Applied AI
39 articles · page 2 of 5
Don’t Give the Agent a Job Title: Give It a Queue, a Budget, and an Escalation Rule
Anthropomorphic “digital worker” language leads teams toward brittle automation. Reliable applied AI starts by redesigning the flow of work around bounded tasks, observable state, and explicit authority.
A Useful AI Memory Must Also Know How to Forget
Persistent assistants will not earn trust by remembering everything. The better product is a negotiated memory: visible, scoped, editable, and designed to lose information on purpose.
An AI Agent’s Most Important Interface Is the Permission Boundary
The central design problem for workplace agents is not how much they can do, but how clearly they negotiate authority. Products that make actions inspectable, reversible, and narrowly scoped will earn more autonomy over time.
Give the Agent a Reverse Gear Before Giving It More Authority
Useful agents do not need theatrical independence; they need bounded permissions, inspectable state, and cheap recovery from mistakes. Reversibility is the engineering property that turns uncertain model behavior into deployable software.
AI Code Needs a Chain of Custody, Not a Vibe Check
The dangerous question is no longer whether generated code looks plausible. Engineering teams need to know what evidence justifies every change and who owns the uncertainty that remains.
The Best AI Workflow Starts Where Automation Gives Up
Production AI is defined by its exception path, not its happiest demo. Designing the handoff to a human is the core product problem, not an admission of failure.
The Best AI Agent Interface Is an Undo Button With a Memory
Permission dialogs are not enough for software that can act across business systems. Trustworthy agents need staged execution, visible state changes, and recovery designed into every consequential workflow.
The Best AI Agent Interface Is a Well-Placed Gate
Agent products are racing to remove friction, but consequential automation needs deliberate pauses. The strongest interfaces distinguish harmless exploration from actions that spend money, alter records, or speak for a person.
Stop Shipping Chatbots: The Useful AI Interface Is an Inspectable Chain of Work
Chat is a convenient doorway into AI, but it is a poor control surface for consequential automation. The better product pattern exposes plans, evidence, actions, and approval boundaries as first-class objects.