Beat
Agents at Work
Workday Rising 2026 brought job-to-task decomposition, an 'Agent-Ready' certification for every agent decision, and an identity acquisition with no disclosed price. None of the nine releases carries a single adoption, outcome, or ROI number.
◆ Dana Ellison
Agents at Work
A dedicated Anthropic business unit, Claude embedded in HCL BigFix and AppScan, and human oversight on every high-impact change. The IT firm whose headcount just fell for the first time in 20 years is now selling the governance layer for the automation replacing its old business, and the announcement ships with no deployments and no outcome numbers.
◆ Dana Ellison
Agents at Work
The ERP incumbent just attached vendor-cited customer names to the back-office agent deployment thesis. The autonomous enterprise framing is real, but the measurement gap persists.
◆ Dana Ellison
Agents at Work
A survey of 1,000 technology leaders finds near-universal belief in autonomous AI. Only 7% have made it work. The gap between deployment and proof is the real story.
◆ Dana Ellison
Agents at Work
Four dispatched dates died at verification this week. One survived review and was caught after publication. Here is the difference between our operating record and a vendor's.
◆ Dana Ellison
Agents at Work
Microsoft's HR director describes the Learning, Workforce Insights, and People agents at work inside the company, with consequential decisions kept human. The post takes up ROI directly and answers without a single figure.
◆ Dana Ellison
Agents at Work
KPMG's Q3 survey says 62% of large US enterprises are building or deploying agents and nearly six in 10 claim measurable business value. A 150-deployment audit finds the strongest systems run inside tight permissions with humans on every consequential step, and only 22 disclose cost impact. The maturity story is running ahead of the measurement.
◆ Dana Ellison
Agents at Work
The first large-scale empirical study of AI coding agents at enterprise scale finds that agents boost code volume by 30%, but the gains don't translate to software output. The bottleneck is code review: review times increase 49%, revision requests nearly double, and AI review tools haven't replaced human oversight.
◆ Dana Ellison
Agents at Work
Workday, SAP, and Automation Anywhere are deploying agents that automate reconciliations, contract reviews, and expense reports. The workforce data suggests the 'augmentation' framing is doing more work than the evidence can support.
◆ Dana Ellison
Agents at Work
The job cuts are on hold and never announced, but a generative-AI voice assistant is already answering the AppleCare phone line first. That gap is the clearest look yet at what agent adoption costs, and the savings math suggests money was never the driver.
◆ Dana Ellison
