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Agents are missing from most CIOs' architecture plans. In Accenture's new CIO Pulse survey of 300 senior tech leaders at companies above $1B in revenue, 61% expect significant transformation or a fundamental redesign of their enterprise architecture within three years. Just 27% have agentic architecture in scope, the lowest of the eight areas tested, while data, security and cloud architecture sit at 66% to 68%.

Accenture's advice is to put orchestration, access control and memory into the design now, because that costs significantly less than retrofitting. Add agents after sign-off and they have to work around access rules and data flows nobody planned for them, so the new system starts with Legacy Friction.

Before the design is signed, take one workflow you expect agents to run within a year, such as order-to-cash or S&OP, and walk it through the draft with the people who run it, asking:

How human-centric AI delivers business results

Your weekly briefing on tools that create competitive leverage

Arcade sits between agents and business systems, checks each action against your identity provider, and works with any model or framework. This week it launched Enterprise MCP Hosting, which puts custom tools in your own environment with one command, and it names Duracell as a production customer. A strong pick for Chief AI Officers, since agents act under each user's own permissions.

Obot is an MIT-licensed gateway you host yourself, setting which people, groups and agents can call which tools. Mastercard-owned BVNK went from zero to 80 servers and 200 regular users in about six months, Obot reported this week. Made for CIOs and Directors of IT who want code they can inspect.

Shanthi Shanmugam spent six years at Robinhood, where she saw clunky back-office systems make it hard to build trust with customers. Casap, which she co-founded, runs AI agents across the systems banks already use to investigate chargebacks and act on them. The company reports staff time per case falling from 45 minutes to one or two, and resolution from as long as 90 days to eight. Casap raised a $56M Series B last week, with Experian and Synchrony also investing.

In 1900 the average person on Earth could expect to live to about 32. Today it's more than 70, and that took about 125 years. Now an AI researcher who used to work at Google DeepMind thinks the 2030s could move further than all of that.

I don't know if he's right, and I don't think anyone does. But a faster decade won't pick its own direction, and neither will an AI program, so somebody has to decide what all that speed is for.

For me the answer is the Symbiocene: Nature, Humanity and Thinking Machines coexisting in a symbiotic balance. That probably sounds pretty far from your week if you run a plant, a fleet or a supply chain, but it shows up on the P&L first.

I wrote about how this week, plus the one test I'd add to every AI program review.

One book, handpicked from my conversations with friends, industry leaders, and tech innovators:

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais build on Conway's Law: organizations tend to design systems that copy how their teams communicate. In Team Topologies, they show how to shape teams around the flow of work, so the architecture you want has a chance of emerging. Read it before you sign off a redesign, then ask which team owns each agent handoff.

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