Agent Inclusive — with Angela and Saar.

Rutger Angela. Thanks for making the time. Saar — thanks for sitting in too.

Angela You sent me the piece. I read it on the train. I have four questions and a hard stop at six. So if we are efficient, everyone gets dinner.

Saar My agent told me to come. He said, "Saar, it's about agents, you'll be wonderful." So I cleared the whole afternoon. I even brought my good earrings.

Rutger [chuckles] Ah. Saar — when I say agent, I mean a piece of software. An AI system. Not the person who books your auditions.

Saar Mm. Yes. Software. [warmly] Keep going, darling. I'm following.

Angela Question one is the title. "Agent Inclusive." Rutger — you know what the word "inclusion" does in a company. It has a job. You have parked it next to "agent," and now I have to explain the parking to people who do not have time for it. That is, in my notes, a risk. Can we agree it is a risk and move on?

Rutger I'll grant it's a risk. But I kept it on purpose — and I'll defend it once, quickly.

Angela One minute. I am watching the clock, lovingly.

Rutger The piece argues we've spent decades designing companies around people — onboarding, escalation paths, performance reviews — and the second an AI system drops into the same workflow, none of that scaffolding fits it. So things quietly break. "Agent inclusive" forces the question now, while the human team is still in the room. Not after.

Saar An inclusive agent. God, I'd love one. Mine forgot my birthday and booked me a yoghurt commercial. In Düsseldorf.

Angela [flat] I have run an office near Düsseldorf.

Saar Then you know.

Angela I know more than I would like. [a beat] Fine. The title is a risk we are accepting with our eyes open. Noted. Question two — and this is the one that kept me on the piece. You write it like good news. "The next teammate, human or not." Rutger, I have sat through every restructuring this office has had in fifteen years, and that exact sentence was on the slide every single time. Right before a slightly long pause.

Rutger Yeah. [sighs] I've been in those rooms too. That read is fair.

Angela Mm.

Rutger But it's not the only read. The alternative — pretend the tools don't exist, or quarantine them in some "innovation lab" off to the side — that costs jobs too. Slower, quieter, more of them. Because by the time the team notices the work has migrated to the tools, the team didn't get the chance to migrate with it. This is about keeping people in the loop earlier, not walking them out.

Angela So your claim is: name it now, with the people present, or lose them later by accident.

Rutger That's the claim.

Angela I will note that as the actual argument, rather than the title. Thank you. That at least I can take into a room.

Saar So you want the agent in the room. For the casting. [delighted] That's clever, actually. Mine never comes. Last reading I did it across from a wall.

Angela A — wall.

Saar A production assistant holding the other lines. Read them like a parking ticket. No chemistry. I cried real tears at a wall.

Rutger [laughs] Hold that, actually — the wall's closer to the point than you'd think.

Angela Three minutes left in my goodwill. Continue.

Rutger Here's the part that matters. The agent is getting genuinely good at the doing — the execution, the draft, the build. So the job that stays human moves up a level. It's writing the brief. Turning a fuzzy "make it good" into a spec precise enough that an agent can actually run with it.

Angela A specification. With an owner. So when it is wrong, someone is accountable, by name.

Rutger Exactly that.

Angela Then let me ask it straight, because this is question three and I would like a real answer. The piece says design the team "so the next member, human or not, can sit down without flinching." Lovely. What happens, in your design, when the agent is wrong?

Rutger Wrong how?

Angela Wrong the way only these systems are wrong. Confidently. Politely. Perfect grammar. And the human — who has been told this thing is a teammate — is the one who has to push back. People do not push back on confident colleagues. Especially expensive ones the company just installed.

Rutger That's the right question, and honestly the article doesn't answer it hard enough.

Angela I noticed. I underlined it.

Rutger So here's the answer I'd add. The brief isn't just instructions for the agent — it's the standard you check the agent against. Somebody human has to be able to say, precisely, what good looks like. Not "I'll know it when I see it." Written down, in advance. That's the one human you cannot remove, because the agent can produce a thousand confident wrong answers and only that person can tell which one is right.

Angela So the role you are protecting is not "person who does the work." It is "person who can say exactly what good is."

Rutger That's the whole episode in one sentence. Yes.

Saar Oh — that's just a good agent, though. A good agent reads the brief before the audition. The role, the wardrobe, the tone. So you don't walk in and play it sad when they wanted funny. You read the brief first. Then you book the job.

Rutger …Saar. That's it. That's almost exactly the whole thing.

Saar Is it? [pleased] I do find these afternoons relaxing.

Rutger Somebody writes the brief so the talent doesn't do the wrong scene, confidently. Swap "audition" for "the work" and you've got the entire argument. The brief comes first, or the agent walks in and nails the wrong thing.

Angela [a beat, dry] That was not a bad sentence. From the room with the earrings.

Saar [laughs] Thank you. People underestimate me at parties too.

Angela Then I will land it. This framing — "agent inclusive" — I do not love, and I will not love it tomorrow either. But the practice underneath it — write the brief before the tool arrives, name the human who owns the standard — that is the step I have watched a hundred companies skip. Then they call my office to clean it up. If the title is the price of the practice, I will pay the title. Can we make that the decision and put it to bed?

Rutger That's generous.

Angela That is not generous. That is me wanting to leave. There is a difference, and the difference is dinner.

Rutger [laughs] Understood.

Angela One more, and then I am gone. The phrase "the team of the future." If it appears on your slides at the next conference, I will know something went wrong in this room. Promise me you will not say it.

Rutger I promise I will not say it.

Angela Then I have a decision, two action items, and a train. [a beat] Write the brief first. Name the owner. Those are the two items.

Rutger That's the show, honestly. Forget the title — Angela's right about the title. It comes down to one line on the org chart: a named human who can write the brief and say exactly what good looks like, and catch the agent when it's confidently, politely wrong. No name in that box and you don't have agent-inclusive anything. You have a tool somebody installed. For the record — this is my read, on my site, synthetic voices. Angela's a character. Saar is —

Saar Saar is available for the right project.

Angela Saar, your agent is software now. We decided.

Saar [warmly] We did? Oh, lovely. I'll tell him. He's terrible, but the brief comes first now. I taught him that.

Rutger [laughs] Write the brief first, Saar.

Saar Always have, darling. Always have. Goodnight.