# Chris Hart *Chief Executive Officer, Civic* Chris Hart is the CEO at Civic; he brings together decades of experience across technology, finance, and identity to help businesses navigate the shift to agentic AI. His Silicon Valley career spans more than 25 years, from running infrastructure at early internet and fintech startups to leading finance and operations teams at high-growth technology companies. Beyond Civic, Chris has championed veteran leadership as Vice Chair of the Pat Tillman Foundation since 2006. When he isn't thinking about the future of identity and AI, you'll probably find him surfing or hanging out with his Dalmatian. ## Elsewhere - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishart1 - X: https://x.com/hartcb ## Field Notes essays - [If Your Team Can't Change the Agent, You Don't Control It](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/if-your-team-cant-change-the-agent-you-dont-control-it) (2026-10-28): Gartner predicts that by 2028, 70% of enterprises will abandon agentic AI built for them by vendor engineers. Before someone builds yours, find out whether your team can change it, see what it did, and keep its history if you leave. - [AI Agents Are Multiplying. Give Your First One a Job That Drives Revenue.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/ai-agents-are-multiplying) (2026-10-21): Gartner predicts ten AI agents for every salesperson by 2028, yet fewer than 40 percent of sellers will say those agents improved their productivity. For smaller companies, the best place to start is one agent solving an urgent revenue problem that otherwise doesn't get solved. - [Your Buyer's AI Does the Research. Be Ready When a Person Comes to Verify It.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/your-buyers-ai-does-the-research) (2026-10-14): AI is already part of vendor research for many B2B buyers. In Gartner's survey, 45 percent used GenAI during a recent purchase, and 69 percent preferred a sales rep to validate AI-generated insights. Be ready for that return visit: know which company came back, what they looked at, and whether you responded while the evaluation was still open. - [Let Your Agent Set Up Your Tools. Keep the Go-Live Decision.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/let-your-agent-set-up-your-tools) (2026-10-07): Agents can now do much of the setup work on the software your team buys, and you should let them. But, before you fully hand over the task, check three things: whether changes stay in a draft before they take effect, who decides when the setup goes live, and whether you can see afterward what was configured. - [Build the Brain. Buy the Infrastructure.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/build-the-brain-buy-the-infrastructure) (2026-09-30): Coding agents have made more of the growth stack practical to build in-house. McKinsey says 32 percent of organizations have already decided against at least one software purchase or feature because they could build it themselves. The implication is not to build everything. You should own the judgment about who to target, what signals matter, and what should happen next. But you should buy the infrastructure that has to stay reliable, connected, and auditable. - [Plan 2027 With the Growth Team You Already Have](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/plan-2027-with-the-team-you-already-have) (2026-09-23): The good news is that high AI adopters report roughly twice the net new ARR per go-to-market employee as low adopters. But, for 2027 planning the critical question is which repetitive, time-sensitive work your existing team should stop doing by hand. - [Dreamforce and UNBOUND Are Putting Agents Inside Their Platforms. Your Pipeline Runs Across Six Tools.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/your-pipeline-runs-across-six-tools) (2026-09-15): Dreamforce and UNBOUND are showing what agents can do inside Salesforce and HubSpot. Most growth teams I talk to do not work inside one platform: buyer activity moves across the website, product, CRM, Slack, outbound, and the data warehouse. The practical question is who is allowed to act across those systems, and where you can review the decisions and actions across the workflow. - [AI Drove More Than a Quarter of Workday's New Sales. Its CEO Credited the Guardrails.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/workday-credited-the-guardrails) (2026-09-09): Workday says the controls around its agents are part of why customers trust them. Gartner predicts governance failures will force many companies to pull autonomous agents back from production. The common issue: companies need to know what an agent can do, who authorized it, and what gets recorded afterward. - [Big Companies Scaled Agents This Year. Everyone Else Stood Still.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/big-companies-scaled-agents) (2026-09-02): McKinsey's 2026 State of AI: 40 percent of billion-dollar companies are scaling agents, up from 27. Smaller companies sat flat at 22. The gap is implementation capacity, not software cost, and there are three questions to ask before you buy. - [AI Pricing Broke This Year. Check What Your Vendors Started Counting.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/ai-pricing-broke-this-year) (2026-08-25): About four in five vendors recently introducing AI pricing chose to meter pricing on capacity over consumption. Buyers need to know what gets counted, who carries the quality risk, and whether they can audit the bill. - [Ramp Spent Four Years Rebuilding Outbound. You Shouldn't Have To.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/ramp-spent-four-years-rebuilding-outbound) (2026-08-18): Ramp shut down the AI SDR program behind 30 percent of its pipeline, then spent four years rebuilding outbound around evidence, bounded action, and a record. The architecture they landed on is right. The timeline is the part almost nobody can copy. - [The EU AI Trust Deadline Moved. The Buyer Didn't.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/the-eu-ai-trust-deadline-moved) (2026-08-12): Europe pushed its central high-risk AI requirements to 2027 and 2028 while most of its transparency rules took effect on schedule. If your trust roadmap was timed to a regulator's calendar, you now know it was the wrong clock. - [The AI Buyer Grew Up. Good.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/the-ai-buyer-grew-up) (2026-07-28): The 2026 buyer wants to know what your agent delivered, how you can prove it, and what happens if it fails. With only 29% of companies reporting significant ROI from generative AI, that scrutiny is healthy. - [You Already Paid for This Pipeline, Why Aren't You Converting?](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/you-already-paid-for-this-pipeline) (2026-07-21): Your site converts at ~2% of visitors. The other 98% aren't gone. They're sitting in tools you already pay for, waiting for someone to notice them. - [Seeing Is Consolidating. Acting Is Still Open.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/seeing-is-consolidating) (2026-07-14): Four independent go-to-market signal companies disappeared into four larger platforms in eleven months. That is not noise. It is the market telling us where the value is moving: seeing is becoming infrastructure, and acting is the layer still worth building on. - [Why We Narrowed](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/why-we-narrowed) (2026-06-29): We focused our platform that could do anything to a product that does one thing on its own. Here's why. - [The Model Was Never the Problem](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/the-model-was-never-the-problem) (2026-06-23): Most agent pilots stall for reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence. A go-to-market view on why, and what actually gets an agent into production. - [Everyone Has Signals. Almost No One Runs Them.](https://www.civic.com/field-notes/everyone-has-signals) (2026-06-16): Signal-based selling became the consensus go-to-market strategy of 2026. The bottleneck is no longer detecting intent. It is what happens in the next minute. Source: https://www.civic.com/field-notes/authors/chris-hart