AI agent concepts, explained
Plain-English explainers for AI agent concepts: tool use, memory, orchestration, evaluation, safety, refusal policy, stopping conditions, and the rest of the agent stack. Written for non-researchers who need to make build vs buy calls.
AI Agent Evaluation Framework (Step by Step)
Most teams decide an agent is "ready" by trying it a few times and getting a good feeling. That is how a demo passes and production fails. An evaluation framework replaces the gut call with a repeatable process: you…
AI Agent Adoption Statistics (Updated Q3 2026)
If you want citable numbers on AI agent adoption, the honest starting point is this: the curve is steep, but the figures depend heavily on how each survey defines an "agent." The baseline is now near-universal.…
AI Agent A/B Testing Strategies That Don't Break Production
You changed the prompt, swapped the model, or added a tool, and now you want to know if the new agent is actually better. The honest answer is that you cannot know from a few hand-checked examples. Agent behavior…
AI Agent Builder Onboarding Guide: Build for Gravity
Becoming a Gravity builder means one clear thing: you build expert agents to Gravity's quality bar, and Gravity then runs those agents for users and pays you to build and maintain them. You are not setting up a…
How to Compare AI Agent Platform SLAs (Buyer Guide)
An SLA, a service level agreement, is a vendor's written promise about reliability. The headline number on the page is the part everyone reads. The part that actually decides what you are buying is the fine print:…
AI Agent Platform Free Tier Comparison (2026)
A free tier looks like a gift until you read the fine print. Most AI agent free plans are not really about giving you free work; they are a shaped sample, generous enough to hook you, capped tightly enough that real…
AI Agent Security Breaches: 2026 Roundup
The defining AI agent security story of 2026 is not a single named company breach. It is the maturing of a handful of attack classes that researchers and standards bodies documented through 2024 and 2025, now showing…
AI Agent Interoperability Standards 2026: MCP, A2A, WebMCP
In 2026, AI agents can finally talk to tools and to each other through open standards rather than bespoke glue code. Two protocols dominate the conversation: MCP (Model Context Protocol) for connecting an agent to…
AI Agent Failures: Lessons From 2026
AI agents fail in production in a small number of predictable ways, and the failure is almost never that the underlying model was too weak. It is that nobody built a guardrail, a test, a budget cap, or a human…
AI Agent Planning vs Execution: The Cognitive Architecture Split
Every agent has to answer two different questions. First, what should I do to reach this goal. Second, how do I actually do it. The first is planning. The second is execution. They look like one smooth motion from…
AI Agent Context Window Management: Memory and Context Strategies
An AI agent can only think about what fits in front of it. That "in front of it" is the context window: the span of text the model reads before deciding its next move. For a quick question it never fills up. For a…
AI Agent Composability Explained: Building Agents from Reusable Parts
A useful AI agent is rarely one giant instruction. Underneath, the good ones are assembled from smaller parts: a tool that reads a calendar, a tool that sends an email, a packaged routine for drafting a reply, a…
AI Agent Architecture Patterns Explained (ReAct, Plan-and-Execute, Reflection)
An AI agent is not one thing. Under the surface, the agent follows a control structure that decides how it reasons, when it calls tools, whether it checks its own work, and how it splits a job into smaller jobs. That…
AI Agents and the EU AI Act: A 2026 Compliance Guide
The EU AI Act is the first comprehensive AI law from a major jurisdiction, and in 2026 its obligations are no longer theoretical, they are phasing in on a fixed schedule. For anyone building or deploying AI agents…
Getting Stakeholder Buy-In for AI Agents (Without Hype)
I have pitched ideas that were technically better than the thing that got approved, and lost. The lesson stuck: the quality of an agent project rarely decides whether it gets funded. The quality of the buy-in does. A…
How to Plan an AI Agent Migration (From Zapier or Make)
Most teams do not migrate to AI agents because a vendor sold them on it. They migrate because a Zap broke on an edge case for the third time, or because a Make scenario grew into a 22-step chain that nobody dares…
AI Agent Implementation Timeline: Realistic Deployment Plans
"How long will this take?" is the first question every buyer asks and the one most vendors answer badly. The honest answer is that it depends on which of four very different things you are actually building. A…
How to Build an Executive Business Case for AI Agents
An executive does not read a business case to learn. They read it to decide whether to bet a slice of budget and reputation on you being right. Everything in the document either reduces their uncertainty or wastes…
AI Agent Zero-Downtime Updates: Hot-Swap Configs Without Stopping Runs
Agent updates fail badly when they are in-place. A prompt edit lands mid-run and the second half of a conversation no longer matches the first. A new model lands and a tool-call signature shifts. An index rebuild…
AI Agent ROI Calculator Guide: A Framework for Quantifying Value
ROI calculations for AI agents fall into two categories: defensible numbers backed by measurement, and made-up numbers backed by vendor claims. The CFO can tell the difference. This guide is the defensible version:…
AI Agent Proof of Concept Checklist: 25-Item Pilot Structure
An agent PoC succeeds when the go-no-go decision is obvious within 6 weeks. It fails when scope creeps, baseline is missing, or no one is responsible for the call. The 25-item checklist below covers what to confirm…
AI Agent Platform RFP Template: 60 Questions for Enterprise Procurement
This is the RFP template I send when buyers ask "give me the question list". Sixty questions across six sections, with a 1-to-5 scoring rubric and walk-away criteria. The template assumes enterprise procurement;…
AI Agent Pilot Program Guide: From PoC to Production in 90 Days
A PoC tells you the technology works. A pilot tells you the deployment works. Most teams skip the pilot because the PoC succeeded; then production hits real volume, real users, and real operational concerns, and the…
AI Agent Disaster Recovery Plan: Failover, Backup, RTO and RPO
Most agent platform outages I have seen were not catastrophic. A model provider had an incident; a region's vector store throttled; a deploy clobbered a prompt store; a tenant's run history was deleted by a buggy…
AI Agent SOC 2 Compliance: What Auditors Actually Check
SOC 2 is the buyer-facing artifact most enterprise prospects ask for before they let an AI agent platform near their data. It is also one of the most misunderstood. The report does not certify your AI; it attests…
AI Agent Procurement Checklist: 50 Questions Before You Sign
Most AI agent purchases go wrong at the sales-call stage, not after deployment. The team likes the demo, the vendor likes the deal, and a year later someone is paying for an unused seat tier with a 60-day notice…
AI Agent Multi-Tenant Isolation: Patterns That Pass Audit
The classic SaaS isolation problem is well understood: keep tenant data, queries, and identity separated through the request path. An agent platform adds two new surfaces that have to follow the same rules. The…
AI Agent Log Aggregation Patterns: Schemas, Sampling, Redaction
Agent logs grow fast. A single run easily writes dozens of structured events: orchestrator steps, model calls with input and output bodies, tool calls with payloads, retrieval queries with chunk text. Multiply by…
AI Agent Canary Releases: Percentage Rollout for Prompts and Models
The point of a canary is to learn things evals cannot. Evals run on a held-out set; production runs on whatever showed up today. Some regressions are visible only at production scale, on production traffic shapes,…
AI Agent Vendor Evaluation: A Scoring Framework
Picking the wrong AI agent vendor costs more than the subscription fee. Across The Standish Group's CHAOS research, software projects have never had a majority success rate: recent CHAOS data puts roughly 31% of…