BUSINESS

Crypto rebounds sharply from Tuesday’s lows, yet traders question whether the move marks a lasting turn or another range-bound bounce.

TheStreet aims to feature only the best products and services. If you buy something via one of our links, we may earn a commission.Why we love this dealSpring cleaning season is just around the corner, and for the most success on this back-breaking journey, you need the right tools and products. Many people, including myself, find these tidying tasks quite dreadful, which is why I’m always finding ways to simplify them. In reality, very few of the cleaning hacks I’ve tried have actually panned out for me, but after switching to the lightweight Black+Decker Powerseries+ 20V Max Cordless Stick Vacuum, vacuuming floors genuinely feels like less of a chore. As a pet owner with multiple types of floors in my home, I highly recommend this Black+Decker vacuum to anyone looking to upgrade their current appliance. It’s the perfect time to test out this stick vacuum for yourself, because it’s on sale at Walmart for a limited time. Already budget-friendly at its original price of $149, the lightweight cordless cleaning tool is now even more affordable at just $120. Black+Decker Powerseries+ 20V Max Cordless Stick Vacuum, $120 (was $149) at Walmart

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This shopping expert’s experienceAfter years of wrestling with a heavy, upright vacuum, there were two things I wanted in a new appliance. First, I wanted something lightweight, so it would be easy to pull out of the closet. I also wanted a cordless model so I didn’t need to hassle with a tangled cord or find an outlet when going from room to room. I looked at online reviews, and after reading a few articles, I settled on this Black+Decker stick vacuum for these features, and its affordable price tag. I’ve used expensive vacuums like Dyson and Miele in the past, but I was surprised by how much easier vacuuming was when switching to the Black+Decker. First, the lightweight design, which is just under 9 pounds, makes it easily accessible, and rolling it across the floors no longer feels like a workout. It comes with a rechargeable battery that runs up to 44 minutes on a single charge, so I can complete my entire 3-bedroom house without interruptions. I keep the appliance running as I go from room to room, and using AutoSense technology, it automatically adjusts to the floor type, which includes a mix of rugs, laminate flooring, carpets, and tile in my home.Related: Amazon is selling a 2-pack of storage shelves that hold up to 500 pounds each for just $50One of the coolest things about this vacuum is the LED floorhead light, which allows me to see dust and debris I couldn’t see otherwise. Thanks to this feature, I know that my dog’s fur or bits of dirt are being sucked up with a single sweep. I also can’t fail to mention the quality of this device. I’ve owned this Black+Decker stick vacuum for multiple years now, and it’s still performing just as well as it did the first day without any changes to the suction power or battery life. Details to know Weight: 8.9 pounds.Is the battery long-lasting?: Yes, the battery runs up to 44 minutes on a single charge.Can it be used as a handheld vacuum? Yes. The stick vacuum comes with a crevice tool attachment, so it can be converted to a handheld vacuum.There are only two downsides to this vacuum to consider, but for me, the pros outweigh the cons. The easy-to-clean dustbin is smaller, so it gets full quickly, and sometimes I’ll have to empty it multiple times in a session. Additionally, I have long hair, and it does get wrapped around the anti-tangle brush bar, but since it’s removable, it’s not too tricky to clear.Shop more dealsBlack+Decker Powerseries Extreme Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner, $134 (was $184) at WalmartHoover Impulse Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner, $50 (was $65) at WalmartYoma Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner, $58 (was $120) at WalmartFor your floors, whether hardwood, tile, or carpet, the Black+Decker Powerseries+ 20V Max Cordless Stick Vacuum is a go-to appliance for removing dirt, dust, and dog or cat fur. It won’t be available for $120 at Walmart for long, so add this spring cleaning deal to your cart now.

When your average daily token usage is 8 billion a day, you have a massive scale problem.

This was the case at AT&T, and chief data officer Andy Markus and his team recognized that it simply wasn’t feasible (or economical) to push everything through large reasoning models.

So, when building out an internal Ask AT&T personal assistant, they reconstructed the orchestration layer. The result: A multi-agent stack built on LangChain where large language model “super agents” direct smaller, underlying “worker” agents performing more concise, purpose-driven work.

This flexible orchestration layer has dramatically improved latency, speed and response times, Markus told VentureBeat. Most notably, his team has seen up to 90% cost savings.

“I believe the future of agentic AI is many, many, many small language models (SLMs),” he said. “We find small language models to be just about as accurate, if not as accurate, as a large language model on a given domain area.”Most recently, Markus and his team used this re-architected stack along with Microsoft Azure to build and deploy Ask AT&T Workflows, a graphical drag-and-drop agent builder for employees to automate tasks. The agents pull from a suite of proprietary AT&T tools that handle document processing, natural language-to-SQL conversion, and image analysis. “As the workflow is executed, it’s AT&T’s data that’s really driving the decisions,” Markus said. Rather than asking general questions, “we’re asking questions of our data, and we bring our data to bear to make sure it focuses on our information as it makes decisions.”

Still, a human always oversees the “chain reaction” of agents. All agent actions are logged, data is isolated throughout the process, and role-based access is enforced when agents pass workloads off to one another.

“Things do happen autonomously, but the human on the loop still provides a check and balance of the entire process,” Markus said.Not overbuilding, using ‘interchangeable and selectable’ modelsAT&T doesn’t take a “build everything from scratch” mindset, Markus noted; it’s more relying on models that are “interchangeable and selectable” and “never rebuilding a commodity.” As functionality matures across the industry, they’ll deprecate homegrown tools in lieu of off the shelf options, he explained.

“Because in this space, things change every week, if we’re lucky, sometimes multiple times a week,” he said. “We need to be able to pilot, plug in and plug out different components.”

They do “really rigorous” evaluations of available options as well as their own; for instance, their Ask Data with Relational Knowledge Graph has topped the Spider 2.0 text to SQL accuracy leaderboard, and other tools have scored highly on the BERT SQL benchmark.

In the case of homegrown agentic tools, his team uses LangChain as a core framework, fine-tunes models with standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and other in-house algorithms, and partners closely with Microsoft, using the tech giant’s search functionality for their vector store.

Ultimately, though, it’s important not to just fuse agentic AI or other advanced tools into everything for the sake of it, Markus advised. “Sometimes we over complicate things,” he said. “Sometimes I’ve seen a solution over engineered.”

Instead, builders should ask themselves whether a given tool actually needs to be agentic. This could include questions like: What accuracy level could be achieved if it was a simpler, single-turn generative solution? How could they break it down into smaller pieces where each piece could be delivered “way more accurately”?, as Markus put it.

Accuracy, cost and tool responsiveness should be core principles. “Even as the solutions have gotten more complicated, those three pretty basic principles still give us a lot of direction,” he said. How 100,000 employees are actually using itAsk AT&T Workflows has been rolled out to 100,000-plus employees. More than half say they use it every day, and active adopters report productivity gains as high as 90%, Markus said.

“We’re looking at, are they using the system repeatedly? Because stickiness is a good indicator of success,” he said.

The agent builder offers “two journeys” for employees. One is pro-code, where users can program Python behind the scenes, dictating rules for how agents should work. The other is no-code, featuring a drag-and-drop visual interface for a “pretty light user experience,” Markus said.

Interestingly, even proficient users are gravitating toward the latter option. At a recent hackathon geared to a technical audience, participants were given a choice of both, and more than half chose low code. “This was a surprise to us, because these people were all very competent in the programming aspect,” Markus said.

Employees are using agents across a variety of functions; for instance, a network engineer may build a series of them to address alerts and reconnect customers when they lose connectivity. In this scenario, one agent can correlate telemetry to identify the network issue and its location, pull change logs and check for known issues. Then, it can open a trouble ticket.

Another agent could then come up with ways to solve the issue and even write new code to patch it. Once the problem is resolved, a third agent can then write up a summary with preventative measures for the future.

“The [human] engineer would watch over all of it, making sure the agents are performing as expected and taking the right actions,” Markus said. AI-fueled coding is the futureThat same engineering discipline — breaking work into smaller, purpose-built pieces — is now reshaping how AT&T writes code itself, through what Markus calls “AI-fueled coding.”

He compared the process to RAG; devs use agile coding methods in an integrated development environment (IDE) along with “function-specific” build archetypes that dictates how code should interact.

The output is not loose code; the code is “very close to production grade,” and could reach that quality in one turn. “We’ve all worked with vibe coding, where we have an agentic kind of code editor,” Markus noted. But AI-fueled coding “eliminates a lot of the back and forth iterations that you might see in vibe coding.”

He sees this coding technique as “tangibly redefining” the software development cycle, ultimately shortening development timelines and increasing output of production-grade code. Non-technical teams can also get in on the action, using plain language prompts to build software prototypes.

His team, for instance, has used the technique to build an internal curated data product in 20 minutes; without AI, building it would have taken six weeks. “We develop software with it, modify software with it, do data science with it, do data analytics with it, do data engineering with it,” Markus said. “So it’s a game changer.”

The AI bellwether reported $68 billion revenue last quarter, expecting it to grow to $78 billion next quarter.

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To focus on ideology as the cause of closed accounts is a non sequitur that totally misses the point.

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Website accessibility is an ongoing operational responsibility. Here’s what happens when it’s treated like a one-time effort or a post-launch checklist instead.