WEEK 3 · MON 16 NOV 2026 · US AND THEM

Count your agents (you’ll be surprised)

How to run a first agent census in an afternoon, and what usually turns up.

Ask a room of leaders how many agents their organisation runs and you’ll usually get a shrug, a guess, or a number that turns out to be wrong. That’s not a criticism; agents are invisible by default. They live in tenants, chat sidebars, flows and scheduled jobs.

The vendors have noticed: Microsoft now ships an agent registry and calls Agent 365 a “control plane” for agents [S9]. When the platform builds an inventory, you know the inventory problem is real.

An afternoon census

1. Pull what the platform knows. Export any agent or app inventory your admins can see.
2. Ask the people. A two-question form: “What AI do you use that acts for you?” and “Did you build any?”
3. Look for schedules. Flows, scripts and jobs that call AI services overnight are your autopilots.
4. Write a card for each. Name, purpose, owner, data, and how much it does without asking.
5. Put the cards on a wall, real or virtual, where everyone can see them.

What usually turns up

Duplicates (several teams building the same helper), orphans (the builder left), and a handful of agents doing far more than anyone thought. In our experience that’s normal. The point of a census isn’t blame; it’s getting everything onto the same floor. OUR VIEW

IBM found 63% of breached organisations had no AI governance policy or were still writing one [S2]. A census is the first page of that policy.

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