You’re doing agents all wrong – why you should focus on human attention

What if agent projects are failing because they’re being applied to the wrong problems?

This was the assertion of Duncan Anderson — CEO and co-founder of boutique AI agency, Barnacle Labs, in a recent discussion with me. It was an interesting provocation — and one I had gone out of my way to find. Because I wanted to shift from understanding the agentic narrative of established mainstream automation vendors to understanding the stories of those implementing new technologies in new ways.

And what emerged was an entirely different way of framing the value and purpose of agents. Less about automation and more about attention — and about removing operating model friction that, until now, has been resistant to systematic improvement.

Finding new agentic perspectives

At diginomica we necessarily spend a lot of time talking to vendors I’ve dubbed ‘enterprise-incrementalists’ — vendors with whom enterprise leaders have long-standing relationships. And while these conversations ...