A Primer on Agents

If you’ve been following my posts on AI—from the jagged frontier to prompts, workflows, and agents—you’ve seen me work through the same question from different angles: how do we think clearly about AI when the ground keeps shifting?

Agents have made that question harder. Every vendor has one. Every demo looks magical. Every definition seems to contradict the last one you heard. And if you’re a business leader trying to make actual decisions—build or buy, pilot or wait, invest or hold—the noise-to-signal ratio is brutal.

So I wrote something longer.

The Business of AI Agents: A Primer for Business Leaders is my attempt to cut through that noise. Not a technical manual. Not a vendor comparison. Not a hype piece. Just a structured way to think clearly about a confusing category.

Here’s what it covers:

Part I: Market Context. Why AI agents are confusing by default, how we got here, and what’s at stake if you get it wrong. Spoiler: there’s a lot of motivated reasoning floating around.

Part II: Resolving Semantic Uncertainty. What an agent actually is—with a definition you can use to call out fuzzy claims. Where chatbots end and agents begin. The autonomy spectrum from assistive tools to genuinely autonomous systems.

Part III: Resolving Technical Uncertainty. Why LLMs look like they reason but don’t. The core barriers: learning, memory, retrieval. Why demos collapse in production. And why human-in-the-loop is a feature, not a failure.

Part IV: Resolving Economic Uncertainty. Who the players are and what they’re selling. Where ROI is currently provable. Build vs buy vs wait decision frameworks. How to value AI pilots using real options thinking—because uncertainty isn’t a bug, it’s the whole game.

Part V: Futures and Boundaries. What agents can actually do today. What remains science fiction. Why timelines are consistently overstated. Calibrated foresight, not predictions.

If you’ve read my posts on AI strategy, you’ll recognize the underlying logic: align means with ends. Treat AI as a general-purpose technology, not a magical solution. Start with measurable outcomes, not impressive demos. The primer extends that thinking specifically to agents—where the confusion is thickest and the stakes are climbing.

The goal is simple: after reading it, you should be able to walk into any conversation about AI agents and know which questions to ask. You should be able to spot the gaps between what vendors claim and what the technology actually does. And you should have a framework for making decisions in what is currently a High Entropy Market

You can download it here: The Business of AI Agents: A Primer for Business Leaders

Related posts: