Wednesday, January 7, 2026
In today’s digest, a long-delayed subway zhuzh, Broadway dangles 2-for-1 tickets, and a check-in on where AI agents stand after a breakout year. 🤖💡
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New York City Council officially has a new speaker. 🗣️ Council Member Julie Menin was unanimously elected by the 51-member council today as council speaker. (PIX 11)
Menin, a moderate from the Upper East Side, will be the council's first Jewish speaker.
Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but the Chambers Street subway station is (finally) getting its long-promised glow-up. ✨ (Time Out New York)
After years of delays, the MTA is reviving a roughly $100 million renovation plan aimed at restoring historic details while adding long-missing basics like new stairs, track walls, and repaired finishes.
If the schedule holds, construction will take about two years once a contractor is selected — not instant gratification, but movement for one of the system’s most neglected stations.
Calling all theater kids: Broadway Week is back! 🎭 (CBS News)
Starting today, theater lovers can score 2-for-1 tickets to 26 Broadway shows running from January 20 through February 12.
It’s part of NYC Winter Outing, which also includes Restaurant Week and Must-See Week, offering similar 2-for-1 deals at museums and attractions across the city.
In other reading:
A ‘very New York’ kind of honor (New York Times)
Can dogs get the flu? NYC vet explains what pet owners need to know (Gothamist)
Vote on 17 ways that Mayor Mamdani could improve New York (New York Times)
In Our James Bond Era
AI agents had a breakout moment in 2025. Systems that once just chatted suddenly did stuff — booking travel, wiring tools together, even talking to other agents behind the scenes.
So where do we go from here? Let’s take a look. 🤖
What 2025 changed:
A global acceleration: Open-weight releases like DeepSeek and continued model launches from U.S. and Chinese labs intensified competition and expanded who could build advanced agents. 🌎
Agents became infrastructure: Standards like Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol and Google’s Agent2Agent protocol gave models a common way to use tools and talk to each other, and were donated to the Linux Foundation, signaling a move away from proprietary experiments toward shared, open standards. 🕶️
🌐 The browser turned into a coworker: By mid-2025, “agentic browsers” like Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI’s Atlas completed tasks like booking travel instead of just retrieving information.
⚠️ New power, new risks: As agents automated more technical work, incidents like the misuse of Anthropic’s Claude Code agent (espionage, much?) highlighted how these systems can also lower barriers to cyberattacks.
What to watch for in 2026:
Expect agents tuned to specific workflows in finance, media, e-commerce, logistics, and healthcare — obvious sweet spots for NYC, where over 2,000 AI startups and 40,000 AI-skilled workers are already building applied AI products.
Researchers are pushing for better benchmarks, clearer definitions, and stronger governance.
Efforts include the Linux Foundation’s new Agentic AI Foundation, which aims to establish shared standards and best practices for building, evaluating, and deploying AI agents responsibly.
Keep an eye on the social sector — programs like Decoded Futures are empowering nonprofits like All Star Code build their own types of AI agents to scale their work and impact.
🧠 The big takeaway: With initiatives like Empire AI and NYC’s strong AI base pushing responsible deployment, the city is positioning itself as the place where agentic AI gets battle-tested outside the sandbox, and in real industries.
In other reading:
The newest health trend is tracking your pee (WIRED)
The most bizarre tech announced so far at CES 2026 (TechCrunch)
How judges are using AI to help decide your legal dispute (Wall Street Journal)
Blackbird.AI, an NYC-based startup that tracks online narratives about businesses, raised $28 million led by Ten Eleven Ventures and Dorilton Ventures.
Semafor, an NYC-based digital media company, raised $30 million at a $330 million post-money valuation. Investors included KKR co-founder Henry Kravis and Carlyle Group's David Rubenstein, PSP Partners, Thomas Leysen, and Antenna Group.
The PantryLink Challenge is calling on innovators and technologists to reimagine emergency food assistance in NYC. The NYC Department of Social Services and the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy is seeking tech-enabled solutions to strengthen the city’s emergency food network and reach thousands of households. Learn more here and submit your proposal by January 26. Interested applicants can join a webinar on January 13 for more details.
New York City Economic Development Corporation has launched a Request for Applications for the NYC Catalyst Fund II, an investment fund aiming to create social and environmental impact, fuel economic growth and development in New York City, and generate income for NYCEDC. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis across several submission deadlines, beginning on January 30 here.
The New York Fashion Tech Lab has announced its 2026 Collective, for women-led, B2B, retail tech startups. Apply here.
HubSpot’s How You Hustle, where you and your business could be featured and receive free press exposure to their 1.5 million subscribers. Apply here.
Company Ventures’ Grand Central Tech Residency’s spring 2026 cohort, a 12-month residency program for founders and teams looking to build in-person in NYC. Apply here.
Union Square Ventures’ “usvwork” — a casual coworking day once a month for founders and builders in NYC. Apply here.
Zero Irving — the Union Square tech hub home to Civic Hall — is relaunching its Workforce Development Project Fund, which awards $200,000 annually for programs that expand tech access and economic mobility for underrepresented New Yorkers, especially those in Manhattan Community District 3 (Lower East Side, East Village, Chinatown). Submit your proposal here.
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