Getting Things Done With Agentic Workers
A practical reflection on using Orchistra and agentic workers to cover the skills a small consulting business needs, while treating token spend as operating capital that has to be watched.
Board & Operations
Tony Wood.
I work across boards and operations to turn intent into execution: better decisions, clearer accountability, and systems that stay useful when they meet operational reality.
Advisory
Bring board judgement and operating discipline to AI adoption.
I advise boards, CEOs, operators, and senior teams who need to make AI useful without losing sight of accountability, access, risk, and operational reality.
The work is practical: challenge the AI operating model, test the POC logic, clarify who owns what, and make the next decision easier to defend.
Board/CEO triggers
- An AI decision needs approval, ownership, or a stop rule.
- A POC looks promising but is not yet operationally safe.
- Governance exists on paper but accountability is unclear.
Where I operate
Strategy, risk, leadership, and execution belong in the same conversation.
This site brings together practical writing, deeper research, and a public agent-readable layer for people working through complex decisions about AI, governance, operations, and organisational capability.
Latest writing
Shorter essays and operating notes
AI Is Not One Thing
A gentle argument for using more precise AI language: chatbot, generative AI, agentic system, local AI, foundation model, AI system, or safety-critical AI, depending on what we actually mean.
The New Product Manager May Be An Engineer Who Reskilled
AI is changing product-to-engineering ratios, but the deeper shift is capability: product managers now need engineering-grade judgement, and senior engineers may be closer to the new product role than many expect.
Research
Playbooks, papers, and board-level frameworks
Research
Triggers: A Signal Language for Long-Running Agentic Systems
Triggers: A Signal Language for Long-Running Agentic Systems
Why read this
Read this for a practical take on abstract, with enough structure to turn the idea into a leadership conversation.
A research paper proposing triggers as a practical signal language for long-running agents, helping systems route attention, constrain action, create reviewable memory, and learn from exceptions without hoarding noise.
Research
Head / Heart / Gut / Spine: A Legible Judgement Model for Long-Running Agents
Head / Heart / Gut / Spine: A Legible Judgement Model for Long-Running Agents
Why read this
Read this for a practical take on abstract, with enough structure to turn the idea into a leadership conversation.
A research paper setting out Head / Heart / Gut / Spine as a practical judgement grammar for long-running agents, separating evidence, human impact, anomaly sensing, authority, and purpose.
Start here
Different routes into the same body of work.
For humans
Start with the writing, research, and profile routes for judgement, context, and practical examples.
For agents
Use structured public routes, skill files, MCP resources, Agent Canon, and citation guidance.
Topics
Move by theme across the archive when you know the problem before you know the article.