Adept represents the most significant pivot in the AI industry’s recent history, serving as the primary case study for the shift from “General Intelligence” to “Specialized Agency.” In mid-2024, the company underwent a massive restructuring where its original co-founders and foundation model team were hired by Amazon, which also licensed its deep tech. However, contrary to initial “acqui-hire” rumors, Adept did not shut down. Instead, under the leadership of new CEO Zach Brock, it re-emerged in 2026 as a leaner, product-focused entity solely dedicated to the application layer of agentic workflows.
Freed from the crippling capital costs of training frontier models (like GPT-5 competitors), the “new” Adept focuses exclusively on Adept Workflows—an enterprise platform that sits on top of existing models to perform actual work. While other companies are still trying to build a smarter brain, Adept is building the “hands” that allow those brains to type, click, and scroll. Its agents are trusted by operations teams to handle brittle, repetitive tasks in legacy software (like Salesforce, Oracle, and Tableau) that modern APIs often miss.
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Core Technology: ACT-2 & Fuyu
- Adept Workflows: A platform that allows non-technical managers to record a process (e.g., “Process this invoice in SAP”) and convert it into a reliable AI agent that runs 24/7.
- Fuyu Architecture: Adept continues to leverage its open-weight Fuyu model family, which was designed specifically for “UI Understanding”—reading screens, understanding layout, and locating buttons—rather than just processing text.
- “Human-in-the-Loop” Design: Unlike “black box” agents, Adept’s interface is designed for observability, allowing human managers to step in, review an agent’s proposed actions, and correct them before execution.
Business & Market Status
- Strategic Pivot: Successfully transitioned from a capital-intensive “Foundation Model Lab” to a high-margin “Enterprise Software Vendor” following the 2024 Amazon licensing deal.
- Leadership: Led by CEO Zach Brock (formerly Head of Engineering), focusing the remaining engineering talent on product reliability rather than scientific research.
- Market Position: Competes directly with UiPath and other RPA (Robotic Process Automation) giants, offering a more flexible, AI-native alternative to brittle legacy automation bots.
Company Profile
- CEO: Zach Brock.
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California.
- Funding: Backed by Greylock, General Catalyst, and Spark Capital (retained equity in the independent operating entity post-Amazon deal).
Key Use Cases
- Legacy Software Automation: Agents navigate older, complex enterprise software (ERPs) that lack modern APIs, clicking through menus just like a human worker.
- Supply Chain Ops: Logistics teams use Adept to cross-reference shipping manifests across multiple vendor portals, extracting data that traditional scrapers miss.
- Data Migration: Automates the manual copy-pasting required when moving data between incompatible systems (e.g., from a PDF into a CRM).
Why It Matters
Adept proves that you don’t need to build the smartest model to win with AI. By bowing out of the “arms race” for AGI, they survived to solve a more immediate problem: the “last mile” of automation. They represent the practical future of the industry in 2026—where success is measured not by benchmarks, but by the number of boring, manual hours saved for enterprise employees.
