A Building Agentic AI

The Blog

Writing on agentic AI.

Practical, honest pieces on building and designing agentic AI systems. Field notes from production work, written for engineers, architects, and technology leaders.

33 posts published 2 clusters · beginner + enterprise RSS →
  1. 01

    Enterprise · 25 min read

    What Counts as Agentic AI, and What Does Not

    Chatbots, workflows and agentic AI are not the same thing. A working definition, the autonomy ladder, production gotchas, and a 10-question checklist.

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  2. 02

    Enterprise · 9 min read

    What to Automate First: A Leader's Framework for Agentic AI in 2026

    The question that stalls most agentic AI programmes is not whether you can build an agent. It is which process first. Four criteria and one hard gate.

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  3. 03

    Beginner · 31 min read

    When to Use an Agent Framework vs Build It Yourself (LangGraph, CrewAI, and More)

    Build the raw loop yourself until you hit a specific named pain, then adopt a framework to solve it. A decision diagram and the frameworks worth knowing.

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  4. 04

    Enterprise · 15 min read

    Why Voice AI Agents Are Harder Than Chatbots

    A working chatbot rarely survives the jump to a phone line. Latency as a hard budget, barge-in, speech recognition errors, silence, and real-time handoff.

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  1. Oct 10 2026

    On Whose Authority? The Identity Question in AI Agent Security

    AI agent security starts with identity: who is acting, with what permissions, and can you trace it afterward. What my unexplained domain cancellation taught me.

  2. Sep 29 2026

    AI-to-Human Handoff in the Contact Center: What the Human Actually Receives

    Leaders say their AI hands off with context. Customers say they still repeat themselves. Why both can be true, and what to check on your platform.

  3. Sep 14 2026

    Best Voice AI and IVA Platforms for Contact Centers

    Fourteen voice AI and IVA platforms for contact centers, compared by who owns the conversation logic and who makes the changes.

  4. Aug 14 2026

    The Hard Part of an AI Eval Set Is the Answer Key

    An automated score said my retriever was failing. I read the failures by hand and found my own answer key was wrong. What that cost, and what it did not fix.

  5. Jul 27 2026

    What an AI Agent Actually Costs Per Resolved Customer Issue

    Most AI contact center business cases count too little cost and divide it by the wrong outcome. Price your agent per resolved issue, not per contact.

  6. Jul 23 2026

    When the Small Language Model Isn't the Bottleneck

    On an offline 350M assistant, model choice mattered, and then stopped being the limit. Several failures I blamed on the model started in the system around it.

  7. Jul 19 2026

    Turn Up AI Autonomy Gradually, Like a Dial, Not an On/Off Switch

    Autonomy is not an on/off property of an agent. It is a per-task setting you turn up gradually as the agent earns trust. Here is the dial, and how to move it.

  8. Jul 14 2026

    The AI Agent Production Readiness Checklist

    Twelve checks that decide whether an agent ships. Any red holds the launch until it is green or covered, except four hard blocks that cannot be covered.

  9. Jul 05 2026

    Forward Deployed Engineering: Why Agentic AI Doesn't Ship Itself

    Forward deployed engineering feels new because vendors finally named it. Nine billion dollars in 2026 is the market admitting agentic AI does not ship itself.

  10. Jul 05 2026

    LangGraph for Voice AI Agents: Strengths, Limits, and Production Risks

    LangGraph is the stateful control-flow brain for a voice agent, not the real-time media layer. Where it fits, where it breaks, and how to compose it.