Agents, tools and skills layer

Sandboxed agents, 1,000+ skills, the Tools arsenal, and My Builds release gates.

This is where the work happens. Agents carry out tasks; skills are the packaged capabilities they use; tools are the hands they use to reach the world. All three are sandboxed and none of them hold standing access.

What it holds

• Agents. Sandboxed workers, each with an identity in the People layer, that run inside a session issued by the Security layer. An agent spawned by another agent inherits no more than its parent's session allows, and usually less.
• Skills. 1,000+ packaged, reusable capabilities: how to reconcile an invoice run, how to triage a ticket, how to prepare a board pack. Skills are catalogued, versioned and shared across the fleet through the gated harvest.
• Tools and MCP servers. The arsenal agents use to act: connectors, browsers, document engines, the in-house image and video engine. Tools are reached through the Integration layer, never directly.
• My Builds. The lifecycle every piece of agent work follows: proposal, shadow, evaluation, approval, canary, live, and quarantine if it goes wrong.

The seven release gates

A build cannot go live until all seven are green, or a leader overrides with a written note.

1. A proposal exists and names the outcome.
2. A shadow period of at least seven days.
3. At least ten shadow outputs reviewed by a person.
4. At least 80 percent of reviewed outputs marked right.
5. Every exception acknowledged.
6. Confidence at or above 0.60.
7. Owner and leadership approval.

Live builds roll out as a canary (10, 25, 50, 100 percent). A wrong answer in live review quarantines the build automatically.

What it never does

• An agent never holds standing access. Access is per session, least privilege, recorded.
• An agent never holds credentials. See People layer.
• A build never goes live on its own say-so. People review shadow output; people approve.
• We do not simply automate what you do by hand. We optimise for the best agreed outcome, which is often a different process from the one you have.

Why it matters

AI can be very literal. It delivers what you ask for, not necessarily what you need, and very few people get consistently excellent results from prompting alone. The gates, the shadow period and the human review are how we turn "what you asked for" into "what you need" before anything touches a live system.

Related: Wingman and My Builds, Release gates and canary.