Introduction

• Can current systems survive the shift to agents?
• Agents become the interface (instead of record systems such as Salesforce, Workday, etc.)
• Decision Traces: Missing layer that actually runs enterprises. They capture what happens in specific cases.
• Rules: Tell an agent what should happen in general.
• Agents do not just need rules. They need access to decision traces to show how rules were applied in the past, and how conflicts are resolved.
• Agent systems sit in the execution path. They see the full context at decision time. If these traces are persisted, we get a queryable record of how decisions were made. This currently does not exist.
• This accumulated structure formed by these traces is called a context graph. It is a living record of decision traces stitched across entitites, and time, so the precedent becomes searchable.

What Current Systems do not Capture

• Agents ship into real workflows. Decision traces are missing.
• We can store the following as durable artifacts:
  1. Exception logic that lives in people's heads
  2. Precedent from past decisions
  3. Cross-system synthesis
  4. Approval chains
• When startups instrument the agent orchestration layer to emit a decision trace on every tun, they get something that enterprises almost never have today, which is a replayable history of turning context into action.
• Over time, records should naturally form a context graph.

Why it is not Currently Possible

• Operational incumbents are siloed, and they prioritize their current state. Even if these systems introduce agents, they do not preserve the context that justified the decision.
• You cannot replay the state of the world at decision time.
• A system of agents has an advantage that the agents are in the orchestration path. When an agent triages an escalation, responds to an incident or decides a discount, it pulls context from multiple systems and acts.
• The orchestration layer sees the full picture, because it executes the workflow.