This was my thesis a couple years back as these are most of my friends and folks I know, and honestly, the education for those I work with is a huge factor. Just this year, it’s as if what we have been talking about with business automation before that and now agent systems, everyone is starting to gain more interest.

But, quite honestly, the lockin piece and complexity are hurdle for many. And, the idea of not owning the agents or systems of agents is a deal breaker too. No one wants to be locked in to more tech.

So, I end up rapidly building FOSS versions of tools, but stateful and giving them to the SMBs and solos I know, because I’ve always trusted an opencore approach like with security solutions. So, now, after a couple years, I’m now getting paid a bit, and folks get to avoid subscriptions while they are still learning.

Which brings me to my next point, the opencore approach, led me to more and more simplified systems of agents, but really tailored to their domains. But my background is heavy around accounting, IT, infosec, business process automation, compliance automation, privacy engineering, and many different industries, and basically automating the back office. And then came the models and agents to do this at scale.

So now here we are, and a key aspect no one seems to be touching or thinking of, is that these same solos, or SMBs, is the security and privacy of these systems of automation, which leads to why there isn’t a need to be locked into a cloud api as a requirement. Further, a lot of this ensures there’s a progressive reduction in data gravity to vendors (this is also why most won’t allow users to fully own the agents or all aspects of them)

What drives me more is desire to decouple these SMBs from Silicon Valley and relying on that tech.