Field Notes.

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

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...

Kurt Fischman · Aug 24, 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 use case library indexes candidate workflows by the work they contain, which is a different artifact from the ranked listicle the category keeps publishing. Every list in this category...

Kurt Fischman · Aug 19, 2026

Nothing about a deployed chatbot upgrades into an agent, which is why the promotion usually arrives as a rebuild disguised as a rename. A chatbot is scoped to a conversation: it matches an incoming...

Kurt Fischman · Aug 18, 2026

Orchestration architecture describes the control layer that routes specialized agents through complex business workflows. Unlike single-agent systems that execute predefined scripts, orchestration...

Kurt Fischman · Aug 14, 2026

Handoffs are a discipline, not an accident. Specialized agents operate reliably in isolation, but handoffs fail in production when orchestration treats state ownership as implicit rather than...

Kurt Fischman · Aug 3, 2026

Agentification maturity is not measured by agent count. Start with one high-value workflow, establish guardrails and governance early, and transition ownership to the function that runs it.

Kurt Fischman · Jul 29, 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

Five words get sold as five products. They are one dial with a price on each notch, and the notch you can afford to buy is rarely the notch you can afford to supervise.

Kurt Fischman · Jul 25, 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 implementation playbook is the ordered sequence that moves an agent from a chosen use case to trusted, unsupervised production. Its seven stages (scope, score, design, build, evaluate,...

Kurt Fischman · Jun 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 governance framework is the set of runtime controls (scoped permissions, approval gates, exception queues, human review, audit trails, and a kill switch) plus the single accountable...

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 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