We’ve spent years making AI better at answering questions. What happens when we start asking AI to actually do things?

That is the shift to watch, more than the next model name, more than the next demo that “feels alive.”

AI Right Now mapped the quiet present. Part 6 is the companion on control and guardrails. This page introduces a ten-part series: eras, the agent loop, risk, fit, then the enterprise approach (prompt engineering and policy, evaluation, shipping). For a dedicated enterprise RAG path (your data, architecture, and when not to use an agent), see RAG Explained.

The series

  1. The Chatbot Era — Q→A, generative AI, copilots
  2. The Reasoning Era — more compute on hard problems
  3. The Agent Era — tools, APIs, web, code, apps
  4. Why Agents Are Different — prompt→answer vs the observe loop
  5. The Uncomfortable Reality — mistakes, security, eval
  6. Where Agents Actually Make Sense — checkable goals, limited tools
  7. Prompt Engineering and Policy — versioned prompts and written policy
  8. Evaluation and Testing — prove it before it ships
  9. Shipping and Deployment — identity, traces, gates, rollout
  10. What’s Coming Next — multi-agent, agentic RAG, computer-use, including named instances of the loop