What Are Your AI Agents Actually Worth? Time To Find Out...

As agents acquire identities, mailboxes and customer-facing roles, owners need a record of what those systems cost, produce and depend on. This article is aimed at firms that are in the scaling phase of AI. (My RISE capability model delineates four phases of AI adoption: Research and Education, Islands of Innovation, Scaling, Emergent Intelligence. This article is aimed at firms that are either scaling or starting to have the AI build more AI, because those organizations have significant agentic deployment.

On November 10, the Linux Foundation announced that Agent Name Service had become a hosted project. The standard uses the internet’s Domain Name System to support agent naming, registration, discovery and identity verification. It addresses a basic question for an economy in which software acts on behalf of businesses: Which agent are you dealing with?

The same day, OpenAI introduced Businesses in ChatGPT in beta, including Business Agents for eligible U.S. ecommerce and online service businesses. These agents can answer customers’ questions about a company’s offerings. Microsoft’s October 30 update described Autopilot, an always-on personal agent with its own account, mailbox and files, scheduled to roll out to its Frontier program in November.

These developments put a management question beside the identity question. Once you can identify an agent, can you say what it costs, how well it works and which parts of the capability your company owns or controls?

For anyone who owns, lends to or buys a business, those answers belong together.

The problem I raised and the missing piece

A skeptical CFO has an obvious reply. How do you evaluate an investment when you cannot identify what is being built, who is responsible for it and what it produces? In my October 20 column, I asked investors and directors how their companies track multi-year AI investments.

Identity is becoming a management record

What the numbers let you see

What a buyer needs to see