Experimental
Isolated agent use by individuals.
A handful of engineers and analysts run agents from personal accounts to save themselves time. Nothing is registered, reviewed, or shared. Ask "which agents are running here?" and nobody can answer.
Nothing is written down. Capability lives in individual heads and personal API keys.
No inventory, personal tokens, no review. Agents are shadow infrastructure from day one.
Start an inventory — even a spreadsheet. You cannot govern what you cannot list.
The six control surfaces
What the controls look like at this stage
Maturity is measured across six control surfaces. Here is where a immature organisation — one sitting at Stage 01 — typically stands on each.
Inventory
ImmatureNo list. Nobody can say which agents exist, what they touch, or where they run.
Ownership
ImmaturePersonal accounts. No named human is accountable for any agent’s behaviour.
Runtime visibility
ImmatureNone. What an agent does between input and output is invisible.
Access control
ImmaturePersonal tokens with broad scopes. Agent identity is indistinguishable from a user’s.
Evaluations
ImmatureNone, or a single check before launch that is never repeated.
Governance
ImmatureNo policy, no audit path, no way to stop an agent cleanly.
The move that matters
Advancing to Stage 02 — Shared
You do not skip stages. You close the gap in front of you, and only one control matters most right now.
Start an inventory — even a spreadsheet. You cannot govern what you cannot list.
Stage 01 — Experimental, answered.
Short answers for teams placing themselves at the Experimental stage of the agent operational maturity curve.
What is Stage 01 (Experimental) of the agent maturity model?
A handful of engineers and analysts run agents from personal accounts to save themselves time. Nothing is registered, reviewed, or shared. Ask "which agents are running here?" and nobody can answer. In short: isolated agent use by individuals.
What is the main risk at the Experimental stage?
No inventory, personal tokens, no review. Agents are shadow infrastructure from day one.
How do you move beyond the Experimental stage?
Start an inventory — even a spreadsheet. You cannot govern what you cannot list. That is what takes an organisation from Stage 01 (Experimental) to Stage 02 (Shared).