- Essays··11 min read
The agentic AI carve-out: why US and EU regulators are writing rules neither can enforce
The Federal Reserve placed agentic AI outside its model-risk framework in April; the European Commission issued transparency guidance two weeks before enforcement began in August. For banks operating across both jurisdictions, the collision is immediate and the governance gap is real. The first regulatory action will not come for deploying these systems badly — it will come for failing to document why deployment was safe at all.
agentic-aifinancial-regulationmodel-riskeu-ai-actRead - Essays··7 min read
Forty Per Cent Escalated to the Board: The AI Invoice Surprise of 2026
Sixty-two per cent of organisations say an unexpected AI cost materially altered a business decision this year; 40% required board-level escalation — a charge that exceeded delegated authority, not infrastructure variance. The overruns trace to a structural mismatch: 2025 budgets set before agentic workloads existed at scale, now compounding as orphaned agents consume tokens with no owner and no attributed business outcome.
ai-cost-governancefinopsagentic-aitechnical-debtRead - Essays··9 min read
The model-risk carve-out: why US banks got a temporary reprieve from agentic AI oversight while EU lenders face their deadline
SR 26-2, the Federal Reserve's updated model-risk guidance, carves generative and agentic AI out of supervisory scope — not as relief, but as a placeholder while regulators decide what replaces SR 11-7. The EU AI Act's high-risk obligations arrive on 2 August. For multinational banks, the result is a structural supervision paradox: US headquarters has time but no clarity; European subsidiaries have clarity but no time.
model-riskagentic-aieu-ai-actbanking-regulationRead - Essays··11 min read
Sunday Essay — Singapore's Rulebook for Agentic Finance
Singapore's Monetary Authority has published the first regulator-authored document to name, at runtime, the exact control gates between an autonomous agent's proposed action and a live ledger. SAFR's policy engine, runtime validator, and append-only audit ledger are not aspirational — they map onto what DBS and Grab Finance already run in production. For model risk officers from Jakarta to Frankfurt, this is the document to read before the vendor decks arrive.
agentic-aifinancial-regulationmodel-riskmas-singaporeRead - Essays··7 min read
Both regulators blinked — and the gap sits exactly where the agents live
Two of the most consequential financial supervisors stepped back from AI oversight inside eight weeks — and the retreat lands precisely on the generative and agentic systems that worry me most. The regulators blinked. The risk didn't even slow down.
model-riskai-regulationeu-ai-actagentic-aiRead - Essays··7 min read
The Slop Debt Bill Is Due, and Nobody on the Org Chart Owns It
Slop debt is the space between what you pay for AI and what you do not get. The bill is in the inbox; the question is whether the org chart catches up before the auditor does.
slop-debtfinopsagentic-aiai-governanceRead - Essays··8 min read
Two Regulators Blinked. The Agent Fleet Did Not.
Two regulators blinked on the AI question in a single five-month window. The largest banks did not stop deploying. The gap between those two facts is the most important live risk in financial services right now.
model-risk-managementagentic-aibank-supervisioneu-ai-actRead - Essays··80 min read
Software 3.0 — Age of Hyper Automation
Intelligence and energy are deflating toward zero, and automation is crossing from the screen into the world — the firm, the laboratory, the factory and the launch pad remade at once. From Rosenblatt's perceptron to agents that write themselves, an instrument-by-instrument map of the most plausible breathtaking future, to 2040.
software-3.0hyper-automationfuturismkurzweilRead - Essays··8 min read
13%: the upskilling number that quietly breaks the agentic AI business case
Only 13% of employees can actually work with the agents their firms are deploying. The centaur the whole thesis assumes is mostly a novice holding the reins — and AI is demolishing the training ground that produced the experts.
agentic-aiworkforce-upskillingdeliberate-practiceapprenticeshipRead - Essays··7 min read
The Agentic AI Gap: SR 11-7 Is Dead, the EU AI Act Is Late, and Banks Are Shipping Agents Anyway
Three jurisdictions, zero frameworks designed for the agents already in production. The governance gap between SR 26-2's carve-out, the EU's sixteen-month delay, and the UK's 'further work' is where the first enforcement action will land.
agentic-aimodel-risk-managementeu-ai-actbanking-regulationRead - Essays··25 min read
Companies Are Workflows. The Audit Just Got Cheap.
Every enterprise is a graph of algorithms — and the bottleneck is the edges between nodes, not the nodes themselves. Private equity, with its hold-period clock and portfolio compounding, will be the first buyer class to operationalise agentic workflow audits at industrial scale.
agentic-aiprivate-equityworkflow-auditvendor-sprawlRead - Essays··7 min read
The Death of Old SaaS Is Not a Victory Speech — It's a Distress Signal
Three rounds of layoffs, each with a grander narrative. The denominator keeps shrinking. ClickUp's 100x org is not strategy — it is a confused product reaching for an AI alibi while the entire per-seat pricing model fractures beneath it.
saas-collapseagentic-aienterprise-softwarepricing-modelsRead - Essays··9 min read
The Agent Stack Just Became a Standard — And Most Enterprises Aren't Ready
MCP and A2A now sit under the Linux Foundation, adoption is measured in billions of tool calls, and the standards war is over. The harder question — whether enterprises can govern what runs on those protocols — has barely been asked.
agentic-aimodel-context-protocolagent-to-agent-protocolenterprise-governanceRead