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Protocols for Business 2026 Review: The Year of the Agent

Articlerafa, Sachin Benny, Matthew McDowell-Sweet

As AI agents increasingly operate autonomously in business contexts without waiting for human approvals, organizations must rely on inherited legal and procedural frameworks—from agency law to audit trails—to maintain coherence rather than assuming either business-as-usual or complete organizational rupture. The piece argues that AI's integration represents a radical transformation that builds upon, rather than breaks from, centuries of established practices around delegation, authority, and accountability.

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Talk

Markets and the Journey to Neutrality

Nicholas Fett traces the history of market neutrality from 1889 Oklahoma land runs and Adam Smith's moral sentiments through Keynes, the Mont Pelerin Society, and into crypto, arguing that protocols designed to be neutral (Bitcoin's decentralization, Ethereum's 'crops' ethos) inevitably get captured by economic incentives like mining and block-builder centralization. He uses the 'tunnel' and 'one more lane' analogies to argue that building for neutral principles without a defined societal goal leads to outcomes divorced from original intentions, and that protocol designers must instead encode explicit purpose rather than chase an unattainable neutral equilibrium.

Nicholas Fett

Talk

Proliferation of Intelligence: Business and Hyper Learning Machines

Krishnakumar Gurumurthy argues that AI's frontier capabilities are outpacing business models built on human labor, creating a socio-economic gap disguised as a technical one. He proposes discretizing business processes into indivisible functional units, mapping them to appropriate AI techniques (neural operators, transformers, RL, etc.), and building a new enterprise stack with guardrails and trust architecture—drawing an extended analogy to how electricity safety standards (insulation, circuit breakers, licensed electricians) evolved to argue for similar AI containment, validation, and certification regimes.

Krishnakumar Gurumurthy

Talk

Attention as Natural Law

Amber Case presents the Calm Technology Institute's 81-point certification framework, arguing that human attention operates like a law of nature—distinguishing prefrontal-cortex-demanding 'center' attention from pass-through 'peripheral' attention—and that products (from car buttons to AI interfaces) should be designed and governed accordingly. She traces the framework's lineage to Mark Weiser's 1995 calm technology principles and discusses the legitimacy problem of building certification authority without statutory power, comparing CTI to Underwriter Laboratories and the Good Housekeeping Seal. The session closes with audience discussion, including Venkatesh Rao connecting the talk to Kairos/Chronos time and AI's 'staircase' temporality.

Amber Case