tech
Seven questions decide whether your AI agent ships. Most teams can answer two.
A new class of company has taken up position around the agent economy, and they are the ones who decide whether your agent gets to ship. They do not build models. They are not on most teams' AI stack roadmap. But every serious production agent has to pass through them, and most agent proposals on a CIO's desk right now have no answer for what those companies are about to ask.
TL;DR
- The control layer dictates an AI model's ability to act in the real world.
- Companies like Cloudflare, Stripe, Okta, Auth0, and Datadog are providing the infrastructure for agent control.
- These companies answer fundamental questions about agent behavior: where it lives, what it remembers, who it acts for, when it needs approval, what it can spend, and who can stop it.
- The "boring layer" of control infrastructure is where significant power is consolidating in the agent economy.
- A seven-row control map and kill switch implementation across multiple layers are crucial for production-ready agents.