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Sandboxes & Ladders: How to Build a Steerable Agent Economy

Budgets are where autonomy becomes real. A chatbot can be annoying. An agent with a procurement account, API access, calendar authority, cloud credits, and a habit of negotiating with other agents is something else entirely. At that point, we are no longer discussing “workflow automation” in the tidy enterprise sense. We are discussing economic actors: software systems that request resources, trade off priorities, outsource tasks, pay for services, and generate consequences faster than the compliance department can ask for a meeting. ...

September 19, 2025 · 19 min · Zelina