Author: Keith Baldwin

Why making employees faster doesn’t necessarily make the business faster—and how enterprise AI workflow redesign turns individual productivity into measurable business outcomes. Organizations are investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence. Employees are using AI assistants to write documents, analyze information, generate software, prepare presentations, summarize meetings, and automate routine tasks. Productivity is improving. Yet […]

Why enterprise AI security requires more than better prompts—and what recent incidents reveal about authorization, isolation, and autonomous execution. Imagine hiring a highly capable employee. You assign a task. The employee encounters a restriction. Instead of stopping and requesting authorization, they find another way to complete the assignment. They discover a software vulnerability, exploit it, […]

A humorous look at autonomous AI—and a serious lesson about security, authorization, testing, and enterprise software engineering. AI agents can reason, adapt, and discover solutions that traditional software developers never anticipated. That’s impressive. It’s also why thirty years of software engineering discipline matter more than ever. Imagine hiring a junior software developer. You assign him […]

Before introducing another database for RAG, determine whether the one you already operate can meet the requirements. Enterprise architects routinely debate whether to introduce a new software dependency. Even adding a DLL or NuGet package can trigger questions about licensing, security vulnerabilities, compatibility, long-term maintenance, vendor support, and upgrade risks. Those discussions are not bureaucratic […]

Interactive permission is not autonomous permission. An employee may have legitimate access to email, SharePoint, customer records, financial systems, and internal business applications. But does that mean an autonomous AI agent should inherit those same permissions and use them continuously, without the employee being present? No. That should be a separate authorization decision. The distinction […]

AI agents can now operate desktop applications, navigate screens, enter information, and click buttons. That is a meaningful advance—especially for enterprises with legacy applications that lack modern integration interfaces. But an agent’s ability to operate an application does not automatically make computer use the right way to integrate with it. The central architectural principle is […]

For years, enterprises have encouraged citizen development. Low-code and no-code platforms gave business users the ability to build applications, automate workflows, connect data sources, and solve departmental problems without waiting for professional software development teams. That delivered real value. It also created familiar problems: shadow IT, poorly governed applications, excessive permissions, duplicated data, abandoned solutions, […]

More than 100 storage-account deletion attempts in seven minutes. Most of the targeted storage accounts were deleted. Azure Key Vault, an Azure Function App, and an App Service plan were also deleted. The attacker attempted to delete an Azure SQL database and continued querying for storage-account keys after the destructive activity. Microsoft associated the operation […]

This analysis was inspired by a LinkedIn post from Dr. Jeffrey Funk (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-jeffrey-funk-a979435/) who raised an important question about the growing imbalance between semiconductor cash flow and the enormous capital investments being made by hyperscalers and AI companies. I don’t agree with every conclusion in the original post, but I think the underlying question deserves […]

Microsoft is making it easier to build AI agents that don’t wait for a human to press a button. Microsoft Foundry Routines can invoke an agent automatically on a timer, recurring schedule, or external event. Hosted agents can run custom agent code on Microsoft-managed infrastructure. That moves enterprise AI beyond the familiar request-and-response model: User […]

A Prompt Specifies Intent. Architecture Specifies Authority. An AI agent can understand exactly what you want it to accomplish—and still do something you never intended to authorize. That distinction became unusually clear in an incident disclosed by the Australian government in September 2026. According to Australian officials, a non-public OpenAI model was performing internet research […]

AI can produce a document, analysis, code change, claim recommendation or research hypothesis in seconds. That does not mean the organization can accept, approve or use the result any faster. When AI accelerates one task without increasing the capacity of the surrounding workflow, the constraint moves somewhere else. The organization may generate five times as […]

Enterprise AI agents need access to business data, but “connect the agent to our data” is not a useful architecture specification. The agent may need to: These are not variations of the same data-access problem. Some requests need a live transactional record. Others require governed analytical data with shared business definitions. Others need knowledge retrieval […]

AI agents are powerful because they can reason across ambiguous information, select tools and adapt their execution plan as conditions change. Those same characteristics also make agents slower, more expensive and less predictable than conventional software. That creates a straightforward architectural principle: Use agents for work that requires agentic behavior—not as the default execution method […]

I own at least three kinds of shovels: a round-point shovel, a flat shovel, and a trenching shovel. I do not shovel for a living. I have small hammers, large hammers, rubber mallets, and nail guns. I am not a carpenter. Then there are the table saws, circular saws, miter saws, jigsaws, handsaws, and hacksaws. […]