Seattle Board Meeting | July 30 2025
Meeting | Agenda | Members | Format
The Next Frontier of Digital Transformation
Generative AI may have entered the enterprise quickly - but impact has lagged. Tools have been deployed, copilots launched, and POCs initiated, yet few organizations have seen material shifts in cost, speed, or growth. Why? Because most efforts so far have been horizontal, assistive, and surface-level.
The next wave - Agentic AI - promises something deeper: autonomous systems that can pursue goals, orchestrate workflows, collaborate across systems, and act with minimal human intervention. These aren’t just copilots—they are teammates, operators, and decision engines. But with that potential comes real complexity: technical, organizational, and cultural.
Our objective is to explore the emerging architecture, real-world deployments, and future implications of Agentic AI—from what’s working today to what’s coming tomorrow.
The Broader Landscape: Four Shifts Underway
Across industries, four structural shifts are becoming visible:
1. From Assistive to Autonomous
The enterprise is moving from AI tools that support humans to systems that execute on behalf of them. This demands new thinking around workflow design, decision rights, and trust.
2. From Tasks to Goals
Agentic systems don’t just automate steps - they pursue outcomes. This reframes how we think about orchestration, exception handling, and value delivery across a process.
3. From Copilots to Meshes
As the number of agents grows, the challenge shifts from building agents to governing them - ensuring coherence, control, auditability, and cross-agent coordination. Architecture becomes critical.
4. From AI Teams to Operating Model Redesign
Scaling agentic AI requires more than model tuning. It demands org model rewiring - new roles, new oversight models, and new definitions of accountability.
Key Tensions We’ll Explore
While the day’s agenda focuses on two slices - ground truth (morning) and emerging direction (afternoon)—we’re stepping into a broader set of strategic questions:
- What types of autonomy are valuable - and in which domains?
- How do we balance control vs. initiative in agent design?
- What does governance look like in systems that no longer wait for human input?
- How do we avoid agent sprawl, and instead design for resilience and reuse?
- What are the signals that a function or workflow is ready to be agentic?
- How do platform choices and architecture shape the ceiling of what’s possible?
- And what does it take to shift from scattered pilots to scalable transformation?
We won’t answer all of these - but we’ll make a meaningful dent.
Framing for the Day
To make the most of our time, we’ve organized the day into two acts:
- Morning: Closed-door session among members to share what’s real today - working examples, key blockers, and what’s been effective in moving forward
- Afternoon: Broader discussion with guest experts on where platforms, infrastructure, and capabilities are headed next
This is a fast-moving space. By bringing both practitioner experience and ecosystem insight into the room, our goal is to ground the conversation in what’s real, while staying oriented toward what’s coming.
Executive Technology Board (c)
AgendaParticipating MembersMeeting FormatMeeting Logistics, Seattle
Pre Read: Attending MembersPre Read: Board Discussion
Agentic AI: a think tank snapshotSeattle Board Meeting Photos