Tony Seale

Tony Seale, who writes on LinkedIn as The Knowledge Graph Guy, argues that the answer to "if software eats the world and AI eats software, what eats AI?" is philosophy. He borrows the question from Michael Schrage and David Kiron in MIT Sloan and redirects it at organizations that treat AI as a technical upgrade: they build models and experiment with prompts, but never formalize the semantics of how they create value. His term for that formalization is the ontological core, the concepts that define a company's identity, surfaced through the use cases that generate value and through competency questions that test whether each concept earns its place.

The 2026 note extends the same argument to agents. Seale reads the orchestration framework wave (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, OpenAI Agents SDK, AWS Bedrock, Google ADK) as scaffolding built for models that could not yet handle multi-step work alone, quoting Anthropic: every harness component encodes an assumption about what the model cannot do, and those assumptions age fast. His prescription is that scaffolding should shrink as models improve rather than accumulate.

The graph argument follows from a limit he states plainly: computer access is not understanding. Give an agent 1000 documents and it searches, hopes, guesses; run 50 such agents with no shared world model and they are coherent in isolation, incoherent in combination. Hence the symmetry he calls the Semantic Agent, (model + harness) + (ontology + data). Models are rented, frameworks are transitional, and the ontology is the part an organization owns.