agent-adoption-stagelisted

# agent-adoption-stage Answer one question honestly: **which rung is this team actually on, and what is the single next thing that moves them up?** Not a scorecard, not a tool list — a placement backed by observables, the bottleneck that gates the next step, and one unlock. Adapted from Boris Cherny's *Steps of AI Adoption* (2026-07-16). The stage names and the bottleneck-shift are his; the guardrail changes and the routing here are skilldrop's, and everything is stated as a **capability** rather than a product so it stays true across tools and across years. The load-bearing idea: **the bottleneck moves.** Each stage is limited by something different, so a fix that unlocked the last step does nothing for the next one. Diagnosing the *current* bottleneck is the whole job; the stage number is just its index. ## The ladder | Stage | Shape | Observable | The bottleneck | |---|---|---|---| | **0 · Gated** | no real access | tools unapproved, gateways slow, no path to run outputs | approval process — a legacy security posture optimising cost-per-token instead of outcomes | | **1 · Assisted** | you + one agent | **~1 agent**, synchronous, you read nearly every change | **your attention.** Low trust and no self-verification, so you watch instead of moving on | | **2 · Parallel** | you orchestrate | **~5–10 agents**, isolated checkouts, agent checks its own work first | **review throughput.** You're checking six streams instead of writing one | | **3 · Supervised autonomy** | man