Governance
An agent acts inside its purview. Six kinds of decision stop and wait for a person.
If we are going to build systems that act on your behalf, you are entitled to know what they are allowed to do without asking. This is the model we run internally and the model we build into what we deliver. It is written down, which is the only version of this claim worth making.
The default
It acts
Inside its assigned purview, with the access it has already been granted, an agent acts — immediately, with no approval step. Access granted is treated as authorization to use it. A system that asks permission for everything is not governed; it is just slow, and it teaches everyone to click yes.
It is recorded either way
Every automatically executed action writes to a standing audit trail. Removing an approval wall does not remove the record of what happened, and the record is what makes the default defensible.
Reading and drafting were never gated
Research, search, analysis, drafting, recommending and modelling do not wait for anyone. The governance is about consequential action, not about thinking.
The shape of it
Any action an agent is about to take
It proceeds
Everything else
Inside its assigned purview, with access already granted, an agent acts immediately — no approval step. Reading, drafting, analysis, recommending and modelling were never gated at all.
Written to the audit trail either way.
It stops and waits
Six kinds of decision
A financial commitment above a threshold. Client-outbound email needing discernment. A legal or contractual position. And the three below.
A person decides, and the decision is recorded.
The test is consequence, not confidence — an overconfident system is the likelier failure than a malicious one.
The six carve-outs
- 01
A financial commitment above a set threshold
Anything that spends, pays, refunds, discounts or otherwise obligates the business at or above a stated figure. Below it, the action proceeds. A running total is recorded even when it does not gate, so a series of small actions cannot quietly become a large unapproved one.
- 02
Client-outbound email that needs discernment
An email to a client or prospect waits when the content may not be accurate and grounded in data actually held, or may disclose personal or confidential information not meant for that recipient. The agent’s own confidence is not the whole test — an overconfident system is the likelier failure than a malicious one — so it is paired with a scan of the actual outgoing payload and a first-contact check on the recipient.
- 03
A legal or contractual commitment
Signing, accepting terms, waiving a right, filing, or stating a legal position externally.
- 04
An employment action
Hiring, dismissal, discipline, compensation, or any other consequential decision about a specific person.
- 05
Production, security, or anything irreversible
A production deploy, a credential or access-control change, a security exception, or any action that cannot be undone.
- 06
A qualified-professional conclusion
Legal, tax, accounting, insurance and regulatory conclusions require the relevant qualified professional regardless of size. A small tax categorisation is still a professional judgment, not a threshold question.
What an approval has to contain
An approval is a record, not a click.
When an action does fall into a carve-out, the approval records the exact action, the evidence behind it, a preview or diff of what will change, the assumptions it rests on, the risk and blast radius, the rollback, the cost or commitment, who approved it, when the approval expires, a hash of the content, and the decision itself.
Any change to the content invalidates the approval. That is the clause that stops an approval for one thing being spent on another.
Who decides what
- Doctrine, strategy, market voice and external approval
- The chief executivePositioning, pricing posture and anything that speaks for the firm publicly.
- Operations, systems and delivery
- The chief operating officerHow the pods are built, and approved reversible internal action.
- Legal, tax, accounting, insurance, employment, regulatory
- A qualified professionalNot a founder, and not a system, regardless of how small the question looks.
How information is classified
- Public
- Approved for distributionWhat may leave the building.
- Internal
- Ordinary operationsNot secret, not for publication.
- Confidential
- Commercial, client, contractual, founderHandled on a need basis.
- Restricted
- Credentials, security, privileged, HR, finance, personalThe highest-impact class; access is the exception, not the rule.
Every seat in a pod is built against these classes, so what a system can reach is a design decision recorded up front rather than a discovery made later.
We do not sell AI adoption. We sell buyer adaptation.Bastion, standing doctrine
Ask what your pods would be allowed to do.
The diagnosis decides what gets built; this decides what it is permitted to do once it is running. Both are written down before anything ships.
Sent straight to the two people who answer it. No autoresponder sequence, no call centre.