Tomasz Tunguz

Know Your Agent’s Real‑Time Location at 9:30 AM

It’s 9:30 AM. Do you know where your agent is? As we enter the era of agentic AI, this is an increasingly important question. ChatGPT launched the consumer use of AI, compressing all of human knowledge into a single model. Now we are asking AI to act on our behalf at work. Analyze this mortgage statement. Figure out if this person has medical insurance. Answer this inbound call about a 2026 Honda Odyssey minivan. AI agents are doing all of this today. Plus, AI is coding millions of lines every day. My coding agent, Claude Code, helps me write software. It runs on my computer in my terminal, orange cursor blinking. When I use Notion AI to summarize a document, it’s running in Notion’s cloud. A large enterprise handling customer support queries runs their AI in their cloud, whether it’s Azure or Google or Amazon or other. Which kind of agents should run in which location : on-device, on my cloud, or on a software-vendor’s cloud? For a vendor : A vendor must offer all three, but for different reasons. Client-side agents handle privacy-sensitive tasks, including accessing data only available locally, like browser history, local files & clipboard content. They may also take advantage of local resources. Own cloud deployments meet enterprise control & compliance requirements. Hosted cloud provides scalability & convenience for most use cases. For an enterprise : An enterprise will need to manage all three. Coding agents will very likely remain running on employee devices. Certain high-velocity agents will likely be on hosted clouds. Core software & infrastructure will run on their own cloud. This presents the most complex topology, but it’s a business reality. For an individual user : Individual users will use predominantly client-side & hosted clouds. Aside from software developers, not many people run their own infrastructure. These hybrid deployments are then multiplexed by all the communication protocols across agents, whether it’s MCP or A2A or ones coming in the future. The net of it is we are creating new agentic networks within enterprises. So next time it’s 9:30 AM & your agent goes running, you’ll know whether to check your laptop, your cloud, or your vendor’s data center.