E-SIGN gave machine-formed contracts federal standing in 2000 and left "attributable" undefined. Adaptive agents are now putting weight on that joint.

Organizations got human development free, as a byproduct of productive work. When agents remove the middle of the task, that subsidy quietly lapses and nothing on the dashboard says so.

Reviewing what a machine made will catch flaws. The judgment to imagine a better option appears to be imported from having built things yourself.

Queues are not shelves. Two clocks, one in support and one in code review, show how waiting work mutates, and why capacity means attention delivered before that change.

MCP's 2026 revision took away sessions and handshakes. Walk a shopping cart through it and you can see exactly which state moved onto your side of the line.

Reliability comes back as a profile, not a rate. And horizon, the variable doing most of the damage, is the one the studies measure least.

Websites, payment networks, and content owners are building recognition infrastructure that will define agent access on their terms, before agents earn trust rather than after.

Agents act faster than organizations can challenge their output, degrading the review layer that makes clerk-model deployment survivable.

Agent speed turns familiar errors into cascades that outrun an organization's capacity to detect, absorb, or correct them. The binding constraint on adoption is not production but reception.

Agent success now depends less on completing tasks than on whether every counterparty with standing to reject recognizes the action as authorized.

Drouin's projects trace how agent evaluation evolved from checking task completion to verifying that outcomes are grounded, cited, and structurally real. The progression reveals a field learning that the hardest problem is not capability but verifiability.

Durable agent adoption depends less on AI capability than on whether a domain already has organizational infrastructure for humans to contest, evaluate, and reverse the output before the cost of errors falls on the wrong people.