Somewhere in the vendor’s deck is a slide with a row of figures on it: a finance agent, a legal agent, an operations agent. You picture something substantial behind each, a trained thing with a discipline in its head. Before you pay for that picture, open one up.
What you would see on the screen is a name, a model, and a set of instructions, and nothing else. That is the whole of a specialist in the Cabinet, ArkOne’s reference design for an executive agent, where a specialist is one of the ten Seats around the Table. Written down, all of it fits on one screen, about thirty lines. What a Seat knows when you ask it something is what those lines say, plus whatever the Chair, the one voice that runs the meeting, chose to hand it with the question.
The three parts of a Seat
Beside the name sits a one-line description of what the Seat is for, and that line is what the Chair reads when deciding whom to ask. Finance: margin, pricing floors, cash; consult when a number must be defended. If the line is vague, the Chair asks the wrong Seat, or asks everyone, and the fifth paper explained what asking everyone costs.
The model is the engine that answers when this Seat is consulted, chosen for this Seat alone; two Seats may run on different models. Whether a Seat is given a model that reasons at length, and how long it may think, is a dial of its own, taken up by the eighth paper.
The instructions are the standing brief the Seat reads before every question: its remit, the form its answer must take, and what it must never do. A Seat has no memory of its own between meetings and no channel to anyone outside the room, as the second paper described. It reads its instructions, reads the Chair’s question, answers, and is gone until asked again.
Put the three parts together and the consequence is exact. A Seat knows what its instructions tell it, what the Chair attached to the question, and whatever the underlying model knows about the world in general. It does not hold your company in its head. For Finance to defend a floor price, the contract’s terms must be in the question, fetched by the Chair from the Library, the room’s own shelves of documents. A Seat answering confidently about a figure it was never given is answering from general knowledge, and its instructions tell it to say so instead.
The Register, the one page that states every setting of the design, lists all ten. Ten screens of text, readable in an afternoon.
One Seat, opened
Suppose you open Finance, in the room built for the invented renewal that runs through this series, the client asking to keep last year’s price. Here is what you would find, and what each part meant on the day.
| Part | What it says, in the reference design | What followed in the renewal |
|---|---|---|
| Name and purpose | Finance. Margin, pricing floors, cash. Consult when a number must be defended | The Chair, needing a floor price, chose this Seat from the one-line description |
| Model | One engine, named, with its thinking setting recorded beside it | The reply took as long as that model takes, and cost what that model costs |
| Instructions | About a screen: answer as the finance director would; return a floor price and the reasoning behind it; never quote a price to anyone outside the room; never state a figure that was not supplied, say instead what is missing | Finance returned a floor with its reasoning, and a warning that a discount here sets a precedent across the account book |
| What it was handed | The Chair’s question, with the contract’s pricing terms and the client’s volume attached | The floor was computed from the terms in front of it, not from anything it remembered |
Exhibit 2. Illustrative. One Seat opened: its name, its model and its instructions, and what each part did in the imagined renewal.
Everything Finance knew, it was told: by its instructions, and by the Chair, which fetched the contract before asking. Nothing in the Seat remembered this client from last year, and that absence of memory is what makes the advice auditable. Ask later why Finance set the floor where it did, and the Record, the ledger of every action and its reason, shows the exact question and the exact attachments.
The instructions row is where the expertise sits, written in the language of a job description by someone who knows the job. Whoever wrote the line about never stating a figure that was not supplied has met a confident wrong number before, and a person can read that line, disagree with it, and change it, which is the subject of the seventh paper.
The limit follows from the same fact. A Chair that forgets to fetch the contract gets a Finance reply built on the client’s own account of their terms, or, where the instructions were written well, a reply saying the terms are missing.
What this arms you to ask
Ask the vendor which specialists are in the room, and what each knows.
A good answer is a list of names you could read aloud, and for each, three things shown on a screen: the instructions, the model, and what the specialist was handed for its last answer. That vendor will also tell you, without flinching, that a specialist knows its instructions and its inputs and nothing else about your company.
The thin answer describes a breadth rather than a roster: the agent has deep expertise across finance, legal and operations. Suppose what sits behind that sentence is one model with one set of instructions, and the specialists are paragraphs in that document or the model’s general knowledge wearing a departmental name. That arrangement may still serve you. It does mean there is no Finance whose instructions you can open, and nothing you could carry to a new vendor if you left. Ask: show me the finance specialist’s instructions, then show me what it was given for its last answer. If the first is a shrug and the second is the whole conversation, you have your answer.
Next paper: You can change a specialist’s instructions tonight, and the vendor should let you.
Asked plainly
What is a specialist agent, in an AI system built from several agents?
A named configuration: a label with a one-line purpose, a choice of underlying model, and a set of standing instructions read before every question. In the reference design each fits on one screen. There is no separately trained finance or legal model behind the name; the expertise is written into the instructions by a person.
What does an AI specialist agent know about my company?
What its instructions say, what the orchestrator attached to the question, and whatever the underlying model knows about the world in general. It holds no memory of your company between questions. If a contract matters to the answer, the contract has to be fetched and handed to it, and a well-written specialist says so when a figure it needs is missing.
How many specialist agents does an AI executive agent have?
The reference design has ten, listed alphabetically so that no order is implied: Board, Counsel, Finance, Marketing, Operations, People, Product, Strategy, Talent and Triage. The number matters less than the fact that each one's instructions can be opened and read in full, which is how you learn what the system believes about your business.
Ask the vendor
The questions this part arms, each with the good answer and the answer that arrives instead.