xAI's business agents sign into company software, and Kenya's essay industry is gone

xAI has released a business version of Grok Bot: agents that sign into a company's own software with a login of their own and finish the work inside it, without a person approving each step. The first two weeks are free, an offer aimed at the customers of Cursor, the coding company SpaceX bought for $60 billion. xAI belongs to SpaceX too, after two mergers this year.

In finance, recruiting and sales, working inside the system means the agent updates the record rather than producing a draft for somebody else to type in. Two free weeks needs no purchase order, and connecting an agent needs a login, which a department head can hand over without involving the technology team.

A member of staff signs in with a password and a code, and signs out again. An agent is connected once and keeps that access until somebody removes it.

In August 2025, attackers stole the tokens belonging to Drift, an AI chat agent that Salesloft sold for handling sales conversations on company websites, and used them to pull data out of hundreds of Salesforce systems over about ten days. Google's Threat Intelligence Group and Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 later found the same tokens had reached Slack and Google Workspace accounts Drift was connected to. Salesforce itself was never broken into.

The attackers never needed a password from any of those companies. The tokens let them present themselves as Drift, an application those systems trusted, and a connected application can query whatever the permissions granted at setup allow, as the security firm Anomali described it. FINRA's alert to member firms listed what came out alongside the contact records: API keys, cloud credentials and passwords staff had typed into support tickets.

Most decisions arrive at a meeting as a shortlist: three options on a page, a recommendation at the bottom. A new analysis warns that AI is taking over the work that produces the page, so the leader reviewing the shortlist is reviewing choices a machine narrowed, and reviewing them after the narrowing is finished.

Felipe Csaszar of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business writes in the September-October Harvard Business Review that the constraint AI removes is human attention: a team can develop only so many options before the calendar forces a decision, which is why SWOT grids and portfolio matrices were kept simple.

Every firm in an industry buys the same tools, so Csaszar expects the advantage to go to those that pair them with their own data. His order of work is the reverse of the shortlist: widen the options with the machine, narrow them with people afterwards.

Teresios Bundi's first paid assignment was two pages on a fruit he had never heard of, and it earned him $7. Over the twelve years that followed he wrote more than 2,500 essays and papers for university students in the United States and Europe, at $40 to $70 each, at least five times what his public health degree could earn him in Kenya. At its peak the trade employed as many as 40,000 people in Nairobi.

The New York Times, in a report by Adam Satariano, Paul Mozur and Edwin Okoth, describes the whole industry gone within two years of ChatGPT's release in November 2022. The students who had been the buyers now type the assignment into the model themselves.

By the standards of outsourced work it was well protected: strong English, low living costs, and customers who could never complain in public about the quality. What ended it was the shape of the task. The order arrived fully specified in writing, the buyer never met the writer, nobody inspected the work against anything except that brief, and what came back was text. A model does all four.

The Kenyan writers still working earn $500 to $800 a month, down from $900 to $1,200. One operator who kept 100 writers busy has closed.