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187 posts in Blog.
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
Maintenance AI Agents Need Rules for When They Disagree
McKinsey shows what single AI agents can already do in maintenance. The harder problem starts when several of them work on the same plant.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
The Operational Decision Owner’s Dilemma
Who funds the change and owns the outcome when agentic operations crosses departmental boundaries? Agentic operations can help a business evaluate production, maintenance, energy and workforce decisions together as conditions change. Acting on a shared assessment may require departments to accept di
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Software-Defined Operations Writes the Decision Down for AI Agents
Software-defined operations means the logic behind an operating decision lives in one place in software. Today it is spread across spreadsheets, procedures, control settings, approval routes and the experience of a few senior people.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
How Much Rigor Does Your Operational AI Need?
During workshop sessions with a large oil and gas company, we discussed how different artificial intelligence (AI) models could be used across operational use cases. Some applications allowed room to experiment with frontier models and change models regularly.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
From Harness to Graph: What the Next Wave of AI Engineering Means for Industrial Operations
In July 2026 the AI engineering conversation moved again — from the harness to graph engineering: designing an AI system's topology as an explicit, inspectable graph of agents, tools, deterministic logic, and governance gates. It turns out industrial operations has been building exactly this for over a decade.
NGNic Gould
What 50 Analyst Research Appearances Reveal About XMPro
From digital twins to Agentic Operations, the pattern behind XMPro's 50 analyst research appearances since January 2024 tells a bigger story than the number.
Wouter Beneke
An Ontology Is Not a Graph Database
Why industrial context needs a system of fit-for-purpose data stores, standardized and governed, before an agent can act on it safely.
Pieter van Schalkwyk
Who Owns Your Context Layer?
France's intelligence agency dropped a platform it could not itself turn off. Any operator building an industrial context layer faces the same exposure, and the consolidation into OEM stacks makes it urgent. The procurement question has changed from which platform has the best features to: whatever happens to this vendor, what do I still own?
Pieter van Schalkwyk