We have written before that generative AI crossed the chasm and agents have not yet. Summit week is going to make agents feel like they already have. The room will be loud about autonomy. It is worth keeping a clear head about what has to be true for that autonomy to work in an enterprise.
The demo and the deployment are different problems
An agent in a keynote operates in a clean environment built for the keynote. An agent in your business operates on the data you have duplicated across systems, loosely governed, with semantics that live in three analysts’ heads and nowhere in the catalog. The capability on stage is real. The gap between that capability and your environment is also real, and it is not a model problem. It is a data foundation problem.
The framework is the easy part
Whichever framework wins the keynote, you will still be running an agent on the data you have. The framework is the part you can swap in an afternoon. The foundation underneath it is the part that takes real work, and it is the part that decides whether the agent does anything useful. Clean semantics, so the agent knows what a field means. Governed access, so it can be trusted with the data. Observability, so you know when it is wrong. Connected systems, so it can act across the workflow rather than inside one tool.
All of it determines whether anything announced on a main stage works for you.
The right question to ask every vendor this week
Walk the expo floor and the pitch will be capability. The question that cuts through it is simple: what does this require my data to look like before it works? A vendor who has a clear answer understands enterprise reality. A vendor who waves the question away is selling you a pilot, not a deployment.
The Bottom Line
Spend the week getting excited about what agents can do. Spend the flight home being honest about whether your foundation is ready for them. The teams that get the most out of agents will be the ones who treated the data layer as the strategy and the agent as the easy part. If you want help figuring out where your foundation stands, that is the work we do.
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