Agent Mode AI — the podcast
The audio companion to this site. Two analysts pick one claim from the Holding-up ledger per episode and walk through the evidence: the primary sources, the named speakers, the verifiable numbers, and the current verdict. Holding, Partial, or Not holding. Fifteen to twenty minutes, every Sunday.
- Episode 8 · 13:47 · 2026-06-28
Which LLM provider actually stays up?
Twenty-four months of operational record across the five major foundation-model providers. AM-136 documents Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, AWS Bedrock, and Azure OpenAI. Every provider had at least one multi-hour outage that exceeded its own SLA-credit threshold. Single-provider dependency is the 2026 procurement risk; multi-provider routing is the mitigation; LiteLLM, OpenRouter, Portkey are the gateway-abstraction reference implementations.
Claims: AM-136 - Episode 7 · 12:45 · 2026-06-21
Why 88% of agentic AI deployments fail
Four datasets converge on the same bimodal shape across enterprise agentic AI. Stanford Digital Economy Lab's twelve-eighty-eight split. McKinsey State of AI 2025's twenty-three percent scaling cohort. MIT NANDA's ninety-five percent pilot-failure finding. The 67-versus-22 build-versus-buy spread. The variable separating the cohorts is operational discipline, not model selection. Six dimensions instrument the gap.
- Episode 6 · 15:34 · 2026-06-14
What changes for enterprise AI on 2 August 2026
The 2 August 2026 EU AI Act deployer-obligations enforcement window is ninety days from this episode's publication date. Four claims interlock for the procurement reader: AM-127 the deadline-anchored prediction, AM-135 the Article 50 transparency UX, AM-138 the post-enforcement MSA red-team additions, and AM-046 the Article 12 audit substrate that ties the other three together. What changes operationally, what changes contractually, and what the first thirty days of enforcement will probably reveal.
- Episode 5 · 08:57 · 2026-06-07
What the money is doing
Three institutional capital allocators reading the same AI risk surface and behaving differently. AM-118: pension funds and sovereign wealth funds publishing nothing. AM-119: reinsurance market actively repricing AI tail risk. AM-121: SaaS incumbents celebrating with 25% RPO growth and AI-native cohort revenue concentration. The asymmetry is the editorial point.
- Episode 4 · 10:04 · 2026-05-31
What AI doesn't know about your business
Operators edition. Three places where SMB AI tools produce visible work that fails because the tool doesn't know about the regulatory or algorithmic layer it's operating in. OPS-037: AI-drafted invoices fail EU VAT audits on cross-border treatment. OPS-039: AI-drafted contracts miss notarisation requirements in EU jurisdictions. OPS-041: AI-generated marketing content hits Google + LinkedIn + Etsy enforcement. The pattern is the same; the fix takes 30 seconds.
- Episode 3 · 07:42 · 2026-05-24
Whose consent do you need to deploy AI?
The same labour-relations surface, two scales. AM-120: works council consent for AI deployment in EU multinationals under German BetrVG §87, Dutch WOR Article 27, French CSE provisions. OPS-038: collective-agreement triggers at four-employee SMB scale via avv-declaration and Allgemeinverbindlich-declaration. Abby and Avery walk both — the bridge episode between enterprise and operators.
- Episode 2 · 09:43 · 2026-05-17
What you are actually buying when you buy AI
Two procurement surfaces that did not exist on any CIO checklist eighteen months ago. AM-117: AI Bill of Materials becoming a procurement requirement under EU AI Act Article 11 and CycloneDX ML-BOM. AM-121: ServiceNow Now Assist's auditability and lock-in axis — the same Bardoliwalla pitch that justifies platform-incumbent AI also names the five-year commitment risk. Abby and Avery walk both.
- Episode 1 · 12:37 · 2026-05-10
The CIO's new liability
Two insurance markets are repricing AI risk on the same enterprise. D&O insurance is rewriting renewal language to flag AI supervision under the Caremark fiduciary doctrine; the reinsurance market is repricing AI tail risk into 2026 cyber treaties. Abby and Matt walk through both signals and what they say together about how underwriters now see AI risk.