When people say "agent," they mean different things. CXO confusion isn't a marketing problem — it's a vocabulary problem. The agent stack has a shape now. Three protocols form the core (MCP, A2A, AG-UI). One pattern enforces it: the Judge Layer. And one role coordinates it all: the OIC — Orchestrator-in-Chief.
Every external action passes through a judge — a separate model that reads the proposal, scores it against intent, and issues one of four verdicts: ALLOW · REVISE · BLOCK · ESCALATE. The actor agent never bypasses it. The OIC sees the audit trail.
Propose an action a sub-agent might take. The judge evaluates against intent + tier. This is the same judge code running in production for Byron's fleet.
69% of B2B buyers in March 2026 changed vendors based on what an AI chatbot told them. Agents now read your boundaries before humans read your homepage. If your fleet has no boundary, both audiences downgrade you.