Agentic AI for Business

Every major AI vendor is now selling "agentic AI." Most of what they're selling isn't agentic at all.

The term has become a marketing blanket thrown over everything from basic chatbots to simple workflow automations. Meanwhile, CIOs are signing seven-figure contracts for products that fail a five-question test for genuine autonomy — and they don't even know the test exists.

Real agentic AI doesn't just answer questions. It reasons through multi-step problems, selects its own tools, takes autonomous action, and recovers when things go wrong. The gap between that and a rebranded chatbot is the gap between a self-driving car and cruise control. Leaders who can't tell the difference are about to spend a lot of money learning the hard way.

Agentic AI for Business gives you the framework the vendors won't — built by someone who deploys these systems inside enterprise environments, not someone who writes about them from conference stages.

What's inside:

• A five-question test that exposes rebranded chatbots disguised as agentic products — and the three capabilities that define genuine autonomy
• The five-layer agentic AI stack, mapped to the build-vs-buy decisions your team is already arguing about
• A use-case identification framework that separates high-value agentic opportunities from automation theater
• Six real-world case studies — including the deployments that failed, why they failed, and what the postmortems revealed
• The three-phase deployment model: shadow mode → supervised mode → autonomous mode, with clear criteria for advancing between phases
• Guardrail architecture that prevents catastrophic failures without reducing your agents to glorified form-fillers
• Failure modes, incident response playbooks, and kill switches — because agents will go wrong, and the question is whether you've planned for it
• The workforce impact no one wants to discuss honestly: which roles change, which disappear, and what organizational transformation actually requires
• Six performance metrics designed specifically for agentic systems, because traditional AI metrics measure the wrong things entirely

This book is for you if:

• You're a CIO, CTO, or VP evaluating agentic AI investments and tired of vendor fog
• You lead a business function that's been targeted for agentic automation and need to know what's real
• You're a transformation officer or consultant who needs a vendor-neutral decision framework
• You've read the hype and want the practitioner reality from someone with production deployments

This book is NOT for you if you want a technical manual for building agents, breathless optimism about AI changing everything, or a 30-page pamphlet skimming the surface. This is a 37,000+ word strategy guide written with the anti-hype discipline the topic desperately needs.

Shane Larson is a domain manager for integration engineering at a major financial institution and founder of Cortex Agent. He builds agentic AI systems for enterprise environments — and wrote the book he wished existed when his organization started evaluating them.