The Automat

Field notes from the bleeding edge of business

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How to Tell if a Process Is Ready to Hand to an Agent

Drew Donaldson

Published on: 25/07/2026

An agent readiness assessment scores a process on five signals before you automate it: structure, decision rules, data access, error cost, and volume. Here is the rubric.

Agentic AI & The Harness Races

Making Agents Reliable Enough to Leave Alone

Drew Donaldson

Published on: 07/07/2026

Moving an AI agent from impressive demo to running unsupervised is a measurement problem, not a model one. Here is what eval harnesses, guardrails, and observability actually take.

Agentic AI & The Harness Races

Seven Operations Jobs That Are Quietly Becoming Agentic

Automata Intel

Published on: 18/06/2026

Agentic AI for operations already runs invoices, reconciliation, and reporting. Seven back-office jobs going agentic, and the human checkpoint each keeps.

Agentic AI & The Harness Races