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CEO's Blog
122 articles — Insights from XMPro CEO Pieter van Schalkwyk on industrial AI and agentic operations.
Agents Are Context Hungry
The better the agent, the more it demands of the context beneath it. Build that foundation now, open and governed, before you scale the agents on top of it.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
You Don't Want an Operator With Four PhDs
An engineer at a large manufacturer showed me a dashboard last week. Sharp work, built fast, and he was rightly proud of it.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Generative Development for Trustworthy Operations at Scale
Vibe coding is cool. Engineers can turn an idea into a working interface quickly, put it in front of colleagues and show what is possible.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Agent Skills Are the New Spreadsheets
A week or so ago I joined a call with the IT division of a large organization who thought they had figured out its agent strategy. They walked me through it with some pride: AI assistants loaded with skill files written by their subject matter experts, ready to answer questions across the business.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Australia Cannot Afford to Fall Behind on AI
Australia cannot sustain a high-wage economy without becoming more productive. Yet our debate about artificial intelligence keeps returning to the jobs it might replace.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Decision Engineering Comes Before Agent Design
List the decisions first. Then decide, for each one, how it should be made, who holds the authority and what evidence it needs.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Your Agents Don't Need a Bigger Model. 615 Business Cases Show Why.
Researchers at Wharton, Harvard Business School, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pennsylvania have built an AI benchmark out of business school case studies. They took 615 open-ended questions from 238 cases across eighteen disciplines, with nothing multiple choice anywhere in it, and scored e
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Intelligence Is Fungible. Operational Context Is Not.
For a model of equivalent performance, the price of intelligence falls about ten times a year. That figure is a16z's own, from their analysis of inference pricing.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Six Things Pharma Should Prepare to Demonstrate About an AI Agent
The draft European rules for artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine manufacturing are blunt about language models. Annex 22 to the European Union (EU) Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) guidelines, published for consultation in July 2025, says generative AI and large language models "should not be
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Should Multi-Agent Systems Negotiate?
Some decisions are negotiations. Almost no multi-agent system is built that way.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
The Agent Is the Cheap Part
Owning your agent IP and owning the platform underneath it are separate commitments. Most build business cases only price the first.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Software-Defined Operations: An Architecture for Agentic Operations
Software-defined operations is an architectural pattern that decouples operational decision and coordination logic from the underlying applications, automation systems, and physical infrastructure, enabling that logic to be configured, changed, and governed through software. Agentic Operations needs
Pieter van Schalkwyk
The AI Labs Want Cover. Industry Never Had Any.
The frontier labs want a regulator to answer for what their models do. In industry, the company that runs the plant answers for what its equipment does, and it builds the guardrails itself.
Pieter van Schalkwyk