Even LLMs Need a Firewall
A practical reflection on why LLM firewalls, tool gates, and deterministic controls are really an old Stoic idea: not every thought deserves to become an action.
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
Thank You, Mum
A personal thank-you to my mum for the patience, belief, faith, strength, and hours she gave me as a dyslexic child learning to read and write, and for what AI has finally helped me unlock.
When The Tool Can Be Turned Off
A researched operational resilience piece on the abrupt suspension of access to Anthropic Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and what it means for European organisations relying on critical US software and AI services.
Research
Playbooks, papers, and board-level frameworks
Agentic Language: The Common Language Layer For Agentic Work
Why read this
Read this for a practical take on copy starter instruction, with enough structure to turn the idea into a leadership conversation.
A compact public agent-facing companion for Tony Wood's Agentic Language research paper, defining Agent Moves, Meaning Blocks, evidence, confidence, uncertainty, routes, human notes, and stop-line boundaries.
Consensus Is Not Compliance
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 consensus as a disciplined process of conviction, evidence, listening, challenge, adaptation, and commitment, then translating that human governance model into agentic systems.
Agentic First
Agentic First is for tools agents can use: MCP, A2A, APIs, and data-residency clues.
Agentic First is the public home for agentic-first patterns: making products, services, and company information readable, governable, and usable by agents.
The Agentic First Directory is the working directory underneath it. Use it when you are looking for EU data residency tools, UK data residency tools, agent access, protocols, evidence, monitoring, and operational fit.
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.