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A deep dive into our “User Led Learning” feature

· 11 min read
Mounir Mouawad
Co-founder and CEO
Mark Smith
Developer Relations

At Portia, we believe building agents for production means balancing AI autonomy with human control – something we call the ‘spectrum of autonomy’. We have previously seen how clarifications can be used during plan runs to handle the human:agent interface. With our new User Led Learning feature, we’re bringing this level of feedback into the planning process as well. Developers now have a powerful way to shape the Planning agent’s behavior—without rewriting prompts or tweaking models. When you generate a plan using the Portia AI SDK, that plan can be stored in the Portia cloud where it can be highlighted as a preferred plan with a simple thumbs-up. Each “like” tells the Portia planning agent, this was a good plan for this type of user intent—and over time, those signals help planning agents make better decisions on their own. It’s a subtle but powerful shift along the spectrum of autonomy: agents become more capable and self-directed, while still staying grounded in what users actually want.

More features for your production agent … and a fundraising announcement

· 6 min read
Emma Burrows
Co-founder and CTO
Mounir Mouawad
Co-founder and CEO

We came out of stealth a few weeks ago. Since then we’ve been working with our first few design partners on developing their production agents and have been heads down building out our SDK to solve their problems. To equip us with enough runway to grow, we’ve also been lucky enough to raise £4.4 million from some of the best investors we could ever hope for: General Catalyst (lead), First Minute Capital, Stem AI and some outstanding angel investors 🚀

In this post we want to give you a sense of what’s coming over the next couple of months.

Agent-Agent interfaces and Google's new A2A protocol

· 9 min read
Robbie Heywood
AI Engineer
Sam Stephens
Backend Engineer
Mounir Mouawad
Co-founder and CEO

This week, Google announced (↗) their new Agent-to-Agent protocol, A2A, designed to standardise how AI agents collaborate, even when run by different organisations using different underlying models. Positioned as complementary to MCP – which standardises agent access to external tools – A2A aims to standardise direct agent-agent communication. Google even declared A2A ♥️ MCP (↗), highlighting their vision for synergy between these protocols.

At Portia, we’ve been thinking about how agents interact with external systems via tools and agents for some time. You may have even read our post two weeks ago, Software interfaces in the agent era (↗). We divided the topic of agent integration with external systems into five categories based on increasing complexity, and A2A sits firmly at the top, in the Agent-Agent interface level.

Beyond APIs: Software interfaces in the agent era

· 12 min read
Tom Stuart
Backend Engineer
Robbie Heywood
AI Engineer
Mounir Mouawad
Co-founder and CEO

For decades, APIs have been the standard for connecting software systems. Whether REST, gRPC, or GraphQL, APIs follow the same principle: well-structured interfaces that are defined ahead of time to expose data and functionality to third parties. But as AI Agents start taking on more autonomous operations this rigid model is limiting what they can do.

APIs work well when requirements are known in advance, but agents often lack full context at the start. They explore, iterate and adapt based on their goals and real-time learning. Relying solely on predefined API calls can restrict an agent’s ability to interact dynamically with software.

Like many in our industry, we have been dealing a lot with the challenges of agent to software interfaces. We think the future of these interfaces will move beyond static APIs toward more flexible, expressive, and adaptive mechanisms. More on our thinking below, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Build a refund agent with Portia AI and Stripe's MCP server

· 9 min read
Sam Stephens
Backend Engineer
Mounir Mouawad
Co-founder and CEO

Anthropic open sourced its Model Context Protocol (↗), or MCP for short, at the end of last year. The protocol is picking up steam as the go-to way to standardise the interface between agent frameworks and apps / data sources, with the list of official MCP server implementations (↗) growing rapidly. Our early users have already asked for an easy way to expose tools from an MCP server to a Portia client so we just released support for MCP servers in our SDK ⭐️.

In this blog post we show how you can combine the power of Portia AI’s abstractions with any tool set from an MCP server to create unique agent workflows. The example we go over is accessible in our agent examples repository here (↗).

Seamless human agent interactions with just-in-time authorization

· 5 min read
Emma Burrows
Co-founder and CTO
Mounir Mouawad
Co-founder and CEO

In part 1 of this series, we established why there is a need for a Just-In-Time (JIT) authorization system, whereby an agent has the ability to authorize itself only at the point where it is very likely that they will 1/ need that authorization and 2/ that they are clear what they will use it for. In this section, we’ll look at how we have done this at Portia AI.

Why authentication is a challenge for AI agents

· 5 min read
Emma Burrows
Co-founder and CTO
Mounir Mouawad
Co-founder and CEO

AI Agents are a rapidly evolving technology in the AI space. The introduction of LLMs and the ability for LLMs to interact with other software autonomously has paved the way for a new wave of technological innovation. This is an exciting development but it needs appropriate guardrails to ensure that an agent is really enacting your wishes and not sending rogue emails on your behalf to your entire address book. This is the first of a 2-part series that discusses some of the challenges of appropriately authenticating and authorizing agents so they can safely fulfill requests.

What's next for Browser Agents? 🤔

· 5 min read
Emma Burrows
Co-founder and CTO
Mounir Mouawad
Co-founder and CEO
TLDR

I've been tinkering with browser automation recently (e.g., building a bot to search and buy on Amazon), and Operator’s release got me thinking about the future of these tools. Here are 3 key challenges browser agents face today:
1️⃣   Moving from text-only to multi-modal AI models.
2️⃣   Solving authentication without blending in with bad bots.
3️⃣   Enabling human-in-the-loop collaboration that's seamless and smart.

In this post we unpack these challenges, share insights, and explore what’s next for browser agents. Would you trust browser agents with your day-to-day tasks? Let me know your thoughts! 👇

Welcome 👋🏼

· 2 min read
Emma Burrows
Co-founder and CTO
Mounir Mouawad
Co-founder and CEO

Welcome to Portia AI's blog! This is a space where we like to share things we're learning along the way, observations on the AI industry in general, and any tinkering and experiments we run on our framework and beyond.

A quick word about us

We are Emma (↗) and Mounir (↗). We want to make it simple for developers to spin up agents that are easy to predict and control, and to complement that with secure and accurate tool calling. We (like to think we) bring relevant experience, having led B2C and B2B product launches at Amazon, Google and Stripe. We are lucky to have recruited some absolute legends on this journey and can't wait to introduce them to you as well. More on our funding soon!

Looking to learn more?