Epilogue · What a Board Can Decide on Monday

Software as we know it dies because writing software and changing it stopped being expensive, and because any agent can today look inside an application and reproduce what it does. In its place, I contend, organizations will emerge that build their own system and evolve it with agents. The peace of mind that came included with bought software is lost. It is recovered by a piece nobody should certify for themselves: a system of truth, with its contract and its two guarantors, surrounded by four more control layers.

A board does not need to settle the future of software to act on Monday.

It can ask about the truth before asking about the product. In the next decision to buy, renew or replace a system, the first question is which records it holds that the organization is accountable to others for, and who vouches for their being true. “The vendor, because many use it” is a good answer, as long as it is known that it is being paid for. “We do” is an incomplete answer.

It can ask every offer for the five control layers, the suite, the custom development and the construction of one’s own: how it answers for the truth, who acts and on whose behalf, how far its agents decide, how it is measured that they do it well, on which standards it is built, and for each layer who operates it and how to go back. An offer that leaves any one of those questions unanswered cannot yet be compared.

And it can adopt a short rule: what cannot be shown to a third party does not count as a control. The telecommunications operators of chapter 7 trust their artificial intelligence quite a bit more than they can demonstrate, and a board has no reason to inherit that gap.

The rest of the trilogy tells where this transition is going, which way it is traveled and how it is built. This book wanted to answer why one has to cross now, and what cannot be left behind.