The four types of agent
Narrow/broad × assistive/autonomous.
Two axes, four quadrants
Once you have decided you need something agentic, classify what you're building. Two axes determine how ambitious the governance conversation has to be.
- Scope — narrow (one job) vs broad (many jobs in a domain).
- Autonomy — assistive (human decides) vs autonomous (agent acts).
Execute a complete workflow end-to-end — within pre-defined rails.
Service ticket resolvers · issue → PR coding agents
Human sets the rules; agent runs the play.
Coordinate systems, agents, and actions toward a higher-level goal.
Multi-agent orchestrators · enterprise agent platforms
Highest value, highest risk — governance non-negotiable.
The human asks, the AI answers — no chain of actions, no memory between tasks.
Gmail Smart Reply · Grammarly · Notion AI inline
Low risk, low governance.
Broad knowledge, narrow authority — reason across a domain but defer the decision to the human.
Microsoft 365 Copilot · IDE copilots · Claude chat
The human stays in the chair.
How to use the quadrant
The quadrant is diagnostic, not prescriptive. You use it to answer one question: what governance does this agent's position require?
- Task Assistants (narrow × assistive) — almost no governance beyond normal software QA. These are features, not agents in the operational sense.
- Domain Copilots (broad × assistive) — you need to worry about groundedness (are its suggestions accurate?) and UX (does the human stay in control?), but the blast radius is low.
- Task Agents (narrow × autonomous) — the first place real governance kicks in. Tools, guardrails, human checkpoints, audit trails. REMIT starts to matter.
- Strategic Agents (broad × autonomous) — everything the Task Agent needed, plus cross-system coordination, multi-agent identity, and board-level accountability. The highest-value, highest-risk quadrant.
Direction of travel
Over a product's lifetime, quadrants tend to move upward and rightward as trust is earned and the scope widens. That is a feature, not a bug — but every move upward or rightward should be paired with a move in governance. Promotion requires evidence; demotion is always available.