Michael Clough
Editorial Advisor, Explore Agentic
About Michael
Michael writes the agentic-AI pillar and the AI agent ROI playbook, and sits on the editorial advisory board reviewing technical claims before publication. The pillar work is definitional: the five tells that separate a real agent from a rebadged chatbot, and the runtimes that matter in 2026 — AWS Strands, Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph, CrewAI, the OpenAI Agents SDK.
The agent-washing glossary entry carries the same argument in Gartner's vocabulary, against Gartner's own forecast that most agentic projects get cancelled. The ROI playbook is the counterweight: a ten-week, CFO-ready measurement framework built on baseline-first instrumentation and direct P&L metrics — cycle time on one named workflow, cost per resolution, revenue per lead — rather than productivity-minute arithmetic, drawing on Forrester's Total Economic Impact method. As a reviewer Michael takes the guardian-agent, agentic-RAG, and shadow-AI entries and the Moveworks vs Glean comparison. Expect skepticism about category labels and specificity about what a deployment returns.
Pieces written or reviewed by Michael
9 pieces across 5 formats on this site — 3 written by Michael and 6 reviewed. A written byline means Michael researched and drafted the piece; a reviewed byline means Michael read it against its cited sources and could defend its claims before it published. Every row below is labelled either way.
- Pillar · Written Agentic AI, minus the agent-washing
- Glossary · Reviewed Agentic RAG
- Glossary · Reviewed Shadow AI
- Glossary · Written Agent washing
- Glossary · Reviewed Guardian agent
- Comparison · Reviewed Moveworks vs Glean (2026, after the ServiceNow deal)
- Playbook · Written How to measure AI agent ROI without embarrassing yourself
- Insight · Reviewed Before You Build: Why a GenAI Assessment Is the Most Important Step Most Companies Skip
- Insight · Reviewed Retail Inventory Search Is Broken — Here's How AI Cuts the Cost of Every Miss
Other contributors
- Ryo HangEditor-in-Chief
- Alexander GromanContributing Writer
- Kelvin YuContributing Writer
- Soraya ZhengContributing Writer
- Cynthia ZhangContributing Writer
- Tommy TaoContributing Writer
- Chandler BensonContributing Writer
- Elias SaljukiContributing Editor
- Ginny CasuccioContributing Editor
- Gloria Qian ZhangContributing Editor
- Laura Bradley McCoyContributing Writer
- Merve TengizContributing Editor