SIGN0016 — Agenticality Signals

18-month lock-ins on technology that obsoletes every 6 months. That's the contract most CFOs signed in 2025. Three obsolescence cycles, one termination fee.

Yesterday I said there's one question every AI-buying CFO should be asking, and almost none of them are. Here it is, written for the finance team and not the ML team:

Can I swap the generalist model under this agent on a Friday afternoon without losing what it has learned about my business by Monday morning?

If the answer is "no" or "let me check with the vendor," you don't own an agent. You're renting a personality on a 36-month leash. The "veteran" — the part that actually knows your reconciliation patterns, your client roster, your edge cases — has to live in your loop, on your traces, governed by your evals. Otherwise the next cheaper, smarter model drops in October and you pay to not use it.

This is the discipline behind the compound model. Three products. One foundation. Every node has to survive a model swap by lunch. That's how we build, and that's how operators should buy.

Think about Helen, CFO of a 60-bed regional NSW aged-care provider. She signed a 36-month clinical-scheduling AI contract last September. Six frontier models have shipped since. She can't move. Residents wear the gap.

Tomorrow: three redlines every AI contract should carry, in plain finance English.

— Agenticality