Agents

There is an important difference between artificial intelligence telling you what to do and being able to do it.

An assistant can draft an email.

An agent can send it.

It can point out that an opportunity has been stalled for days.

Or it can change its status, create the next task, and notify someone else.

That step turns a response into an action.

And it changes the question completely.

It is no longer enough to evaluate whether the recommendation appears correct.

We must also decide:

Which systems it can touch.

Which information it can access.

Which actions it can execute without asking.

When it must stop and request confirmation.

And which evidence remains so we can later understand what it did.

For years, we designed software assuming that a person would read the screen and press the button.

If an agent can now press it too, we need to define exactly which buttons it may press and under which conditions.

Not because the technology is less useful.

Because the more capacity we give it to act, the more important the boundary becomes.

Delegating a task can free up time.

Delegating authority without context, permissions, or traceability merely accelerates a risk that once moved slowly.