The CTO Playbook for Agentic Systems
A 71-page operating manual for engineering leaders whose software has started to reason, decide, and write the software that carries out those decisions. Written by our CTO, Andrew Stevens.
Category
Opinion
Protecting the IP in a Generative World
10 minutes
A studio can find its back catalogue inside a public model's training data and discover it cannot prove, from its own systems, when the work …
Launch Day Is Every Day
9 minutes
Subscription and on-demand media platforms still spend their engineering effort preparing for the scheduled launch, while the traffic that …
Your Managed Providers Are About to Be Regulated. Here Is What to Ask Them.
11 minutes
The UK Cyber Security and Resilience Bill and NIS2 both regulate managed service providers directly, wherever they are established. Seven …
Arkhe: An Ontology Language for AI Systems
7 minutes
Two weeks ago I argued that your ontology is the asset and you should own it in a neutral, versioned form. Arguing is cheap. Arkhe v0.2 is …
Identity Is the Bank Now
10 minutes
Fraud, financial crime, KYC, and customer experience have collapsed into a single engineering question about who the customer is. This final …
The Sovereign Cloud Question Inside a Bank
13 minutes
Sovereign cloud commitments are usually scoped as a hosting decision, while a bank's real exposure sits in the data flows that cross the …
Regulatory Evidence at Machine Speed
9 minutes
Regulators have moved from asking banks for periodic reports to asking for specific evidence, on demand, about decisions made months ago. …
Trust Is an Engineering Output
9 minutes
Being correct is not the same as being able to prove it. This final post in The Engineering Underneath argues that trust is an engineering …
Your Ontology Is the Asset. Stop Renting It Back.
10 minutes
Agentic AI post-mortems keep naming the same trio: determinism failures, hallucinations, and compliance gaps. An ontology retires all three, …
Multi-Cloud Versus Consolidation
9 minutes
Most enterprises already run several clouds, whether they chose to or not, so the real question is not whether to consolidate but how to …
Telemetry Is Becoming the Business
10 minutes
Operational telemetry has moved from a back-office by-product to one of the most valuable assets a business owns. This fourth post in The …
Evidence Versus Speed
10 minutes
Regulated organisations have long optimised for speed and assumed the evidence could be assembled later. This third post in The Engineering …