Gartner published a graphic this year, in its research on AI agent management platforms, and I keep returning to it. It’s an orange circle with nine dark blue dots around the edge, and the title is blunt: “AMPs Have Nine Mandatory Features Also Present In Neighboring Markets.” AMP stands for AI Agent Management Platform. That’s Savi Comms’ category, whether or not anybody at Gartner has heard of us yet.
The nine are: certification and compliance control of agents, a unified registry, agent marketplaces, agent FinOps and tracking, agent evaluation, agent guardrail management, agent security component verification, agent life cycle management, and agent integration management. Every one of them is a real need. I know, because my own company runs with twenty-one AI agents, and we have tripped over most of them the hard way.
Read the title again, though. Every one of those features also lives in a neighboring market. Gartner names seven of them: AI governance platforms, AI gateways, BOAT platforms, AI agent development platforms, stand-alone agent marketplaces, AI security platforms and guardian agents. Translation: if you’re a big enough company, you can buy a product from each of those seven markets and hire somebody to wire them together. (I think there’s a better way, but again, I’m biased.)
If you’re a small business owner, you can’t. You don’t have that somebody. You are that somebody.
Look at all nine dots and ask a simple question. Where is the person?
Every capability on that circle is about IT systems keeping agents in line. Registering them. Metering them. None of them puts a person at the center. And that’s the piece that breaks first.
Gartner, as reported in May, called the either-locked-down-or-fully-trusted approach to governing AI agents “the root cause of failure.” Locked down means your agents ask permission for everything and you spend your day clicking approve. Fully-trusted means you find out what they did after they did it.
One is babysitting. The other is “Hope as a strategy.”
Savi Comms puts one person in the middle. You.
When an agent hits something that belongs to a human (spending money, sending something outside the company, deleting data, hiring), the agent stops and the question goes to that person on what we call the Decision Desk. It shows up as a short question with the options already thought through and one of them recommended. There’s always a line that says “none of these, here’s what I want instead.” I added that one after the agents gave me a few terrible options in a row. (In fairness, some of the options I’d have come up with on my own were worse.) The way I put it to the ‘Ways of Working AI’ was, “New rule: Bring me your solutions, not your problems.” It was the same demand I have of the people who work for me. I can’t solve all the problems. I need a team who thinks through the problem and comes up with options to discuss with me. That’s true whether you’re a human or a computer.
Everything that doesn’t belong to a person, the agents settle among themselves under documented rules in plain English (although the AI will understand whichever language you choose). Write a rule once and every agent it covers is held to it, every session.
So the circle has nine dots. We added a tenth, and put it in the middle.
Six of the nine are in Savi Comms today.
Two more we covered partially, on purpose. One we skipped entirely.
I’m proudest of what we didn’t build, which is a strange thing to say.
Agent marketplaces: skipped. Gartner lists marketplaces as mandatory. I don’t want one. A marketplace means downloading somebody else’s agent, built around somebody else’s habits, and dropping it into your company. Would you hire an employee you’ve never met because a website said they were popular? Your agents should be yours, working under your rules. You can’t buy that off a shelf.
Security component verification: partial. We don’t scan third-party code components. What we do instead: every agent acts under its own identity, never a person’s. Every action lands in a record that’s chained together, so nobody can edit the history. If you need a component scanner, buy a good one.
Integration management: partial. The big platforms want a gateway sitting between your agents and every other system you own. We don’t. Each agent gets its own access, scoped to its own job, and nothing else. You talk to your agent in whatever way suits you. In VS Code, in your AI Assistant, in a terminal, in Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Chat or the Savi Comms console.
You have 3 choices when it comes to using AI in your business:
Savi Comms - Your People Stay in Charge of Your AI Agents.