Tech Talent Drop - Edition 31

Signals you can actually hire against: Copilot agents get governance, GitHub ships new assist features, and fresh capital points to growth teams.

The Drop

Microsoft puts agent governance on the map
At Ignite, Microsoft introduced Agent 365, an admin layer to authorize, quarantine, and secure autonomous AI agents across the workplace, plus Work IQ to build custom agents on Microsoft 365 data. Plan on new roles around agent ops, policy, and ROI tracking.

Copilot agents land across M365 apps
New AI agents for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint sit inside Copilot Chat to draft, analyze, and iterate with you. Expect demand for solution architects and enablement engineers who can wire these into teams and data.

GitHub Copilot: next edit suggestions
GitHub rolled out Next Edit Suggestions (NES) in public preview for Xcode and Eclipse. It proposes the next logical change from context, which matters for interview take-homes and day-one developer velocity.

EU proposes delaying parts of the AI Act to 2027
Brussels floated a delay for high-risk provisions while it streamlines digital rules via a “Digital Omnibus.” Privacy groups call it a rollback. Hiring takeaway: governance and compliance roadmaps will stretch, not vanish.

AI Tool of the Week

Metaview
Interview intelligence that records, transcribes, and auto-summarizes interviews, with ATS integrations and structured notes for fast debriefs. Use it to raise signal quality without adding admin.

7-day pilot

1. Enable recording on screens and panels for one role.

2. Ship a standard rubric and require rubric-tied notes.

3. Measure time-to-feedback and debrief quality vs last role.

4. Keep human review for final summaries in week one.

Hiring and Interview Insight

Agents are here. Test for judgment, not just speed.
Add a 15-minute exercise where candidates must:

1. Decide when to pause or continue an automated outreach flow and justify the call.

2. Document a minimal agent policy for handling candidate data.
   Score on risk triage, documentation clarity, and communication. Map your exercise to the new agent controls above.

Funding Watch

All announced this week. Treat these as sourcing beacons.

• Luma AI — generative video and world models — $900M Series C led by Humain, with AMD Ventures and a16z participating. Hiring: multimodal research, data infra, training ops.

• Genspark — AI productivity suite — $275M Series C, post-money about $1.25B. Hiring: applied ML, enterprise integrations, growth.

• Sakana AI — Japan-first foundation models — $135M Series B at $2.65B valuation. Hiring: model training, Japanese NLP, enterprise adapters.

• Maxima — AI accounting platform — $41M Kleiner Perkins and Redpoint, team currently ~31 and scaling. Hiring: agents for finance, reliability, integrations.

• Flexion — AI “brain” for humanoid robots — $50M Series A. Hiring: robotics control, perception, embedded systems.

Why it matters
Capital is concentrating in agent platforms, multimodal video, enterprise AI, and robotics. Expect demand in platform reliability, data engineering, integrations, and partner engineering.

Quick Bytes

• Ignite follow-through will create near-term openings in agent governance and M365 enablement. Track “Agent 365,” “Work IQ,” and “Copilot rollout” in JD keywords.

• GitHub NES is a small feature with outsized onboarding impact. Use it in take-homes to observe candidate editing workflows, not just final code.

What to do this week

1. Agent policy sprint
   Draft a one-pager: where agents are allowed, data they can touch, a kill-switch owner, and how to log actions. Align with Agent 365 controls.

2. Metaview pilot
   Run the 7-day test above on one role. Report time-to-feedback and debrief acceptance next Monday.

3. Funding watchlist
   Set alerts for Luma AI, Genspark, Sakana AI, Maxima, and Flexion to catch early role posts and post-raise departures.

Listen to the episode

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That’s all for this week’s Tech Talent Drop — stay informed, and see you next week!