Whitepaper
From the core to the agentic layer.
Modernise the core or put agents on top? What decides is not the system but how legible its rules are. A four-quadrant framework for the 2027 budget.
Overview
The 2027 budget forces many organisations to choose between two paths presented as mutually exclusive: modernising the core system or deploying AI agents on top of it. Both have a well-known record of failure. This paper argues the deciding variable is not the system but the legibility of its rules. An agent that reads from an opaque core is a contained risk; an agent that writes to it is comprehension debt at machine speed. The decision is made domain by domain, crossing two axes: how much we know about the rules governing that domain, and how much autonomy the agent needs.