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The Agentic AI Gap: When Tech is Used Before its Architecture is Ready - Anthony Alcaraz, Agentic AI Architect (EP 25)

The Agentic AI Gap: When Tech is Used Before its Architecture is Ready - Anthony Alcaraz, Agentic AI Architect (EP 25)

The In-Between Tech and Trust Podcast vor 4 Monaten

0:00

36:53

Most enterprises have the technology to run agentic AI. They do
not yet have the data architecture, identity layer, or empowered
workforce to actually trust it. Anthony Alcaraz argues that the
bottleneck for agentic AI has shifted from building the agents to
building everything around them — and that the organisations most
at risk are the ones keeping a human in the loop and calling it
transformation. This conversation is for leaders sitting between
AI pilots that worked and production systems that have not yet
arrived.

Episode overview

Anthony joins Eva to map what changes when AI shifts from
reactive systems to agents that observe, reason, and act. The
conversation moves through what enterprises miss in their own
data — systems of record that capture what happened but not why —
and the new attack surfaces agents introduce, including tool
poisoning. Anthony names the empowerment gap inside
organisations: business experts who hold the knowledge agents
need, with no clear path to building anything themselves. The
most provocative moment lands near the end, when Anthony argues
that human-in-the-loop adoption can be a way of avoiding actual
transformation rather than achieving it.

Key themes discussed

The shift from reactive to agentic systems, and what trust
has to carry now

Why most enterprise data is missing the why behind
decisions

Tool poisoning and the new attack surface for agents

The empowerment gap between business knowledge and technical
capability

Graph architecture as the control layer for agentic reasoning

Why human-in-the-loop can be a refusal to transform

About the guest

Anthony Alcaraz works across three vantage points that rarely sit
together: he architects agentic AI systems, invests in
early-stage AI startups as an angel, and is the author
of Agentic Graph RAG with O'Reilly. He spends most
weeks in conversation with founders attempting to enter regulated
enterprises, and most evenings building software with the same
tools he writes about. His perspective on this episode comes from
watching the same gap repeat itself across organisations of very
different sizes — the technology is ready, and most of the
systems around it are not.

Chapter markers

[00:00] What changes when AI moves from reactive to agentic

[05:42] Why agents need access — and what enterprises have
not built

[10:29] The three problems: data, governance, and the people
in between

[23:13] Graph architecture and the missing why of enterprise
data

[32:06] The empowerment gap that no one has solved yet

[45:17] In-between: where Anthony finds himself now

Links

Anthony Alcaraz LinkedIn —
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-alcaraz-b80763155/

Agentic Graph RAG (O'Reilly) —
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/agentic-graphrag/9798341623163/

Foundation Capital context graph thesis —
https://foundationcapital.com/ideas/the-case-for-context-graphs

Related episode — Trust as an operating system in AI
companions
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5t4BtgevPOtMWUfB4jThWX?si=oGo2JPHNTeCTxbqkNXDJMw

Eva Simone Lihotzky's LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/