Agent readiness for CTOs
The CTO owns the question the board will eventually ask: are we getting value from agents without taking risk we cannot see? That means owning the operating model for agents — not each agent, but the standards every agent is built and run against.
Key concerns
Sprawl before standards
Teams are shipping agents faster than the organisation is setting standards. Every quarter without a paved road — a standard way to register, credential, deploy, and observe agents — adds agents that will need retrofitting later. The cost of standardising grows with every unstandardised agent in production.
Concentration and vendor risk
Agent stacks harden quickly around early choices: a model provider, a framework, a gateway. The CTO question is not which choice is right but which choices are reversible. Abstraction layers and exit-tested integrations matter more than picking winners. The exit question belongs in the original procurement conversation, not in a renegotiation after lock-in has already priced it.
Value attribution
Agent spend is easy to measure; agent value is not. Without cost-per-task and quality metrics wired in from the start, the agent portfolio becomes unfalsifiable — impossible to defend in budget season and impossible to prune. The fix is unglamorous: per-task cost and quality metrics defined before launch, reported on the same dashboard as the spend they justify.
Readiness checklist
- An agent registry exists and deployment is gated on registration
- A paved-road platform covers identity, deployment, observability, and audit for agents — and using it is easier than not
- Every production agent has a named owner and a risk profile
- Cost per task and a quality score are tracked for each production agent
- Model/framework exit costs have been assessed for the top three dependencies
- Someone owns agent governance as a role, not a side project