Zufelt.ca

My Writing

1. Before You Give an Agent the Keys

   OriumJuly 6, 2026

   Agentic AI security isn't a problem to be solved but a balance to be struck: anything that can act can act wrongly, so organizations need to calibrate each agent's autonomy to the damage it could cause. The piece identifies six areas where that tradeoff concentrates — credentials, data flow inspection, tool access, host isolation, review processes, and data retention — and argues that instrumentation and human accountability have to back up the technical controls.

2. Trusting Agent-Driven Delivery in Production

   OriumJuly 3, 2026

   Agent-driven software delivery shows real promise but keeps stalling in practice, and the fix isn't a better model. The path to trustworthy, production-ready output is removing friction from the delivery lifecycle: documenting conventions, building sandboxes, automating checks, and giving teams clear visibility into what agents changed and why.

3. A Better Search Bar, or a Relationship?

   OriumJune 29, 2026

   Shopping agents are being built almost entirely around product discovery, but that undersells what they could be. Extending agents past checkout into onboarding, problem resolution, and ongoing personalized recommendations is what turns a one-time transaction into a lasting customer relationship.

4. The First Wave of Agentic AI Is Already in Production

   MACH AllianceMay 7, 2026

   Five enterprises have already moved AI agents into production with measurable results, and the pattern cuts against conventional wisdom: the biggest wins came from narrowly targeting specific operational bottlenecks, not from obvious use cases like chatbots. Composable, API-first infrastructure and tightly scoped starting points were common to every success story.

5. Building the Agent Ecosystem: How We're Learning Together

   MACH AllianceApril 9, 2026

   MACH Alliance's Agent Ecosystem initiative brings enterprises, practitioners, and technology partners together to build enterprise AI solutions collaboratively rather than in isolation. The program is organized around four themes — engagement, awareness, solution demonstrations, and trust-signal creation — with separate participation paths for business leaders and technical architects.

6. Competitive Compression: The New Race for Execution Capacity

   OriumMarch 13, 2026

   Agentic AI is compressing the gap between intent and action, and that speed is becoming the new competitive battleground. Organizations with strong internal structure can turn that compression into an advantage, while those with fragmented processes will find their weak points exposed faster than ever.

7. What Agentic Systems Are Forcing Organizations to Confront

   OriumMarch 4, 2026

   As agentic AI moves from pilot to mainstream, it's surfacing five hard operating questions at once: competitive acceleration, operational clarity, workforce evolution, digital delivery, and shifting customer expectations. Adopting the technology isn't the hard part — the real work is fixing the structural issues it exposes.

8. Move Beyond Digital Transformation with Agentic Thinking

   OriumDecember 16, 2025

   Digital transformation has become table stakes rather than an advantage, so the real differentiator now is agentic transformation: building systems, human and AI alike, that act autonomously and adaptively instead of just digitizing existing processes. That means designing for context-awareness and proactive action, not just faster versions of the old workflow.

9. The Fluent Builder MCP Server: Accelerating Developer Productivity with Context-Aware Tools

   Fluent CommerceNovember 25, 2025

   Fluent Commerce and Orium built the Fluent Builder MCP Server, wiring AI-assisted development directly into the Fluent CLI so developers can generate GraphQL queries and modify rules and workflows faster. It's a concrete example of the Model Context Protocol — a year old at the time of writing — connecting agents to real developer tooling rather than staying a demo.

10. Agentic Payments Explained: ACP, AP2, and x402

    OriumSeptember 29, 2025

    Three new protocols — ACP from Stripe and OpenAI, AP2 from Google, and x402 from Coinbase — are emerging to let AI agents transact autonomously. Rather than competing head-on, each sits at a different layer of the agentic commerce stack: checkout integration, trust and authorization, and programmable payments, respectively.