Adam Smithline

The agent market is polarizing into two extremes. 🧩 1) Builders (e.g. n8n, clay and many others): flexible tooling where customers assemble bespoke “agentic” workflows. 📦 2) Packaged vertical agents: pre-built solutions that promise outcomes out of the box (security triage, sales research, IT helpdesk, finance ops). Under the hood, both share the same unit of abstraction: a workflow. The key difference is who authors it: 🧑‍💻 Builders: authored by the customer, optimized for their environment. 🧠 Packaged agents: authored by the vendor/SMEs, optimized for many environments. Each extreme breaks in predictable ways. 🧩 Builders break like code: they’re great until reality changes—new data, new edge cases, new tools, new questions. Then the workflow either fails or degrades into “automation cosplay.” Many flows never needed AI; they needed glue. 📦 Packaged agents break on variance: real organizations don’t follow the vendor’s ontology. Data is fragmented, naming is inconsistent, policies are full of exceptions, and “best practice” is aspirational. The agent is often smart but not situationally correct. So the real gap isn’t “more agents.” It’s a better unit of adoption: something that carries domain expertise and survives contact with a messy environment. The middle ground is specialized agent templates: opinionated starting points (domain language + best-practice playbooks) with a deliberate adaptation surface—connectors, schema/ontology mapping, guardrails, and human checkpoints—plus an eval harness so teams can tune behavior, version changes, and rollback safely inside an Agent Builder/IDE. 🏁 In a fragmented space, the winners won’t just sell “agents.” They’ll ship templates that become production systems—because they come with a customizer that keeps them from becoming a bespoke services project.

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Project Vend reads less like a capability story and more like a governability story. Phase two improved because institutional scaffolding (tools, procedures, role separation) reduced predictable judgment failures—persuasion, compliance blind spots, boundary confusion, values drift. The board-level question isn’t “can an agent run a business?” but “what governance primitives must exist before we delegate authority.” Until incentives, escalation rights, and refusal boundaries are structurally enforced—not merely prompted—agents remain high-performing managers, not autonomous executives.

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Proud that Sierra has partnered with Cedar to build Kora, an AI voice agent purpose-built for patient billing. Catch Cedar's Sumayah Rahman and Sierra's Miranda Zhao at ViVE later this month to hear how they built Kora and what they've learned from real patient interactions https://lnkd.in/gh2et3ss

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The 2026 Shift: From AI That Thinks to AI That Acts If 2023 was the year of the chatbot, then 2026 will be remembered as the year of the agent. The landmark Meta-Manus deal on New Year's Eve wasn't just an acquisition; it was a starting gun. It signals the decisive pivot from passive, prompt-based AI to active, Agentic AI—systems that perceive context, make decisions, and execute complex tasks autonomously. This shift creates a green-field opportunity, but with one critical condition: for Agentic AI to serve humanity at scale, it must escape the confines of the cloud and the vulnerabilities of the smartphone. By 2027, we predict dominance will belong to ecosystems that merge intelligent agentic software with a secure, universal physical layer. This hardware foundation will be the key that unlocks trust, privacy, and true global accessibility. At AI Trust Cards, we are building that indispensable physical layer. Our platform moves agentic intelligence from a digital concept to a trusted action in your hand—secure, private, and funded by a model more sustainable and trustworthy than the leaky app economy. The next chapter of AI isn't about bigger data centers; it's about smarter, safer actions in the real world. 2026 is the year we start building it. #AgenticAI #AI #2026Predictions #FutureOfTech #FinTech #Privacy #Innovation See Richard Crone's excellent article on LLM-led Agentic commerce, showing again that 2026 will be the Agentic AI shift - in many global AI sectors. Richard Crone Crone Consulting LLC https://lnkd.in/gUB2zVbP

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Dashboards don’t create accountability. They create meetings. Charts get shared. Everyone nods. Action items get “noted”. Same problems. Next quarter. Accountability doesn’t come from visibility. It comes from systems — where ownership is clear and decisions can’t be ignored. I wrote a short note on why dashboards feel productive but rarely change behaviour — and what actually does. If your org has great dashboards but the same issues every review… this will sound familiar. Dashboards Don’t Create Accountability — Systems Do: https://lnkd.in/gCGpm-VU

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The Headline family is experiencing incredible momentum, and today our portfolio company DeepIP is announcing a $25M Series B, bringing total funding to $40M.  This is the kind of company that doesn’t just add AI to a workflow, but it sets the standard for an entire category. The momentum speaks for itself: 1️⃣ 10x ARR growth in < 18 months 2️⃣ Trusted by 400+ law firms and leading corporate IP teams globally 3️⃣ 2M+ chats on the DeepIP platform We’ve had the chance to back FX (Francois-Xavier) L. and Edouard D., leading their Seed round with Headline. Watching them take on a problem as complex and high-stakes as patent work has been genuinely impressive. And working with them has been an absolute pleasure: these 2 are coupling very high ambition and humility. Tech built in Europe, but opening the US office very early and FX starting a life in NYC with his family with 0 hesitation in order to build a global category leader in the IP industry. What convinced me early is still what stands out today: patent teams don’t need another standalone AI tool. They need something that fits the way the work actually happens: documents, long-running matters, multiple stakeholders, and zero room for sloppy context handoffs. Big congrats to the whole DeepIP team + Korelya Capital, Balderton & Serena Proud that we’re doubling down at Headline and continuing the support for what’s next!

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We're excited to share Timber Grove Ventures investment in Jampack AI. Wholesale operations for CPG brands are workflow-dense, error-prone, and chronically underserved by software. A single PO can touch ten disconnected systems before it's resolved while the status quo is spreadsheets, email chains, and tools that don't talk to each other. Matteo Rossant lived this challenge helping scale N!CK'S from $0 to $40M in revenue. That operator DNA shows up in the product: Jampack's agentic workflows automate the entire operational layer, meeting brands where they are without ripping out existing systems. In just a few months, they're processing $500M in annualized wholesale volume. We’re proud to partner with Matteo, Rezi Tsulukidze, and the entire Jampack team alongside Maveron. If you are a high growth CPG brand scaling in retail please reach out! Full article in the comments below.

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ICYMI - from VentureBeat Intuit’s new AI agents help businesses get funds up to 5 days faster and save 12 hours a month with autonomous workflows. This is a tangible example of AI driving efficiency. The conversation shifts from if to how we implement AI. How do we ensure these autonomous workflows are not just fast, but fundamentally fair and truthful? AI offers incredible efficiencies, its autonomous nature in critical financial processes raises questions about accountability, bias, and the transparent flow of information, which could inadvertently lead to issues of accuracy or hidden deceptions. Ensuring ethical AI deployment means validating its integrity. Glimmary's AI-powered truth/lie index and deepfake detection for videos can be invaluable for companies showcasing leveraging AI solutions. Assure clients of their reliability and ethical adherence. #AIEthics #BusinessEfficiency #TechInnovation #FutureOfWork

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When your booth looks like a middle-school art project, but you're talking about building on-prem solutions for enterprises with your product. Jack Phan was able to get tables for all the members of the Oregon AI Accelerator at the Silicon Forest conference on Saturday. I decided to do my booth shopping at Office Depot the day before. My $35 wooden easel held an oversized Post-It pad that said "We make better decks than Claude, Gamma, and Genspark" which led to quite a few conversations. One of those conversations being about the security requirements when working with large corporations. "Can you build on-prem?" Another signal that decks are a big pain point for major corporations and they understand the productivity lift if they can maintain output quality.

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When it comes to technology investments in multifamily communities, ROI matters, and managed WiFi delivers measurable impact. At Aerwave , we’re committed to making connectivity simple, scalable, and reliable. Check out Lesson 3 to see how the right network design translates into real returns for your portfolio! #connectivity, #managedwifi, #multifamily

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