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 hub is the door to a ten-part series: eras, the agent loop, risk, fit, then the enterprise playbook (prompt engineering and policy, eval, 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