Principle 01
Agency is an architectural property
Autonomous behavior cannot be bolted on. Systems must be designed with agency as a structural constraint — defining boundaries, permissions, escalation paths, and fallback behaviors from the start. An agent without architectural guardrails is a liability. An agent within a well-designed system is a force multiplier.
Principle 02
Context must be infrastructure
Enterprise decisions depend on information scattered across systems, teams, timelines, and formats. For AI agents to operate at the executive level, context cannot be an afterthought. It must be indexed, versioned, permissioned, and accessible — treated with the same rigor as compute or storage.
Principle 03
Composability over monoliths
The agentic enterprise is not a single platform. It is a composable system of specialized agents, shared context layers, and orchestration protocols. Each component should be independently deployable, testable, and replaceable. Lock-in is the enemy of architectural longevity.
Principle 04
Auditability is non-negotiable
Autonomous systems that cannot be audited cannot be trusted. Every action taken by an agent — every decision, delegation, and data access — must produce a traceable record. Transparency is not a feature. It is a prerequisite for enterprise adoption.
Principle 05
Data integrity precedes intelligence
No model, no matter how capable, produces reliable output from unreliable data. Enterprise AI architecture must prioritize data integrity at the foundation — clean pipelines, validated sources, version-controlled schemas, and clear provenance chains. Intelligence without integrity is noise.
Principle 06
Build for the long horizon
The agentic enterprise is a decade-long architectural shift, not a quarterly initiative. Decisions must account for model evolution, regulatory change, organizational maturity, and infrastructure migration. Build systems that adapt — not systems that need to be replaced.