Between Frontier Ambition and Reality: What 'Agent Ready' Really Means

Microsoft defined six pillars that a company needs to deal with AI Agents a few weeks ago. Governance, Scaling, Adoption and so on.

What I find exciting is that Microsoft itself says most companies are only at the beginning. Not because they’re lagging behind, but because “Agent Ready” means more than just starting an agent.

The Responsibility Question

What occupies me most is not (only) the technology, but who in the company actually bears the responsibility for it.

• CIO?
• CDO?
• CISO?
• COO?

AI Agents affect everyone at the end. And if we’ve learned anything from past change projects, it’s that it gets particularly difficult when multiple C-levels are affected simultaneously.

I can already hear the champagne corks popping at the governance tool vendors. And the tools are really good, too. It’s just that they’re far too often used as a convenient parking space for responsibility instead of as a real control instrument.

(A governance concept is the foundation, not the only step on the way!)

The Learning Speed

For me, it’s ultimately a question of learning speed. Companies need to create a framework in which people can really engage with it.

No one says after 50 hours of lessons that they can play piano or guitar.

But with Copilot and Agents, many people think 3-4 hours of training should be enough to completely change years of trained behavior - best supported by an “Agent 2 Agent Skill”.

Between frontier ambition and reality, there’s still a bit of work ahead of us.

The header image was created with Copilot based on this post.