AI agent concepts, explained
Plain-English explainers for AI agent concepts: tool use, memory, orchestration, evaluation, safety, refusal policy, stopping conditions, and the rest of the agent stack. Written for non-researchers who need to make build vs buy calls.
AI Agent Trends 2026: Eight Shifts to Watch
Eight months into 2026 and the agent market has visibly matured in three ways the 2025 forecasts mostly missed: pricing structures are converging, buyer procurement bars have hardened, and the marketing language of…
AI Agent Failure Modes: The Eight Ways Autonomous Agents Break
"Why did the agent fail?" is the question every operator asks the first time an agent misses. The honest answer is almost always one of eight things, and the eight things are different enough that lumping them…
AI Agent Evaluation Metrics: What "Good" Actually Looks Like
"Is the agent any good?" is the question every buyer asks and almost no buyer can answer with a number. The shortage of good answers is not because the metrics are unknown; it is because most vendors publish one or…
AI Agent Benchmarks 2026: The 5 That Actually Matter
The benchmark landscape for AI agents in 2026 is busier than the buyer landscape can absorb. Five benchmarks dominate the conversation: GAIA, SWE-bench, AgentBench, BFCL, and ToolBench. Each measures something…
AI Agent Prompt vs LLM Prompt: 5 Real Differences (2026)
The first time someone writes an agent prompt the way they write an LLM prompt, the agent breaks within the first hour of running. Not because the prompt is wrong in a literal sense; it is just shaped for the wrong…
AI Agent for Weekly KPI Reports From Your Stack
The Monday morning KPI summary is the report that should be automated and almost never is. The data exists. The query exists. The template exists. What is missing is the half-hour every Monday that somebody spends…
AI Agent Tool Use Explained: Function Calling, Selection, Recovery
Tool use is what separates a chatbot from an agent. A chatbot talks about sending the email; an agent calls the email-send tool and watches for the result. The mechanism under tool use is function calling,…
AI Agent Reasoning vs Pattern Matching: What Agents Actually Do
Whether AI agents "reason" is a debate that often misses the practical point. The practical point is that different reasoning patterns produce different reliability characteristics on different tasks.…
AI Agent Orchestration Explained: Planner, Executor, Evaluator
Orchestration is the runtime layer that coordinates multi-step agent execution. The LLM thinks; the orchestration decides which step runs next, retries when something fails, evaluates whether the goal is met, and…
AI Agent Myths and Reality: 8 Claims, Debunked
The discourse around AI agents in 2026 carries a lot of myths. Some come from vendor marketing; some come from social-media hot takes; a few are honest misunderstandings of fast-moving terminology. This post takes…
AI Agent Memory Explained: Short-Term, Long-Term, Episodic
AI agent memory is not one thing. It is three layers, each handling a different timescale and a different question. Short-term memory holds what is happening right now. Long-term memory holds what the agent might…
AI Agent Glossary for Buyers: 28 Terms, Defined
Procurement conversations about AI agents fail when buyer and vendor use the same words to mean different things. This glossary defines 28 terms that show up in agent procurement, organised by category. Each entry…