Three audiences, three different mindset shifts. Each one is currently running the wrong play, and each one needs to switch tracks before the year is out.
If you are an executive: stop treating this like procurement. The gap between a vendor demo and a working agent in your business is filled with software you have to write or commission. Hire engineers, not consultants. Treat the AI portfolio the way you treat the rest of your software portfolio — projects, owners, milestones, deprecation dates. There is no shortcut where a vendor delivers operationalization in a quarter.
If you are a founder: pick a hard problem and stay in it. Every obvious idea will be cloned by Friday. The moat is not novelty. The moat is the boring infrastructure underneath — the context layer, the memory, the evaluation, the integration plumbing — and the diligence to keep building it after the first commoditization wave. Founders who pivot fast tend to learn fast and ship nothing. Founders who compound their understanding of one space build companies.
If you are an engineering leader: your teams are already using AI coding tools whether you sanctioned it or not. The question is whether you have the infrastructure to absorb the output. Can your review processes handle ten times the PR volume? Do you have visibility into what every team is building? Are your agents running in environments where they have real codebase context, or are they hallucinating against stale vector embeddings?
I've argued that building has gotten cheap, so coordination breaks — that one cuts across all three audiences. Background agents are not coming. They are here. The only question is whether your organization is structured to use them, or be buried by them. Pick the play that matches your seat. Run it this quarter, not next year.
Sources
Related Essays
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Key takeaways
- Executives should stop running procurement processes and hire engineers, not consultants.
- Founders should pick a hard problem and stay in it after the first commoditization wave hits.
- Engineering leaders should ask whether their review processes can absorb ten times the PR volume their teams will produce.
FAQ
What should an executive do differently in 2026?
Stop treating agent automation like procurement. The gap between a vendor demo and a working agent in your business is filled with software you have to write or commission. Hire engineers, not consultants, and treat the work as a software portfolio.
What should an engineering leader do differently?
Assume your teams are already using AI coding tools. The question is whether you have the infrastructure to absorb the output. Can your review processes handle ten times the PR volume? Do you have visibility into what every team is shipping? Are agents running with real codebase context?