Agentic Startups: The Opportunity Principles
February 23, 2026
The global economy is entering a structural transition as significant as the industrial revolution or the rise of the internet. The catalyst is not merely artificial intelligence, but a specific architectural shift within it: the rise of agentic systems—software that does not simply respond, but acts. These systems interpret goals, plan sequences of actions, execute tasks across tools and platforms, verify outcomes, and adapt continuously. This transformation marks the moment when intelligence becomes operational capacity.
For decades, software has primarily functioned as an interface—organizing information, accelerating workflows, and assisting human decision-makers. The agentic era replaces this assistive paradigm with an executive one. Software is no longer limited to presenting options; it increasingly assumes responsibility for completing jobs. In doing so, it redefines what organizations buy, what employees do, and where economic value concentrates.
This shift moves the unit of economic value from access to capability toward measurable outcomes. Companies no longer pay for software features; they pay for resolved customer tickets, automated compliance processes, optimized supply chains, and continuously balanced risk portfolios. The contractual relationship between vendor and enterprise changes, as performance, reliability, and verification become central economic variables.
At the architectural level, the agentic paradigm replaces static workflows with dynamic control loops. Systems operate continuously rather than periodically, integrating real-time data, planning actions, executing through tools, and validating results. What was once a quarterly review becomes a real-time adaptive process. Organizations increasingly resemble cybernetic systems—self-monitoring and self-correcting.
As autonomy scales, governance transforms from documentation into infrastructure. Permissioning, observability, auditability, and evaluation frameworks become embedded technical requirements rather than compliance checkboxes. Trust becomes a product category. The companies that master safe and verifiable execution gain durable competitive advantage.
Simultaneously, the marginal cost of personalization collapses. Agents generate individualized experiences at machine scale—across commerce, finance, healthcare, education, and public services. Markets shift from demographic segmentation to contextual, moment-by-moment optimization. Personalization ceases to be a premium service and becomes the default.
Perhaps most profoundly, the economy begins to industrialize agency itself. Autonomous systems become a new factor of production—a silicon workforce that can be orchestrated, specialized, supervised, and scaled. Humans increasingly transition from performing repetitive execution to managing and supervising networks of intelligent agents.
These twelve principles define not a feature upgrade but a systemic reconfiguration of economic structure. The agentic era is not about better chat interfaces. It is about embedding autonomous decision-and-action loops into the fabric of organizations. The question is no longer whether AI will augment work, but how deeply it will reprogram the architecture of value creation itself.
The unit of value shifts from “tool access” to “job completed.” Instead of selling features or seats, companies sell measurable outcomes—tickets resolved, invoices collected, fraud prevented. Software no longer assists humans; it assumes responsibility for execution.
Entire SaaS categories become replaceable by outcome-based systems. Vendors who guarantee results can:
Price on performance
Capture more economic upside
Absorb operational complexity from customers
This restructures enterprise budgets from software spend to labor replacement or revenue acceleration spend.
Measurable KPIs tied to actions
Verification mechanisms (state-based, not text-based)
Clear risk-sharing contracts
Reliable end-to-end workflow execution
AI moves from responding to prompts to executing goal-directed loops. The system plans tasks, calls tools, checks outcomes, and iterates autonomously until objectives are met.
Autonomy compresses multi-person workflows into machine loops. Organizations gain:
Speed (machine-time decision cycles)
Scale (parallel execution)
Labor compression (fewer humans per workflow)
Entire coordination overhead disappears.
Structured planning architecture
Reliable tool invocation
Iterative verification logic
Escalation mechanisms when confidence drops
Language models stop being generators and become operators. Tool APIs allow agents to alter databases, send payments, deploy code, update CRMs.
The economic jump happens when language produces state change. That enables:
Automation of cross-system workflows
Enterprise-wide orchestration
Direct revenue or cost impact
Without tool-use, there is no durable automation moat.
Structured, schema-defined tool interfaces
Permissioned access control
Observability of tool calls
Error recovery and retries
Automation expands from isolated workflows to entire value chains spanning departments. Agents traverse systems and functions seamlessly.
End-to-end automation multiplies ROI because:
Bottlenecks shift from steps to chains
Coordination costs collapse
Entire operational layers become programmable
Value scales superlinearly when chains are optimized.
Cross-system orchestration layer
Process intelligence visibility
Exception handling across boundaries
Governance embedded in flows
Periodic decision cycles (quarterly planning, weekly reviews) are replaced by continuous real-time loops. Agents monitor, act, verify—constantly.
Continuous optimization:
Reduces latency of correction
Minimizes compounding inefficiencies
Enables real-time adaptation
Organizations become adaptive systems rather than calendar-driven structures.
Streaming event infrastructure
Threshold-triggered policies
Autonomous action constraints
Rollback and override systems
Instead of one assistant, organizations deploy networks of specialized agents—planner, executor, verifier, auditor—coordinated by orchestration layers.
Specialization increases:
Accuracy
Parallel throughput
Composability
This mirrors how human organizations scale—through division of labor.
Clear role definitions per agent
Central orchestration logic
Shared but scoped memory
Agent-to-agent communication protocols
Governance shifts from documents and reviews to embedded technical systems. Agents require runtime guardrails, identity, observability, and audit logs.
Trust becomes monetizable. Companies that can:
Prove reliability
Demonstrate compliance
Provide real-time oversight
Win enterprise adoption.
Fine-grained authorization
Continuous evaluation harnesses
Traceability of decisions
Human-in-the-loop escalation
Agents become digital labor units. Organizations manage capacity, performance, and throughput of autonomous systems like they manage employees.
Labor cost structures shift dramatically:
24/7 operation
Near-zero marginal scaling
Instant specialization
Entire departments can be restructured around hybrid teams.
Agent role definitions
Performance monitoring
Capacity allocation systems
Quality assurance and supervision
Personalization becomes computationally cheap. Agents generate and adapt individualized interactions in real time.
Markets shift from segmentation to:
Individualized pricing
Custom journeys
Continuous contextual optimization
Customer experience becomes algorithmic rather than campaign-based.
Unified data infrastructure
Real-time intent detection
Content generation pipelines
Feedback loops tied to outcomes
Data is no longer passive insight; it becomes trigger-driven execution fuel. Signals directly cause actions.
Organizations transform from report-driven to control-system-driven.
Reduced decision lag
Automated corrections
Higher system efficiency
Value emerges from constant micro-adjustments.
Clean structured data
Event-driven architectures
Reliable state verification
Observability across systems
Competitive advantage moves from UI and features to:
Integration depth
Distribution embedding
Execution reliability
Moats become structural rather than cosmetic.
Companies embedded deeply into operational systems gain:
High switching costs
Data gravity
Execution defensibility
Robust integration layers
Tool optimization
Evaluation and rollback systems
Deep enterprise embedding
The economy industrializes agency—the ability to interpret, decide, and act autonomously at scale.
This is equivalent to industrializing labor in the 19th century or computation in the 20th:
Exponential scaling of decision execution
Programmable organizational intelligence
New macro-markets built on autonomous capacity
Scalable orchestration infrastructure
Governance frameworks
Evaluation and feedback loops
Human supervisory layers
Traditional software monetizes access: seats, licenses, modules, usage. Agentic software makes a different promise: a completed job. That changes the entire economic contract between vendor and buyer, because the vendor is no longer selling tools that might help; they’re effectively selling labor output (“tickets resolved”, “calls handled”, “returns processed”, “collections completed”).
This is why serious pricing thinkers are explicitly describing an “agentic pricing era” where outcome-based and job-completed pricing becomes viable specifically because agents can execute workflows end-to-end. BCG frames this as Outcome-Based: Jobs Completed—payment only after predefined jobs are successfully executed.
For outcomes to replace software as the unit of value, agentic systems need:
Workflow ownership: the agent must take responsibility for the full chain (not just drafting text).
Verification hooks: there must be a way to confirm completion (ticket closed, refund issued, appointment booked).
Risk transfer: vendor takes performance risk; buyer pays for verified value (AWS notes outcome models shift financial risk toward the provider while aligning incentives).
Measurable KPI mapping: outcomes tie to metrics customers already track (e.g., meetings booked, invoices collected, fraud blocked).
Operational discipline: agents must be reliable enough in production that “pay-per-job” doesn’t implode economically for the vendor.
This isn’t just a conceptual argument; there’s a pricing literature and operator guidance converging on it:
BCG explicitly describes outcome-based pricing for AI agents as payment after “jobs completed,” highlighting that it becomes attractive when vendors can guarantee measurable value.
AWS Prescriptive Guidance makes the same point from an economics angle: modern outcome-based models tie payments to measurable results and align incentives while shifting risk.
Industry playbooks (Chargebee, etc.) are now treating “selling intelligence” and outcome models as a major theme of 2026 monetization strategy—because agents are capable of executing work, not just generating content.
Even secondary analyses of agent pricing (and agentic AI economics guides) repeatedly highlight the same pivot: agents are different because they assume workflows rather than provide tools.
So the “verification” here is: multiple independent, reputable operator/pricing sources are explicitly re-centering monetization around outcomes because agents can complete multi-step jobs.
Customer Experience / Contact Centers
Outcomes are naturally measurable (resolution rate, time-to-resolution, containment, refunds processed). This makes it a first domain where agentic ROI is legible and therefore priceable.
Fintech / Regulated Customer Operations
The “job” is concrete (lost card workflow, fraud checks, account actions) and compliance constraints force clear definitions and audit trails—perfect for “job completed” contracts.
Developer Security / AppSec Remediation
Security outcomes can be framed as “vulnerabilities fixed”, “risks reduced”, “issues prevented from shipping.” It’s inherently outcome/KPI-driven, so tools that actually prevent or remediate become monetizable by result.
Parloa (Germany) — agentic CX where ROI is measurable
Reuters reports Parloa’s platform automates customer service tasks (tracking, returns) and cites strong revenue traction and major enterprise customers; that’s exactly the environment where “pay per resolved interaction” becomes natural.
PolyAI (UK) — enterprise voice agents, scalable resolution outcomes
PolyAI’s Series D announcement and coverage frame it as enterprise conversational/voice AI—again, a space where containment and resolution outcomes are quantifiable and can anchor pricing.
Gradient Labs (UK) — customer ops agent purpose-built for regulated finance
Their own positioning is explicit: an AI agent that resolves complex support end-to-end for financial services; Vestbee and others cover funding and regulated focus—ideal conditions for outcome contracts (quality + compliance + completion).
The radical step is moving from AI as a response generator to AI as an autonomous operator. The economic significance is that autonomy enables:
compression of multi-person workflows into agent loops
continuous execution (agents don’t sleep)
scale without proportional headcount
Multiple definitions and “explainer” sources describe agentic AI as systems that can reason about goals, plan sequences of actions, execute them, and adapt—i.e., autonomy is defined as a loop, not a chat response.
A practical goal-driven agent needs:
Goal interpretation: convert vague goals into explicit success criteria
Planning: decompose into sub-tasks with dependencies and ordering
Action execution: call tools / APIs / environments to do work
Verification: check whether the world-state changed as desired
Iteration: revise plan when steps fail or reality deviates
This “agent loop” framing is common in agentic AI explanations; it’s how autonomy is operationalized.
We can verify goal-driven autonomy at two levels:
(A) Engineering-level verification (how builders are told to implement it)
Anthropic’s engineering guidance literally recommends agentic loops (e.g., while-loops alternating model calls and tool calls) as a practical pattern. That’s direct evidence that “autonomy” is implemented as iterative loops, not one-shot completion.
(B) Definition-level verification (how credible sources define agentic AI)
Multiple technical explainers define agentic AI by the ability to plan, decide, and perform goal-directed action with minimal human guidance—explicitly describing continuous perception–reasoning–action loops.
So the principle is not a slogan; it’s a documented architectural shift: the recommended and described system structure is loop-based autonomy.
Defense / Autonomous Systems
Real autonomy is unavoidable: contested environments require systems that can continue mission behavior even with degraded connectivity, changing conditions, and adversarial interference.
Cybersecurity Response
Security is fundamentally a loop: detect → investigate → respond → validate → learn. The value comes from running that loop at machine speed.
Enterprise Automation (RPA → Agentic Automation)
Business processes are multi-step and exception-heavy; autonomy matters because agents must keep going, recover, and complete work rather than stop at “draft a response.”
Helsing (Europe: Germany/UK/France footprint) — autonomy in the physical world
Helsing describes building autonomous systems; their product pages describe systems capable of operating in contested environments with onboard AI and mission autonomy characteristics. This is goal-driven autonomy in its most literal form.
Aikido Security (Belgium) — toward self-securing software (security loops automated)
Reuters confirms unicorn funding; SecurityWeek describes a developer security company—this space is moving toward autonomous detect/remediate/verify loops, exactly the plan–act–verify pattern applied to security workflows.
Robocorp (Finland origin) — “digital workers” and intelligent automation
Robocorp positions itself around intelligent automation/digital workers—conceptually aligned to goal-driven “do the work” loops across enterprise systems rather than one-off chat.
Language alone creates plans and content. Tool-use creates state changes: database writes, refunds issued, tickets closed, deployments rolled back, workflows triggered.
This is the core reason agentic AI is economically discontinuous: it converts LLMs from “generators” into operators of the software layer, and therefore operators of the enterprise itself.
Tool-use becomes leverage when:
tools are structured (schemas, parameters, constraints) so agents can call them reliably
orchestration logic exists (loops, conditionals, retries)
tool calls are observable and auditable (especially in regulated domains)
systems are integrated (permissions, identity, access control)
the agent has a safe action space: what it is allowed to do, with guardrails
Here the verification is unusually direct and high-quality:
Anthropic’s research and engineering guidance emphasizes that tools are central: tools let agents interact with external services/APIs, and tool definitions deserve “prompt engineering attention.”
Claude tool-use docs describe the exact mechanics: the model decides whether to use tools, emits a tool-use request, then your system executes the tool and returns results—this is literally how “language becomes action.”
Anthropic’s advanced tool-use notes that agents need the ability to call tools from code and that orchestration logic (loops/conditionals) fits naturally in code—again confirming the architecture: LLM + tool calls + orchestration.
The ecosystem around agents increasingly treats tool calls as first-class, e.g., Langfuse describing tool calls as “the heartbeat of agents,” and building UI around seeing available tools and validating calls.
This is the strongest “analytical verification” of the three principles: the primary docs explicitly define and operationalize the mechanism.
IT Operations / DevOps
Tool-use is the whole game: agents must read logs, call deployment tools, roll back releases, open tickets, notify teams—actions across multiple systems. (This is exactly the class of workflows n8n showcases as agentic multi-step tool calling.)
Enterprise Knowledge + Work Orchestration
The economic value is connecting agents to internal tools/data (Drive, Notion, Slack, Intercom, etc.), enabling agents to execute across the “knowledge surface area” of the org.
Analytics / LLM Ops (observability + evaluation)
As soon as agents call tools, you need tracing of prompts, tool calls, and intermediate steps. Observability becomes required infrastructure, not a nice-to-have.
n8n (Germany) — “build multi-step agents calling custom tools”
Their own product positioning is explicit: create agentic systems on one screen, integrate LLMs, and build multi-step agents that call custom tools. That’s tool-use as product.
Dust (France) — enterprise agents connected to internal tools and data
Dust’s positioning and TechCrunch coverage focus on enterprise assistants connected to internal documents and tools—precisely the tool-use → leverage story.
Langfuse (Germany) — tool-call observability (the “agent reliability” layer)
Langfuse focuses on tracing, prompts, evals, and explicitly highlights tool calls as the heartbeat of agents, with features to inspect tool availability and calls—critical infrastructure for tool-using agent systems.
Classic automation (RPA, scripts, point tools) tends to optimize local steps: one team, one system, one bottleneck. The radical move in the agentic era is that the unit of change is no longer a “task” or even a “workflow” — it’s the value chain: a multi-department sequence that spans procurement → operations → finance → customer → compliance.
Agentic software can actually traverse those boundaries because it can:
understand context across systems,
act through tools, and
handle exceptions without halting at the first “unknown state.”
McKinsey describes this directly as agents “automating complex business workflows” and pushing horizontal copilots into “proactive teammates” that monitor, trigger, follow up, and deliver insights in real time — which is exactly the shift from task-level automation to end-to-end chain execution.
To move from workflow automation to value-chain automation, you need five technical/organizational ingredients:
Process visibility (“what actually happens”)
A live model of the real process across systems (not the slide-deck process).
Orchestration layer
A controller that can route work between agents, humans, and deterministic automations.
Event-driven execution
Agents don’t wait for a person; events (new order, failed payment, delayed shipment) trigger actions.
Exception handling + handoffs
When uncertain, the system escalates to humans with context and resumes afterward.
Governed integration
Permissions and policy define what actions agents can take across systems.
This “orchestrated, governed agentic automation across people, systems, and processes” is explicitly the framing in Camunda’s 2026 material on moving from isolated agent pilots to production-grade end-to-end automation.
We can verify the principle from three directions:
(A) Strategy: McKinsey’s definition of where agentic value comes from
McKinsey is explicit that the highest leverage comes from re-inventing “the way work gets done,” using custom-built agents for high-impact end-to-end processes such as customer resolution and supply chain orchestration — not bolt-on chat.
(B) Production reality: “orchestration” emerging as the missing layer
Camunda’s 2026 “State of Agentic Orchestration & Automation” is literally positioned around closing the gap from experiments to orchestrated automation across systems and people.
(C) Enterprise operations: process intelligence + orchestration to make agents reliable
Celonis describes an orchestration engine coordinating “multiple AI agents, human tasks, and system automations across the enterprise” — that’s value-chain automation by design, not a per-team workflow.
Also, the cautionary side: Gartner expects many agentic projects to be scrapped due to cost/unclear outcomes, which reinforces the point that without value-chain ROI and orchestration, agent pilots fail.
Supply chain & manufacturing operations
Value is created across a chain: planning → procurement → production → logistics → service. Agentic value is highest when orchestration spans the chain rather than optimizing one node. (McKinsey explicitly highlights “adaptive supply chain orchestration.”)
Finance operations (order-to-cash, procure-to-pay)
These are multi-system, exception-heavy processes — the ideal domain for end-to-end orchestration plus human-in-the-loop escalations. UiPath showcases “invoice dispute resolution” as a complex business-critical process for enterprise agents.
Retail “unified commerce”
Retail requires inventory, pricing, orders, and customer context unified across channels; agentic automation becomes reliable only when systems are integrated — which TechRadar highlights as a prerequisite to scaling agentic AI in commerce.
Camunda (Germany) — orchestration as the control plane
Their positioning is directly about orchestrated, governed agentic automation across people/systems/processes (i.e., the value chain).
Celonis (Germany) — process intelligence + orchestration engine
Celonis explicitly frames orchestration as coordinating AI agents, humans, and automations end-to-end, anchored in process intelligence (“living digital twin” of operations).
UiPath (Romania-origin, enterprise scale) — agentic automation platform for end-to-end processes
UiPath positions “agentic automation” as combining agents, robots, tools, models, and people to transform processes end-to-end (and provides concrete use cases like invoice disputes).
Most organizations still run on batch cycles: weekly reports, monthly closes, quarterly planning, scheduled audits, periodic reviews. That cadence is a historical artifact of limited human attention and slow information flow.
Agentic systems invert this: they operate like a continuous control system. Instead of “review → decide → act” being a calendar ritual, it becomes a real-time loop: monitor → detect → act → verify → learn.
McKinsey is explicit that as agents operate continuously, governance must become real-time, embedded, data-driven, with humans holding final accountability — that’s exactly the shift from periodic management to always-on operations.
To make always-on safe and valuable, you need:
Streaming signals (telemetry, events, transactional changes)
Triggers & thresholds (what requires action, what can wait)
Autonomous action policies (what the agent can do without approval)
Verification and rollback (check success; revert if wrong)
Real-time governance (permissions, audit logs, human override)
Gartner’s “agent washing” warning is relevant here: continuous action without real governance and ROI is exactly how organizations burn money and then cancel projects.
(A) Explicit operating model claim
McKinsey’s agentic organization thesis explicitly ties the rise of always-on agents to the necessity of real-time governance and embedded oversight.
(B) Concrete “always-on teammate” description
McKinsey’s “Seizing the agentic AI advantage” describes agents as proactive teammates that monitor dashboards, trigger workflows, follow up on open actions, and deliver relevant insights in real time — which is literally “always-on beats batch.”
(C) Industry readiness narrative (commerce)
TechRadar’s 2026 commerce piece frames the move from chat to agents that execute tasks, and emphasizes that reliable always-on automation depends on unified operational data (inventory/orders/pricing/context).
Cybersecurity / SOC
Security is a continuous game: adversaries don’t attack quarterly. Sekoia positions a turnkey operational capability to automatically detect and respond to incidents (a continuous loop).
IT operations / Digital employee experience
“Always-on” remediation is emerging: telemetry + automated diagnosis + real-time remediation. The ControlUp acquisition story (Unipath) explicitly describes cutting response times massively via autonomous resolution patterns.
Commerce operations (pricing, inventory, returns, CX)
Always-on optimization matters because demand, supply, and customer behavior shift constantly; unified commerce becomes the substrate for continuous automation.
Sekoia.io (France) — always-on detection + response posture
Their platform positioning (SIEM + SOAR capabilities, auto detect/respond) maps directly to continuous operations.
Parloa (Germany) — always-on enterprise customer operations
Voice agents operate continuously; Parloa’s funding coverage highlights enterprise deployments and scale. This is always-on resolution replacing batch call-center operations.
n8n (Germany) — always-on workflow execution substrate
While it’s “automation tooling,” its relevance is that it enables event-driven, continuous multi-step agentic workflows in production environments.
(If you prefer to keep this list strictly to “agent-first” rather than “agent-enabling”, we can swap n8n for a SOC or IT-remediation focused European agentic startup; the evidence base for Sekoia + Parloa is strongest.)
The radical shift here is that “AI” stops being a single assistant and becomes an organizational fabric: networks of specialized agents that coordinate like teams.
Economically, multi-agent architectures unlock:
specialization (higher quality per domain),
parallelism (faster throughput),
composability (new capabilities by recombining agents),
governance separation (different permissions per agent role).
UiPath’s own trends report bluntly states “Solo agents are out. Multi-agent systems are in.”
A practical multi-agent system typically uses:
Role separation: planner / executor / verifier / compliance / observer
Central orchestration: a supervisor process that routes work and enforces policies
Shared context + memory boundaries: what agents can see and persist
Escalation protocols: humans as explicit roles in the multi-agent process
Observability: traces of decisions, tool calls, and handoffs
Camunda describes this explicitly: “multi-agent orchestration” where a central orchestrator unifies any AI agent in the organization into a reusable governed process.
(A) The “mesh” idea (enterprise scaling)
McKinsey QuantumBlack’s “agentic AI mesh” architecture documentation focuses on scaling agents across an organization while maintaining security, compliance, and institutional capability — the entire framing assumes multi-agent systems, not a single bot.
(B) Vendor trend confirmation
UiPath’s 2026 trends report explicitly claims the transition from solo agents to multi-agent systems and adds governance-as-code as a must-have — which is precisely the operational precondition for multi-agent collaboration.
(C) Orchestration productization
Camunda operationalizes the principle: multi-agent orchestration as a product category, explicitly listing integration with many agent providers/frameworks under one governed process.
Large enterprise operations (procurement, finance, HR, service)
These are inherently multi-role workflows with approvals and controls; multi-agent lets you model the org structure digitally. (McKinsey emphasizes reinventing work and building agent-centric processes.)
Security operations
It naturally decomposes into specialist roles: triage agent, enrichment agent, response agent, reporting agent — coordinated with human analysts.
Healthcare delivery and admin
You need multiple roles and permissions: scheduling, clinical summarization, triage, follow-up, billing — multi-agent is the practical way to keep safety boundaries and scope control. (This is consistent with “embedded governance” logic.)
Camunda (Germany) — multi-agent orchestration as a governed process layer
They are directly productizing the “orchestrator” concept for multi-agent systems.
Celonis (Germany) — orchestration engine coordinating agents, humans, automations
Their own material describes coordination of multiple AI agents + humans + automations across enterprise processes, i.e., a multi-agent operational model anchored in process intelligence.
Dust (France) — enterprise agent layer connected to data and tools (multi-agent readiness)
Dust positions itself around building customizable secure agents connected to company data and systems — a substrate that often becomes multi-agent in practice (specialized agents per domain/tool boundary).
In the agentic era, the “thing that creates damage” is no longer just a bad model output — it’s a bad action (wrong refund, wrong account change, wrong compliance step, wrong deployment). That forces a shift:
Governance stops being periodic (reviews, approvals, annual audits) and becomes continuous, embedded, and technical — closer to how you run production systems than how you write corporate policies.
McKinsey’s agentic-organization framing is explicit: as agents run continuously, governance must become “real time, data driven, and embedded” with humans holding final accountability.
To govern agents at scale, you need an operational stack that behaves like a product:
Identity & authorization: fine-grained permissions per agent/tool/system (limit blast radius)
Observability: end-to-end traces across model calls + tool calls + decisions
Audit trails: evidence for “why did it do that” (compliance + accountability)
Evaluation & guardrails: systematic testing + runtime enforcement against known failure modes
Onboarding & role definitions: treat agents like employees with explicit roles and oversight
McKinsey’s “agentic advantage” notes observability and fine-grain auth as core architectural requirements.
The World Economic Forum explicitly argues agents should be onboarded “with the same rigour as a new employee,” including safeguards and structured oversight.
You can verify the “governance becomes product” thesis by looking at why projects fail:
Gartner predicts 40%+ of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear value, or inadequate risk controls. That’s governance failure as a first-order economic constraint, not a footnote.
McKinsey highlights that observability + auth are not optional add-ons; they are foundational to safe scaling.
WEF’s governance/evaluation work treats this as an emerging standardization problem: you need structured evaluation and proportionate safeguards, not slogans.
So: governance is becoming a market category (tools, platforms, vendors, budgets), because without it, ROI collapses.
Financial services (banking/fintech/insurance)
High-stakes actions + audit requirements → governance tooling becomes mandatory infrastructure.
Healthcare and life sciences
Safety + privacy + regulated workflows → “prove what happened” is non-negotiable.
Cybersecurity / DevSecOps
Agents increase operational speed, but also expand attack surface; governance and runtime controls become the difference between “automation” and “incident factory.”
(These sectors are where “action risk” is highest, making governance spend inevitable.)
Langfuse (Germany) — observability for agentic systems
Langfuse’s docs explicitly emphasize tracing and tool-call visibility (a core governance primitive for agents).
Lakera (Switzerland) — AI-native security against prompt injection/data leakage
Lakera positions itself around preventing prompt injections and runtime risks; it’s also been treated as a major “AI security platform” play in Europe.
Aikido Security (Belgium) — developer-centric security “guardrails” at scale
Aikido’s rapid growth and unicorn funding underscore how security/governance becomes spend-driven in the agentic era.
Once agents can execute multi-step work reliably, they stop being “software features” and become labor capacity. This is the discontinuity:
not just productivity tools,
but a new workforce class that can be spun up, specialized, and scaled like compute.
McKinsey explicitly frames the agentic organization as humans + agents (virtual and physical) working side-by-side at near-zero marginal cost.
Microsoft’s “agent boss” framing describes humans managing AI workers, with agents becoming digital colleagues and autonomous workflow runners under human supervision.
A workforce is real when it has:
roles (job descriptions for agents)
management (delegation, monitoring, performance)
capacity planning (how many agents for what throughput)
quality control (review, sampling, escalation)
work orchestration (handoffs across humans/agents/tools)
UiPath literally positions its platform as orchestrating “every AI agent, robot, system, and human from a single control plane,” i.e., workforce management logic.
This is already showing up as: “agents as employees” narratives + platforms + capital flows.
Microsoft’s public “agent boss” narrative is a management model prediction, not a feature demo.
UiPath’s agentic automation messaging is explicitly about hybrid work orchestration and governance — the “control plane” for a mixed human/agent workforce.
Parloa’s funding story highlights agentic AI in customer experience as one of the first domains delivering clear ROI, which is exactly how “labor capacity” gets bought.
Customer operations (contact centers, service, claims)
Throughput is measurable; agents can cover 24/7; ROI ties directly to cost-to-serve and resolution time.
Enterprise operations (finance ops, procurement, HR ops)
Huge volumes of standardized work with exceptions → ideal for “agent teams” + human escalation.
Defense / autonomous systems
“Physical agents” are literally workforce units (drones, autonomous sensors) with humans “in/on the loop.” Helsing’s product descriptions are explicit about autonomous systems with human-in-the-loop critical decisions.
Parloa (Germany) — agent workforce for enterprise customer experience
Reuters documents Parloa’s scale, enterprise focus, and valuation jump (a concrete signal of “agents as labor capacity” economics).
UiPath (Romania-origin / Europe-rooted) — “control plane” for hybrid human/agent work
Their platform positioning is explicitly orchestration + governance across agents/robots/humans.
Helsing (Germany / Europe) — autonomous systems as physical agent workforce
Helsing describes autonomous systems and onboard AI with human oversight; this is the physical-world extension of the silicon workforce.
In industrial-era economics, personalization was expensive: human time to craft messaging, localize, design, and support. In the agentic era, personalization becomes software-like:
personalized copy, voice, video, language, and flows
delivered continuously
adapted in real time
McKinsey’s agentic commerce framing explicitly centers hyperpersonalized experiences and transactions mediated by agents.
McKinsey’s agentic-organization framing also ties the new paradigm to near-zero marginal cost scaling.
WEF similarly highlights agents shortening the consumer journey and offering personalization/expertise/certainty.
Infinite variants: generate tailored content per person/context instantly
Multimodal delivery: text → voice → video → interactive flows
Localization at scale: language is no longer a bottleneck
Real-time intent: shift from demographic segments to moment-by-moment intent signals
Closed-loop learning: agents update behavior from outcomes (conversion, retention, satisfaction)
WEF’s “performance marketing in 2026” explicitly describes moving from broad segments to “marketing in moments,” personalizing based on real-time intent rather than static demographics.
You can see the infrastructure becoming real:
DeepL positions translation + API integration as enterprise workflow infrastructure, including automation via “DeepL Agent.”
Synthesia explicitly markets scalable personalized video messaging as a way to automate individualized communication at scale.
ElevenLabs has rapidly scaled as a voice infrastructure company, with Reuters reporting a major 2026 funding round and $11B valuation — consistent with demand for voice-based personalization and agent interfaces.
This is the economic verification: capital and product positioning are clustering around infrastructure for individualized experiences.
Commerce / retail / marketplaces
Shopping mediated by agents + hyperpersonalization + autonomous transactions becomes a new distribution battleground.
Learning & workforce development
Personalized instruction and feedback loops are inherently high-value; AI makes 1:1 support economically viable.
B2B sales & customer success
Personalized outreach, enablement content, onboarding flows, and renewal interventions become continuous, not campaign-based.
ElevenLabs (UK / Europe) — voice personalization + conversational interfaces
Reuters reports its scale and valuation surge in early Feb 2026; voice becomes a primary interface for personalized agents.
Synthesia (UK / Europe) — individualized video at scale for training/comms/sales
Synthesia directly promotes automated personalized video messaging and scalable training video creation.
DeepL (Germany) — localization + language workflows as personalization infrastructure
DeepL’s API and “Agent” positioning point to language as a workflow layer, enabling personalization across markets.
In the pre-agentic economy, data mostly created value indirectly: dashboards, reports, BI, occasional decisions. In the agentic era, data becomes operational fuel—it is continuously turned into actions that change the state of the business. That is a phase change because it collapses the distance between “knowing” and “doing.”
NVIDIA describes agentic AI as systems that ingest large amounts of data, reason and plan, then execute multi-step tasks—explicitly framing the output as action rather than insight.
To turn data into action reliably, agentic systems need:
Live access to enterprise data (via retrieval, APIs, event streams)
Reasoning + planning to interpret signals and choose interventions
Tool execution so the system can modify real systems (tickets, payments, schedules, configs)
Verification loops: don’t trust the text; verify the final state in the environment
(Anthropic’s evals example: “agent said it booked a flight” vs “reservation exists in DB”).
End-to-end observability & access control so active actions are traceable and constrained.
We can verify the principle with a crisp chain of evidence:
Definition level: Agentic AI is explicitly described as reasoning/planning systems that ingest enterprise data and complete tasks independently.
Safety/reality level: Anthropic’s evaluation guidance stresses that the real outcome is the final external state, not the agent’s claim—so “data → action” must be measured by environment changes.
Production architecture level: McKinsey specifies observability and fine-grained auth as core requirements for workflows spanning agentic + procedural systems—exactly what you need when data triggers actions.
IT operations / Reliability engineering: telemetry → diagnosis → remediation → verification (continuous loops, measurable outcomes).
Fraud / Risk / Compliance in finance: signals → decision → account action/hold → audit trail (high-frequency, high-stakes).
Manufacturing & supply chain: sensor signals + demand signals → schedule/routing changes → verification (self-optimizing operations).
Celonis (Germany) — “active operations” via process intelligence + orchestration (data becomes operational decisions and interventions).
UiPath (Romania-origin / Europe-rooted) — automation + agents + tools as a path from enterprise data to executed work (their core business model is turning signals into executed tasks).
Camunda (Germany) — orchestration layer that makes data-triggered, end-to-end processes executable and governed at scale.
In SaaS, moats often came from UI, features, or switching costs. In the agentic era, many “features” become commoditized quickly because models can imitate interfaces and generate equivalent outputs. The moat shifts to:
where the agent sits (distribution),
what it can access (integrations + permissions),
how reliably it executes (safety, evals, observability, rollback).
McKinsey’s architecture emphasis on observability and fine-grained authorization is effectively a statement that reliability and controlled access are foundational—i.e., competitive necessities, not optional add-ons.
Distribution moat: embedded in core workflows (support, finance ops, dev pipelines) → habitual usage
Integration moat: the agent can act across the org’s toolchain (CRM, ERP, ticketing, CI/CD)
Permissioning moat: tightly scoped access lowers risk and enables autonomy at scale
Reliability moat: better tool design + fewer execution errors
(Anthropic: they improved agent performance more by improving tools than by tweaking prompts).
Measurement moat: evaluation harnesses that score outcomes as real environment states, not narratives.
Tooling reliability is repeatedly shown as a performance lever. Anthropic explicitly says they spent more time optimizing tools than the overall prompt, and fixing tool interface details eliminated whole error classes.
Scaling requires “platform primitives.” McKinsey’s piece names observability and auth as required primitives for end-to-end workflows, implying that reliable execution and safe access are structural constraints.
“Outcome truth” requires eval infrastructure. Anthropic’s evals note that outcome is the environment state—making evals and logging part of the moat.
Customer operations (contact center + back office): distribution is built into the queue; reliability is measurable (containment, resolution, refunds).
DevSecOps / cybersecurity: integrations + safe action boundaries + rapid verification are decisive (wrong action is catastrophic).
Enterprise process automation (finance/procurement/HR): integration depth + permissioning + auditability determine whether agents can be trusted with real actions.
n8n (Germany) — integration surface area and workflow embedding as a distribution moat (agents become powerful where integrations are deepest).
Langfuse (Germany) — reliability moat via observability, traces, and tooling around agent workflows (the “trust layer”).
Parloa (Germany) — distribution moat via enterprise CX deployment + measurable execution (resolution outcomes), where reliability directly maps to revenue.
Agency is the ability to interpret → decide → act toward goals. The radical claim is that we are industrializing agency the way the last era industrialized computation. That creates a new macro-market: not “AI features,” but autonomous capacity across every value chain.
WEF defines AI agents as systems that can independently interpret information, make decisions, and carry out actions to achieve goals—this is the cleanest statement of “agency.”
NVIDIA frames agentic AI as reasoning + iterative planning that executes complex, multi-step work—i.e., scalable agency.
Specialization: multiple agents per org function (planner/executor/verifier)
Tool ecosystems: reliable tool interfaces for actions at scale
Governance & onboarding: treat agents like employees (scope, permissions, monitoring)
Eval + continuous improvement: harnesses that score real outcomes
Mesh architectures: authenticated, observable agent-to-agent and agent-to-service interactions (so organizations can deploy many agents safely).
Conceptual convergence: WEF and NVIDIA align on the same definition: agents act toward goals, not just generate text.
Enterprise scaling focus: McKinsey emphasizes observability and fine-grained auth for workflows spanning agentic and procedural systems—exactly what you need to scale many acting systems safely.
Engineering reality: Anthropic’s multi-agent and eval work shows production systems are built as orchestrated loops with measurable outcomes—this is “agency” implemented as infrastructure.
Enterprise operations: large volumes of multi-step work become “agent-runnable,” with humans supervising exceptions.
Public services: high-volume transactions and citizen journeys become agent-mediated, with governance as a core requirement.
Physical-world autonomy (defense, logistics, robotics): agency becomes embodied; value is driven by autonomous action under constraints.
UiPath (Romania-origin / Europe-rooted) — industrializing agency in enterprise workflows (agentic automation at scale).
Helsing (Germany / Europe) — physical-world agency at scale (autonomous systems as “acting capacity”).
ElevenLabs (UK / Europe) — voice as a dominant interface for agentic systems; scalable agency needs natural, low-friction human interaction, and voice is a major channel for that.
February 23, 2026
February 20, 2026
February 17, 2026