Most agentic pilots don't die from bad engineering. They die because nobody wrote down what "working" means.

In this episode, Alex and Jordan take the product line: the agent is a product, not a project. It has users, an owner, and a definition of done.

In this episode:

- The product brief: one paragraph answering four questions before anyone maps a process

- Users are plural: the end user, the supervisor, and the auditor, and why all three belong in the brief

- Define what good looks like first: accuracy, speed, and escalation rate, picked while you're still honest

- Version-one discipline: the most powerful list in the brief is what the agent will not do yet

- Name one owner: every agentic product that survives has one, and every one that dies was owned by a slide

- Then dive into the process anyway: end to end across the silos, because the agent inherits whatever you don't map

The Monday move: take one use case and write the one-paragraph product brief. Who uses it, what job it does for them, how you'll know it worked, and what's not in version one. Then trace the process it sits on, end to end. If you can't do both on one page, you've found your first problem.

Before you listen to a single episode, listen to this. Two minutes on what The Agentic Enterprise is, who it's for, and the playbook we're building together.

In this episode:

• Why this series exists: cutting through the AI agent hype for practitioners
• The gap it lives in: what works in a demo versus what survives in production
• Why practitioners: the people who feel the consequences when agents fail
• Where it comes from: more than twenty years in the field, hundreds of systems built across consulting, technology, and banking
• The season goal: a complete practitioner's playbook, one episode and one Monday move at a time

Your first move: start with Episode 1, "Beyond the Demo" — it begins with the most abused word in the industry right now: AI Agent.

Where do the agents go in — and where do the humans stay in charge? Alex and Jordan lay out the map-before-you-build discipline for placing every step before a single bot is built.

In this episode:

Start with evidence: process mining and system logs — if the map doesn't surprise you, you mapped the brochure

Walk the real process: documented versus real, with the SMEs who live in it

Decision logic: deterministic gets encoded as workflow; interpretive gets AI assisting the human first

Supervision and risk: the agent proposes, a person disposes — with risk and legal as co-designers

Map as contract: every agent insertion point gets a test

The Monday move: pick one process, map the real current state with two people who do it daily, then mark three things on the future state: where agents go in, where humans stay in charge, and what risk and legal need to see. One page.

Which processes deserve an agent — and which should stay deterministic? Alex and Jordan lay out a four-dimension scorecard (value, variability, risk, feedback) for making that call honestly.

In this episode:

• Price the counterfactual: the business case starts with what the work costs today
• Variability: why invoice processing breaks rule-based systems — the variability never stops
• Risk: supervised agents, the agent proposes and the human disposes
• Feedback: the quiet pilot-killer — no verifiable outcome means no trust
• Three processes scored live: complaint triage, financial close, contract review
• The Monday move: score your top three candidates. Under 12 stays deterministic, above 15 makes the shortlist

Everyone's demo looks agentic. Almost none of them survive production. In this opening brief, Alex and Jordan ask what makes a system genuinely agentic — goal pursuit, tool use, adaptation to feedback, bounded autonomy — and when a simpler workflow is actually the smarter choice.

You'll get the agency test: four questions to run any "agentic" project through before you commit, the real cost of agency in tokens, latency, and operations, and the Monday-morning move — start deterministic, add agency only where variability hurts.

Hosts: Alex and Jordan. Content created by Agentic Practitioner.