Frameworks

Every enterprise AI deployment involves the same five elements. Most deployments never make the relationships between them explicit. The five elements Human — The principal. The person or role whose authority the agent is ultimately exercising. Every agent should trace back to a named human accountable for its actions. Agent — The actor. The AI system that receives delegated authority and acts on it. The agent does not have authority of its own — it exercises authority granted by the human principal. ...

Every meaningful action in an enterprise follows the same path. Someone has to be identified, authorized, delegated, observed, and — eventually — revoked. Most organizations handle the first step well. The rest compound silently. The six stages Identity — Who is acting? Before anything else, the actor must be known. A human, a service, an AI agent. Identity is the foundation. Without it, nothing else holds. Authority — What are they allowed to do? ...

Every enterprise has an authority stack. Most don’t know it exists until something breaks at the top. The five layers Infrastructure — The compute, network, and storage that everything runs on. Mature. Well-understood. Most organizations have this handled. Identity — Who or what is acting. Users, services, agents. Also mature — the last decade of investment in IAM, SSO, and zero-trust has made identity a solved problem for most enterprises. ...