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At VentureBeat's recent AI Impact event, where the discussion centered on what separates enterprises that scale agentic AI from those that stall in pilot mode, Brian Gracely, senior director of portfolio strategy at Red Hat, detailed what companies actually run into once agents reach production.

He dove into cost discipline, the security blind spots unique to autonomous systems, and the organizational friction that determines whether agent adoption spreads beyond early champions.

Enterprises are overestimating how far behind they are on AI agents

Many enterprise leaders, especially those following industry keynotes and AI announcements, worry that they’re already falling dangerously behind competitors deploying agents at scale. But according to Gracely, much of that anxiety reflects a misconception about how quickly organizations learn once they begin building. Teams often move up the learning curve far faster than they expect.

That rapid progress creates a different challenge, however. As agent usage expands, AI costs rise just as quickly, turning cost management from an engineering concern into a recurring boardroom discussion.

Agentic AI usage is orders of magnitude higher than during the chatbot era, making AI costs a growing concern for enterprises. At the same time, organizations are becoming increasingly aware of their dependence on a small number of model providers. According to Gracely, that combination is driving many enterprises to explore alternatives that give them greater control over costs and infrastructure.

"The two or three top providers are already telling the market that they're losing money, and they're trying to go public to make up those gaps," he explained. "At some point, the dependency on that means you're either going to buy at a very high-cost level, or you're going to figure out alternatives to control what you're doing."

Right-sizing AI models is the fastest lever for cutting agent costs

The biggest cost issue is that enterprises overspend by defaulting to the most capable model available regardless of task complexity.

"If I'm simply trying to resolve an insurance claim, I don't need to know about the history of Western civilization in my model, I don't need to know World Cup soccer scores," Gracely said.

Semantic routing is the mechanism many companies use to make that judgment automatically, classifying requests and sending each to a model sized for the task without requiring users to choose, while infrastructure techniques like caching repetitive queries cut how often a request needs to reach GPU compute at all. Together, he said, these tools remove the assumption that efficiency and innovation pull in opposite directions.

"There's a lot you can do at a GPU infrastructure level, and quite a bit you can do in terms of flexibility of models," he explained. "Those give excellent choices in terms of the levers you're trying to pull, whether you need efficiency or you need innovation. That shouldn't be a binary choice."

The financial discipline needed for token spend is similar to the FinOps practices that took years to mature in order to take control of cloud compute spending. Those underlying frameworks will transfer even as the vocabulary changes, Gracely said, especially as organizations push for internal education on model selection so teams stop defaulting to the most prominent option for tasks that don't need it.

"The same way we first had to teach the financial people what an EC2 instance is and what an S3 bucket is, you're going to have to start explaining tokens to them," he said. "We don't always need a Rolls-Royce. We don't always need caviar, because we're trying to do basic types of things."

Patch speed is now critical as AI tools find vulnerabilities faster

AI-powered vulnerability discovery is forcing enterprises to rethink how quickly they can identify, validate and deploy patches. Long-established patch management cycles may no longer be fast enough in an environment where AI can uncover — and attackers can exploit — new vulnerabilities much more quickly.

"Most companies are probably going to have a window of somewhere between seven and 14 days to stay ahead," he said. "There are groups, Red Hat included, that are going to build patches for these, but the embargo window is going to be short."

AI is also changing what defenders need to look for. Rather than simply uncovering isolated critical flaws, AI security tools can identify combinations of seemingly minor vulnerabilities that become dangerous only when chained together. As both software complexity and vulnerability discovery accelerate, Gracely argued that the ability to rapidly manage and update software is becoming a strategic capability rather than simply an operational one.

Subject matter experts and compliance teams decide whether agents scale

In the end, organizational adoption comes down to the need for deep, sustained involvement from the subject matter experts whose knowledge the agent is meant to encode, which makes earning their buy-in a prerequisite rather than an afterthought.

"You have to think about the incentives, what you do for people who participate in this work so they don't feel threatened that it's going to take away their job, and how you incentivize people in the long run to cooperate with that innovation," he said.

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A team of conservationists has discovered and restored the tombstone of Sebastian, a formerly enslaved man who died free in 1729.

"That discovery is likely one of the oldest gravestones of a free Black person in America," Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston, said in a July 4 speech . "It's been there all along. We just had to go look and share the story."

The stone marker is inscribed with Sebastian's chosen name, Boston, and features an image common in 17th- and early 18th-century tombstones in New England: the death's head . The symbol includes a stylized skull flanked by wings, which were possibly intended to symbolize spiritual resurrection .

On the tombstone, a simple, five-line inscription reads:

Original Inscription

HERE LYES Y e

BODY OF BOSTON

AGED 70 YEARS

DEC D FEB Y Y e 28

1728

Modern English

HERE LIES THE

BODY OF BOSTON

AGED 70 YEARS

DECEASED FEBRUARY THE 28

1728

In 18th-century American writing, the word "the" was often abbreviated with a Y-shaped letter form called a " thorn " representing the "th" sound. Tombstones also frequently abbreviated "deceased" and the month. Somewhat confusingly, before 1752, the American colonies regularly used the Julian calendar , as did Britain, in which the new year started on March 25. Boston's year of death is listed on the tombstone as 1728, but his February 28 death was actually in 1729 in our modern Gregorian calendar.

Kelly Thomas, the director of the Historic Burying Grounds Initiative for the Boston Parks and Recreation Department, told WBZ News Radio that she identified the gravestone during a restoration project at the Granary Burying Ground , the city's third-oldest cemetery. Established in 1660, the cemetery includes over 5,000 graves, including the final resting places of Declaration of Independence signers Samuel Adams and John Hancock; the U.S. Revolutionary War officer Paul Revere; and Crispus Attucks, a sailor of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry who is thought to be the first American killed in the Boston Massacre.

"I was reviewing the photos of headstones, and then I noticed that the stone only had one name," rather than a first and last name, Thomas told WBZ News Radio, suggesting that Boston was either enslaved or free when he died. Based on a search of historical records, Thomas determined that Boston's enslaved name was Sebastian and that he also went by Bastian.

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A surprising amount of information was recorded about Boston and his wife, Jane Lake. In 1701, they had their daughter, also named Jane, baptized at First Church in Boston, where they regularly attended worship services. But while the two were married with children, they were also both enslaved and lived in different households, historian Gloria Whiting wrote in a 2016 study .

Boston was likely freed in the early 18th century, some time after the 1702 death of John Waite, who had held him in slavery. By 1708, a list of free Black people included the name Boston, and he had gained a reputation in the city as a hardworking handyman, according to Whiting's study. He had been freed for roughly 30 years when he died in 1729 and was well-known enough to have an obituary published for him in the New-England Weekly Journal , a rare occurrence for enslaved or freed Black people in colonial America.

Wu also said that, in recent weeks, archaeologists in Boston had discovered musket balls and gun flints from the infamous Battle of Bunker Hill that took place on June 17, 1775. The battle was fought by British Crown forces and New England troops in the first stage of the American Revolutionary War.

See if you know what these mysterious artifacts are with our archaeological fragments quiz!