Enterprise Agentic Computing—12 Rules
John Taschek is a market analyst at Salesforce who, inspired by Codd’s twelve rules for relational databases, has written twelve rules for agentic computing. They are a master class in what it’s going to take to govern and run agentic workflows at scale, and every CIO should read them and discuss them in depth with their teams.
For the rest of us, they are a wake-up call as to how heavy a lift pervasive agentic computing will be. Daunting as that might seem, it’s actually a call to action to start now with highly contained, high-value use cases where all twelve rules can be effectively addressed locally. Not only does this result in short-term ROI from releasing trapped value, it also lays the foundation for sizing future investments in infrastructure, personnel, tooling, and applications.
The agentic revolution is not for the faint of heart. Neither is it for the fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants crowd. Time to buckle up and buckle down.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
Love it. One dimension worth adding: information only has value when it reduces uncertainty. If the agent confirms what you already knew, the bits are wasted. Every rule adds signal. Every rule also adds cost: compute, latency, governance overhead, review cycles. 12 layers of validation for a $50 decision is noise pretending to be signal. The 13th rule: value per bit delivered. Trapped value is real. So is trapped cost.
🙏💐
Rule 9 (Human-in-the-Loop by Design) is the one I see broken most in practice. Teams say they have it, but what they actually have is rubber-stamp review — humans approving agent outputs they can't meaningfully verify at the speed agents produce them. In the agentic coding pipelines I've built, we had to rethink HITL entirely: instead of reviewing every output, we shifted to reviewing the agent's decision boundaries upfront and only escalating genuine edge cases. The result was fewer overrides but much more meaningful ones. Which of the 12 rules do you find enterprises struggle with most when moving from pilot to production?
Your work has helped so many teams think more clearly about the hard part between promise and scale. The Chasm framework still feels as relevant today as ever, especially for leaders trying to turn innovation into real adoption. 🚀
Operating is exactly where it breaks. Capability gets you the demo — operating gets you the budget line that survives next year. The teams pulling ahead treat agents like staff you onboard and supervise, not software you install.