Skip to content

Protocols for Business 2026 Review: The Year of the Agent

Article rafa, 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.

Related resources

Talk

Guest Talk with Daniel Bashir | A Survey of AI for the Protocol-Minded

Daniel Bashir, ML engineer at AWS and host of The Gradient podcast, surveys how protocol thinking applies across AI—from funding and scaling laws (like DeepMind's Chinchilla compute-optimal training protocol) to benchmarks (perplexity vs. François Chollet's ARC benchmark for measuring sample-efficient generalization) to regulation (the EU AI Act's risk-tiered categorization). He argues that nearly every layer of AI development—research, engineering, deployment, and governance—can be reframed as a set of competing or evolving protocols, using examples like Sarah Hooker's 'hardware lottery' and Tolga Bolukbasi-style debates over fair/responsible AI operationalization.

benchmarks-as-protocols-perplexity-arc-vibe-based-evaluation chollets-formal-definition-of-intelligence-and-generalization-hierarchy eu-ai-act-risk-based-regulatory-tiers

Daniel Bashir

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.

attention-as-natural-law-center-vs-periphery-mark-weiser calm-technology-certification-framework-81-point-six-categories certification-legitimacy-and-protocol-authority-without-enforcement-power

Amber Case

Talk

Chores as Complex Coordination

Daniel Kronovet presents 'Chores as Complex Coordination,' introducing 'regenerative labor' as a concept distinct from maintenance or care work, and detailing Chore Wheel, a Slack-based protocol suite (chores, hearts, things) built on Elinor Ostrom's commons-governance principles plus four digital-era additions: no privileged roles, simple inputs, humans-for-sensing/machines-for-bookkeeping, and continuous asynchronous participation. Drawing on his Los Angeles co-living house Sage House as a real-world case study, he argues that separating task definition from task performance (akin to double-entry bookkeeping) allows a fixed, continuously-replenished point economy to turn dish-washing and trash duty into a system of social computation that generates social capital alongside physical upkeep.

chore-wheel-choresheartsthings-mechanisms community-currency-with-point-expiration governance

Daniel Kronovet