This is the first issue of The Vantage Pilot. The pretext is the May we just had: Vantage Workspace went live at workspace.handvantage.com on May 6 after eight months of build, and the editorial archive shipped with three pieces — the B-to-A retrospective, the EU AI Act deadline briefing, and the 40%-failure analysis. The intent of this digest is to be useful to one specific reader: someone responsible for evaluating, deploying, or governing agentic AI in a regulated environment, who has no budget for marketing-grade content and limited time for it either.
What I want this digest to be, and not be. It is not a drip campaign — there is no funnel attached. It is not a republication of the articles — those live on the site. It is correspondence: one founder note, the month's articles in two sentences each, and a few links to primary sources that crossed my desk and shaped how the team thinks. Five minutes to read, monthly, no other email.
The recurring theme this month is one I expect to keep returning to: the gap between platforms that produce contemporaneous evidence and platforms that produce documents about evidence. The first kind survives audits, regulator inquiries, and post-incident investigations. The second kind survives demos. The August 2 EU AI Act high-risk obligations deadline is going to make this distinction expensive for organisations that mistook the second kind for the first. The articles below get into the specifics.