Your AI agent has access to everything it needs. That also means access to everything it shouldn't. Here's how to fix it.In this episode of Past the Pilot, Stefan Born (Co-Founder & CEO, Vertesia) and Jonny McFadden go deep on Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) — the access control model that makes AI agents actually safe to run in production.Most enterprise AI deployments rely on Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). It works fine for humans. It quietly falls apart for AI agents — because roles are static, and agents are dynamic. The result? A security gap that doesn't show up in your demo and only reveals itself when something goes wrong in production.Stefan and Jonny break down why ABAC is the missing piece, how it differs from RBAC at a philosophical level, and what Vertesia built to close the write-path gap that even most security-conscious teams miss.In this episode:🔑 Why RBAC breaks down when AI agents enter the picture 🔑 The "intern with a master key" problem — and why it's more common than you think 🔑 ABAC vs. RBAC: it's not just a feature upgrade, it's a different way of thinking about identity 🔑 The nurse analogy — same person, different context, different access 🔑 Why the write path was the critical missing piece in AI security 🔑 What it takes to go from 10 users to 10 agents without losing your mind (or your compliance posture) 🔑 Why Jonny thinks this should have been Episode 1⏱ Timestamps00— Introduction 02— Why access control matters more than ever for AI 06— RBAC: what it is and where it breaks 12— Enter ABAC: attributes, context, and dynamic access 18— The nurse analogy explained 24— The write-path gap: what it is and why it's dangerous 31— What Vertesia built with FEAT-060 38— Scaling from users to agents without operational chaos 44— "This should have been Episode 1" 48— Wrap-up and where to learn more🎙 About Past the PilotPast the Pilot is the show for enterprise teams building real AI — not demos, not prototypes, but production-grade systems that actually work. Hosted by Stefan Born and Jonny McFadden, each episode tackles one of the hard problems standing between your AI pilot and something you can actually ship.New episodes drop regularly. Subscribe so you don't miss one.🌐 Vertesia: https://vertesiahq.com 📄 Read the full blog post: https://medium.com/@sborn_63068/abacadabra-why-abac-is-the-missing-piece-that-gets-your-ai-past-the-pilot-77aec500be66 🔔 Subscribe to Past the Pilot

Anthropic can now watermark AI-generated text. Smart. One problem: edit a single sentence and the watermark disappears. Writing in pencil.

That's where Episode 13 starts — and it doesn't slow down from there.

Also make sure you read the blog here

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Jonny and I run a live workflow demo we built for a finance client. A chaotic client meeting goes in. Structured developer tickets, user stories, and epics come out — automatically, straight into ClickUp. But the part that changed the room? A Scope-of-Work validation node that reads the actual contract and flags every ticket: in scope or out. Scope creep caught before a single line of code gets written.

We also get into why pure LLM agents fail at scale — the 9-out-of-10 problem — and why process engines are the answer. Plus the governance layer that makes this safe for regulated industries: role-based access, audit trails, model switching. The stuff nobody talks about until it's too late.

But here's what I really want you to take from this episode. You're not building individual tools anymore. You have an agentic platform — a master tool — that lets you improve processes you've never been able to automate. Not just replace things. Improve them. Smarter. Faster. More auditable. More reliable.

Nobody gets excited about a pile of LEGO bricks. Show them the finished fire station and they get it immediately. That's what Past the Pilot is about. Not AI in the abstract. The fire station.

#PastThePilot #EnterpriseAI #AgenticAI #AIWatermarking #WorkflowAutomation #ScopeCreep #AIInProduction #DigitalTransformation #LLM #FutureOfWork

Your meeting filed its own tickets. Human approval required. Obviously.In Episode 12 of Past the Pilot we discuss how we turned a simple yet crucial workflow into an agentic process using the Vertesia platform, honest to our credo with all the rough edges showing.Read the blog here: https://medium.com/@sborn_63068/the-kitchen-is-open-lets-cook-some-workflow-d0ed96345b2cThe demo: a client workshop transcript goes in, structured project management tickets come out. You can have a simple agent do that sure, but what are the risks?? Believe your agent won't delete it all because you tell it to ask you? Nice try - unchecked and without a controlled process your LLM will go rogue eventually. In the enterprise world you need reliable, auditable architecture, not some governance prompt theater.Then Jonny made an argument I keep coming back to: platforms compound, tools don't. Every project builds on the last one. Foundation, walls, windows, house.We're building in public. It's messy. It's moving.Don't miss out when we continue this in the next episode!#PastThePilot #AIAgents #EnterpriseAI #AgentArchitecture #Vertesia #BuildingInPublic

One developer. One platform. Six enterprise tools — gone.
That's not a pitch. That's what Jonny McFadden built in one week. See how in Past the Pilot Episode 11
A full contract lifecycle management app — AI-powered review, multi-channel intake, obligations extraction, financial monitoring — built in days, not months. No stitching tools together. No six-figure vendor stack.
One platform beats a thousand tools. The shift is already here.

Make sure you also read the blog: https://lnkd.in/gsXX8qWX

We didn't have any agenda slides ready for Episode 10.So Vertesia built them on spot for us.

Make sure you also ready the blog: https://medium.com/@sborn_63068/open-heart-surgery-past-the-pilot-episode-10-three-features-that-change-the-game-f97732dca6d0

This is episode 10 and we are geeking out on the latest development pipeline features of Vertesia.

Grounded IDP — document intelligence that doesn't just extract data. It scores every field with a confidence level, shows you exactly where in the document it found the answer, and triggers an agentic review loop when it's not sure. That's not OCR. That's a system that knows what it doesn't know.

Collaborative Editing — paragraph-level. With a real diff view. And an explicit publish gate so nothing goes live until a human says so. Finally.

The Process Engine — you describe a workflow in plain language. The platform builds it. Half deterministic, half agentic. Backed by Temporal. It runs the things that need to run reliably, and thinks through the things that need judgment.And then there's the one Jonny called "Goddamn" on air.

The Agentic Content Pipeline. Three agents. One loop.We built this on Vertesia. With Vertesia.It's not a demo. It's how we actually work.We're not eating our own dog food. We're running a restaurant on it.#VertesiaAI #PastThePilot #AIAgents #DocumentIntelligence #EnterpriseAI #AgenticAI #ContentAutomation #BuildInPublic #ProductDemo #AIInProduction

Welcome to our first episode of "PAST THE PILOT". This week, I sat down with my colleague Jonny to discuss how agentic AI has transformed our personal way of working at Vertesia.The insights blew our minds:• Agents that self-correct and recover autonomously• Weeks of work → minutes• Self-improving systems that optimize themselves• Everyone becomes a manager of AI agentsWatch our full conversation 👇Read the deep dive blog: https://hubs.la/Q049zHBV0