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An AI agent is software that takes a goal, plans a few steps, and uses other systems to finish the job. That last part is what makes it different from a chatbot, and it is the part that gets...
Aug 31, 2026/ recent · long reads
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Google's first page for AI agent governance describes controls in exhaustive detail and dates almost none of them. An AI agent, for this purpose, is software that takes actions inside your real...
Aug 30, 2026
An AI agent governance policy template is a document with numbers in it: dollar ceilings, named systems, named tools, one named approver, and a retention period. An AI agent, for the purposes of that...
Aug 30, 2026/ selected notes
All dispatches →01 / AI Agents
Every published AI agent ROI calculator gets the arithmetic right, and the arithmetic is not the trivial part: benefits minus costs over costs, then payback, then net present value for the finance...
Aug 29, 2026
02 / Playbooks
Multi-step agent workflow evaluation is a spending decision disguised as a test suite. The unit under test is never the model alone; it is the harness plus the model, meaning the scaffold that holds...
Aug 24, 2026
03 / AI Agents
An AI agent evaluation plan template is a fixed set of sections that turns scattered agent testing into one signed decision about whether a workflow changes hands. Eight sections carry the whole...
Aug 19, 2026
/ the feed · everything we've published
> An AI agent ROI measurement framework separates an agent's return into four classes (cost avoidance, capacity creation, risk and quality, and revenue lift) and measures each one on the clock it...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 22, 2026
> AI agent performance metrics are the numbers a business tracks to confirm a deployed AI agent does its job correctly, safely, affordably, and fast enough to matter. Marshal sorts them into five...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 11, 2026
> AI agent evaluation is the testing discipline that decides whether an agent can be trusted to own a business workflow. It runs on three surfaces: reliability (does the agent complete the job),...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 10, 2026
> Choosing the right AI agent use case means passing each candidate workflow through three gates in order: value (is the job worth owning), risk (can the business afford the worst day), and...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 10, 2026
> AI agent use cases are business workflows an agent can own end to end, and they sort by function: sales, marketing, customer service, finance and admin, HR, and IT operations. A use case is real...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 10, 2026
> AI agents and chatbots differ by what they produce: a chatbot produces conversation, answering questions inside a contained exchange, while an AI agent produces actions, completing multi-step work...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 10, 2026
> AI agent orchestration is the coordination layer that lets multiple specialized AI agents share work, context, and handoffs on jobs too big for one agent to own. An orchestrator routes tasks,...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 10, 2026
> Designing an agentic workflow means specifying five stages in order: intake (the trigger and the inputs), reasoning (the decision and its limits), action (what the agent may write and where),...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 8, 2026
> An agentic workflow is a complete business job, from trigger to finished outcome, that an AI agent owns by deciding each step instead of following a fixed branch. It differs from a single task,...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 8, 2026
> The SMB agentification roadmap is the staged path a founder-led business takes from one-off agent pilots to an operating model, defined by who owns the agents rather than how many days have passed....
Kurt Fischman · Jun 8, 2026
The business case for AI agents is the per-workflow analysis that decides whether an agent is worth building, measured as the manual-coordination cost a business stops paying minus the oversight.
Kurt Fischman · Jun 8, 2026
> Agentic AI is software that reasons over changing input and acts toward an outcome, while traditional automation runs a fixed rule and conventional software executes a fixed instruction. Agentic AI...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 8, 2026
> An AI agent for business is software that owns a defined workflow end to end: it reads what is happening, decides the next step, acts across the tools a company already runs, and works toward an...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 3, 2026
> An AI agent for CRM sync and admin relay is an AI Agent System that keeps a company's CRM record current and routes the next action to the right person or system, without anyone driving each update...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 2, 2026
> An AI agent for client onboarding is an AI Agent System that turns a signed client into a running engagement: collecting intake information, provisioning access, scheduling kickoff, and chasing...
Kurt Fischman · May 29, 2026
An AI agent for lead qualification and routing is an AI Agent System that scores each inbound lead against a qualification framework and assigns the qualified ones to the right owner automatically....
Kurt Fischman · May 28, 2026
An AI agent for inbound lead response is a productized inbound workflow inside an AI Agent System for founder-led businesses where inbound volume has outgrown the team. The agent owns the path from...
Kurt Fischman · May 27, 2026
> An AI Agent System is a productized operational layer that owns a workflow end-to-end. A chatbot is a conversational interface that handles one turn of dialogue at a time. The difference is...
Kurt Fischman · May 27, 2026
An AI Agent System is the productized operational layer that wraps one or more AI agents, the automation underneath them, the governance around them, and the integrations into a company's real...
Kurt Fischman · May 26, 2026
An AI Agent System is the productized operational layer that wraps one or more AI agents, the governance that controls them, and the integrations that connect them to a company's real workflows....
Kurt Fischman · May 26, 2026
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