Market Pulse
Market Pulse
When Agents Move Faster Than You Can Stop Them
Enterprise agent deployments doubled in four months—7.2% in August 2025, 13.2% by December. That acceleration hit architectural limits most organizations didn't know existed.
Most can watch their agents work. Far fewer can actually stop them when something goes wrong. A twenty-point gap separates visibility from control. For web agents pulling data across hundreds of sites simultaneously, sessions span different authentication implementations, each with different timeout behaviors. Failures cascade. Manual coordination can't keep pace. The speed that makes agents valuable is the same speed that makes them impossible to stop.
When Agents Move Faster Than You Can Stop Them
Enterprise agent deployments doubled in four months—7.2% in August 2025, 13.2% by December. That acceleration hit architectural limits most organizations didn't know existed.
Most can watch their agents work. Far fewer can actually stop them when something goes wrong. A twenty-point gap separates visibility from control. For web agents pulling data across hundreds of sites simultaneously, sessions span different authentication implementations, each with different timeout behaviors. Failures cascade. Manual coordination can't keep pace. The speed that makes agents valuable is the same speed that makes them impossible to stop.
Where This Goes
Security vendors launched agent-specific identity frameworks in early January. The timing matters. Machine identities now outnumber humans by orders of magnitude in production environments.
Every agent session creates credentials, service accounts, API keys. Each persists beyond its immediate purpose. Traditional access control assumes humans request permission, use resources, log off. Agents spawn identities continuously, operate across time zones, accumulate entitlements without natural expiration.
We think the next six months separate organizations that grasp the architectural challenge from those treating this as a monitoring upgrade. The compliance gap isn't documentation quality. Most identity systems can't answer "what can this agent actually do right now?" when you have thousands running simultaneously. That question gets harder as agents start coordinating with each other.
From the Labs
Model-First Reasoning Tackles Representational Deficiencies in Planning
Reliability becomes a structural problem with a structural solution: explicit modeling phases before execution.
More interpretable behavior. The explicit model reveals what the agent actually understands about the task.
From the Labs
Scaling Laws Reveal When Coordination Helps and Hurts
Empirical decision criteria for when to scale horizontally versus improving single-agent capabilities.
Practical guidance emerges: web navigation benefits from decentralized coordination; sequential reasoning actively degrades with multi-agent approaches.
From the Labs
Reflection-Driven Control Makes Safety Intrinsic, Not Bolted-On
Safety as intrinsic reasoning reduces latency overhead while improving contextual awareness.
Pluggable design means existing systems can adopt this without rewrites, lowering the barrier to production-grade safety.
From the Labs
EnCompass Cuts Search Implementation Effort by 80 Percent
Implementing robust error handling typically requires as much code as agent logic. This eliminates that complexity tax.
Branchpoints acknowledge that LLM outputs are inherently probabilistic and make that uncertainty explicit in code structure.
What We're Reading
