Research

This year’s focus will be on how organizations run when AI agents do much of the work. We call this AI-native data operations. What we learn will improve Business Protocol Management, the practice of running a business on a small hard core of protocols.

Premises

The research rests on three premises. We treat them as observations that could turn out partial or wrong, and the sessions and cases test them.

• Abundant cognition

  Reading and writing both get cheap. Processing unstructured data (PDFs, rate sheets, forms) and producing software cost a fraction of what they did.

  Tested in the water and construction cases

• Distributed agency

  Models act, and they run as many instances at once. Swarms of agents show up wherever work is done.

  Read against OpenAI’s incident report and Anthropic’s multi-agent study in theme I

• Mediation

  Information increasingly flows through models: people and agents find, read, and exchange it by way of LLMs and the protocols that connect them.

  Read against the Model Context Protocol in theme I and the Agent Payments Protocol in theme V

What we study

If those premises hold, running data operations means managing a swarm through its protocols. We study the three phases of Business Protocol Management. Each one relies on protocol vision, the capability to see the protocols a business actually runs on.

• See
  

  Seeing the protocols a business actually runs on, which usually go unnoticed until they break. Field logs record what happens and why, as it happens, so patterns show up. What an organization emits, and who can read it, shows where its protocols live. Nature helps too, because cells and flocks coordinate through signals their neighbours can read.

  Themes II, III and IV

• Design
  

  What agents can see and do, and the hard core that bounds them: permissions, data contracts, spending limits, and the checks every output must pass. That includes scoring agents against real outcomes and versioning their models, prompts and context.

  Themes I and V

• Evolve
  

  How discretion moves between people and agents, how it gets checked cheaply and recorded where others can see it, and how the hard core gets amended as the business grows.

  Theme VI

Speak at a session

We’re looking for guest speakers. If your work touches one of this year’s themes, we’d like to hear from you. Guests speak first, at the start of the session, and the group reads and discusses afterwards.

• Agents

  Teams that run agents in production, or build the protocols they use.

• Nature

  Biologists and roboticists who study coordination without a manager.

• Emissions

  People who publish, audit or read logs, filings and reports.

• Incidents

  Incident investigators, reliability engineers and safety researchers.

• Hardness

  Architects of permissions, payments, data contracts and safety checks.

• Liveness

  People who keep standards, production systems and safety programs working as they grow.

Four guest slots are still open this year: 8 February 2027, 22 March 2027, 19 April 2027 and 28 June 2027. The reading plan shows which theme runs when.

Offer a talk or message Rafael Fernández (@rafa_0x) on Discord

Cases

Training

We train protocol vision outside the reading too. Members watch protocols at work, log them with the Protocol Bicorder and share them in #protocols-for-business, aiming at about a hundred over the year. The protocol watching guide explains how.

We also run workshops, listed under work so far, and we’re exploring a simulation in which a swarm of agents runs a small company and players set the guardrails. Anyone can help shape the reading plan by suggesting or challenging a reading.

Sponsor or partner

The Protocol Institute is an independent research organization, supported by the Ethereum Foundation through 2026 and becoming a Canada-based nonprofit. It is raising support for its 2027 programs, including this project. To sponsor the work or bring us a research problem from your domain, see how to support the Institute or get in touch.