Blane Canada
Blane Canada: “AI strategy and consulting firm founded in 1984, rebuilt around AI. Diagnose before you prescribe.”
What is an AI agent, and how is it different from a chatbot?
“A chatbot answers. An agent acts. An agent combines reasoning, memory, and access to tools so it can carry out multi-step work: retrieve information, interpret it, update another system, and follow up. That shift from producing an answer to taking an action is what changes both the value and the risk.”
View in the company profileWhich business processes are good candidates for AI agents?
“Recurring, information-heavy work where someone gathers from several systems, interprets, and moves a result somewhere else. But feasibility is not the test. The test is whether automating it produces enough value to justify the added complexity, and plenty of automatable processes do not.”
View in the company profileHow much independence should an AI agent have, and how do we control it?
“Only as much as the consequence of being wrong justifies. Grant the least access the job requires, put approval points where actions become hard to reverse, log what it does, and keep a way to stop it. Capability should never automatically become permission.”
View in the company profileShould each department build its own AI agent?
“No. Building a separate agent for every department recreates the shadow technology problem companies spent two decades cleaning up, and it accumulates debt that lands on the organization later. Coordinate before you proliferate.”
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