3h ago