I Asked Seven Questions About Our AI Agent. We Failed Five.

Podcast/Substack · Article

• Seven control-layer questions that determine whether an AI agent ships to production: where does it reside, what state does it remember, who does it act for, when is approval required, what are spending limits, what’s the kill switch, and what audit trail exists. Most teams can answer two.
• The “control layer” is the infrastructure sitting between models and production systems — runtime, identity, payments, state, approval flows. Companies like Cloudflare, Okta, Stripe, and Datadog are becoming AI-era gatekeepers by providing this missing governance layer.
• Practical diagnostic: run the seven questions on any agent proposal before committing to build. If five fail, the agent isn’t ready — the infrastructure isn’t ready.
• Cross-column note: the control layer framework maps directly to the Claude Compliance API launch (May 21) — Anthropic is providing the governance layer for Claude Enterprise that Nate identifies as the critical missing piece for production agents.