Drug discovery is notoriously inefficient. Pharmaceutical projects span years, moving from one specialized human team to the next through disconnected workflows that result in knowledge loss during each handoff.
A shocking 90% to 95% of drug discovery projects reportedly fail — one of the highest failure rates of any industry. A single successful drug can take over a dozen years and up to $1 billion from initial discovery to patient distribution, according to published reports.
Generative AI is being used to solve some of the challenges, but Stanford researchers have moved the ball forward with agentic AI.
A team led by James Zou, associate professor of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, has deployed thousands autonomous AI “scientist” agents in a virtual biotech that simulates the full lifecycle of drug development. The agents handle everything from initial discovery through safety testing and clinical trial design, while maintaining the continuity that’s lacking in today’s drug discovery processes, according to Zou.
The project uses a hierarchical orchestration framework. At the top sits a chief scientist officer agent that acts as a planner, delegating tasks to teams of specialized agents, Zou told VentureBeat during a call ahead of his upcoming session at VB Transform 2026.
While one team of agents focuses on discovery, another manages safety, and others handle specialized analytical tasks. Because these agents operate within a unified, hierarchical ecosystem, they retain the full context of a project, maintaining continuity from the first molecule identified to the final clinical outcome.
The “brain” of the system relies on a vast amount of primary data. The agents are granted access to data sources ranging from genomics and FDA chemistry data to clinical trial databases using a model context protocol.
The team has invested heavily in agent-native and agent-friendly data, allowing the AI to synthesize complex information more effectively. The system relies on a combination of models, with Zou noting that while Claude often serves as the backbone for coding and data analysis, the architecture employs a mixture of models, including those fine-tuned specialized use cases.
Zou is raising money at a roughly $1 billion valuation for his startup, Human Intelligence, based on the research.
During Zou’s session at VB Transform on July 15, titled How 10,000 agentic scientists in Stanford’s lab are set to revolutionize medical research and discovery, he will share valuable insights including strategies for managing context and long-running, multi-step workflows in a multi-agent system, the process of transforming and indexing raw enterprise data to make it agent native, and how to use human auditing and experimental reward signals to verify agent actions.
Another session at VB Transform focused on the value of agentic context includes Building a trustworthy agentic AI foundation: How Zillow accelerated engineering by 40%, with Zillow’s SVP of engineering and technology, Toby Roberts and Glean’s CEO Arvind Jain.
Interested in attending VB Transform 2026? Register here. A select number of complimentary passes are also available to senior technology leaders. Contact us to get yours.
Customer expectations have shifted from simple, fast conversational interactions to complex agentic AI-powered tasks that legacy IT architectures simply can’t handle.
To address this, Intuit made the bold decision to overhaul its technical infrastructure for its business platform. The company moved away from its multi-agent setup, which prioritized broad capabilities, to a granular, skill-and-tool-based architecture while embedding human experts directly into the workflow alongside AI. This shift involved decomposing its massive agents into specialized components, separating the brain from the hands, essentially.
“We went from a multi-agent system where we had large agents that did a lot to fully incorporating workflows, skills and tools down to the base level,” said Nhung Ho, VP of AI at Intuit. “We changed the orchestrator, we changed the planner, we changed the brain, and we also changed what everybody had to build across the whole company.”
At VB Transform 2026 on July 14 and 15, Ho will share details about the technology decisions behind building an abstraction layer behind Intuit’s system of intelligence. She’ll also share how the new architecture has allowed the company to decouple its orchestration from specific model providers, allowing Intuit to remain agile and use the best tools for the job, whether from large model providers or their own home-grown tools.
Other VB Transform sessions focused on agentic orchestration include:
From signals to shelves: How Target is engineering Agentic AI for the right product, right place, right time with speaker Siobhan McFeeney, SVP Technology, Target;
The engineer’s multiplier: How Instacart uses agentic AI to eliminate toil, elevate teams and slash costs with speaker Anirban Kundu, CTO, Instacart;
MCP connection isn’t orchestration: Building the agent execution layer with Arnab Bose, chief product officer, Asana;
Building the agentic workforce: A blueprint for scaling AI operations without the sprawl with Romit Jadhwani, Sr. Director, Enterprise AI, Data & Productivity, Rivian and Craig Wiley, VP of AI, Databricks; and
Inside Atlassian’s Living Lab: Deploying context-aware agents at scale with Dr. Molly Sands, head of the Teamwork Lab at Atlassian
Interested in attending VB Transform 2026? Register here. A select number of complimentary passes are also available to senior technology leaders. Contact us to get yours.
The security implications of advanced AI models were immediately clear to Visa’s technology team when they began testing Anthropic’s Mythos model.
Just weeks into Project Glasswing, the team observed how quickly attackers can identify and weaponize vulnerabilities in critical code bases, creating security risks, explained Rajat Taneja, Visa’s president of technology, during a call to prepare for his session at VB Transform 2026, VentureBeat’s upcoming agentic AI event.
Visa is among the companies selected to test Anthropic’s upcoming model — a version of which was released June 9 but abruptly disabled days later to comply with U.S. government directives.
The findings of Project Glasswing put a spotlight on widening enterprise security gaps and the vulnerabilities malicious actors can take advantage of.
“Security has always been important, but currently, in the age of AI, is going to be even more important because the attacks become autonomous,” Taneja told VentureBeat. “The defenses have to become autonomous. And we are not there. And there’s an asymmetry there, which is a very big risk for the world.”
Threat actors now have access to powerful AI agents that can work 24/7, “operating at a scale and speed that human teams cannot match, automating the tedious reconnaissance and exploitation phases of a cyberattack,” according to Cisco’s State of AI Security 2026 report. Amy Chang, Cisco’s head of AI threat intelligence and security research, will also be a speaker at VB Transform.
To mitigate these risks, Visa is building its own abstraction layers, observability, and data guardrails to secure its autonomous commerce frameworks. The payment services giant also rolled out an open‑source, AI-driven security framework that turns vulnerability discovery and remediation into a structured, repeatable pipeline.
Their work represents a shift enterprise IT teams must make to protect enterprise systems against threats posed by bad actors wielding autonomous agents. Taneja will share these insights and valuable technical details during his session at VB Transform, titled Inside Project Glasswing and Mythos: Securing the agentic future today, on July 15.
Other agentic AI security-focused sessions at VB Transform include:
CrabTrap: How Brex built an open source proxy to secure OpenClaw’s critical flaws for everyone with Brex co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi;
When AI Agents have wallets: Building the trust layer for autonomous B2B commerce with Mastercard’s Chief AI and Data Officer, Greg Ulrich;
Expedia’s blueprint for building autonomous agents for high-stakes transactional systems with Chief AI and Data Officer Xavier Amatrain; and
Securing agentic AI: A playbook for permissioning, sandboxing, and human-in-the-loop controls, a panel discussion with AI security leaders from Intuit, Box and Cisco.
Interested in attending VB Transform 2026? Register here. A select number of complimentary passes are also available to senior technology leaders. Contact us to get yours.