Field Notes.

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...

Kurt Fischman · Aug 31, 2026

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...

Kurt Fischman · 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...

Kurt Fischman · Aug 30, 2026

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...

Kurt Fischman · Aug 29, 2026

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...

Kurt Fischman · Aug 19, 2026

An AI agent maturity model for a business team is a staged framework that ranks how much work a business can safely hand to agents, and where along that path it currently sits. Most models split the...

Kurt Fischman · Jul 27, 2026

Agent readiness is the business case for AI agents restated as a production question: can you afford the oversight, not can you afford the license. Most guides answer a different question. They walk...

Kurt Fischman · Jul 27, 2026

Seventy-five terms sounds like a lot until you notice most of them are selling you something. The market for AI agents for business is arranged as a shopping problem: ranked lists, best-of grids, a...

Kurt Fischman · Jul 22, 2026

AI agents for business get sold as a shopping problem, and the whole market is arranged to keep it that way: ranked listicles, best-of grids, a leaderboard of tools. That framing hides the actual...

Kurt Fischman · Jul 22, 2026

> An AI agent risk assessment framework scores a single agent workflow on five factors (autonomy, reversibility, data sensitivity, customer impact, and auditability) to decide how much oversight it...

Kurt Fischman · Jun 22, 2026

> AI agent security is the practice of capping what a deployed agent, and anyone who hijacks it, can do to the systems and data it touches. The agent's defining flaw, that it cannot tell data from...

Kurt Fischman · Jun 22, 2026

> 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. We sort them into five...

Kurt Fischman · Jun 11, 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

> 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

> 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 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 governance that controls them, and the integrations that connect them to a company's real workflows....

Kurt Fischman · May 26, 2026