The four foundations
no one wants to talk about.
Vendors sell the agents. They are quieter about what the agents need to actually work. Four foundations separate the organizations that get value from the ones that produce expensive demos.
Data fit to act on, not just to report on.
A dashboard tolerates messy data. A human reader silently corrects for the duplicate customer record, the missing region code, the stale price. An agent does not.
Decision rights that are explicit and machine-readable.
In most organizations, who can decide what is captured in approval matrices, delegation policies, and tribal knowledge. Agents cannot read tribal knowledge.
Workflows redesigned around agents, not around screens.
Most enterprise processes were designed around a screen-based human workflow. Bolting an agent onto a screen-based workflow produces marginal gains at best.
Trust infrastructure — observability, evaluation, recourse.
An agent that acts in your business is a new kind of actor in your control environment. It needs the equivalent of audit logs, performance reviews, and a complaints process.