The Agent Stack.
The infrastructure an autonomous financial agent actually runs on — observability, orchestration, retrieval, lineage, constraints. Every entry is described for what it contributes to governing an agent that touches capital, not for what it does in general. That framing is the whole register: there is no shortage of writing about these tools, and almost none of it asks the question a risk officer asks.
How to read this register.
Entries are published at one of two levels, and the level is stated on every page:
- Profile — scored against five published criteria, with a defended caveat. Requires that someone has actually used it in anger.
- Listed — not yet reviewed — structured facts and a governance lens, with no score. Honest about what it is.
The second category exists so the register can be complete without pretending to judgment it has not earned. If you build one of these and want a full profile, walk us through it.
No entry in this register has a commercial relationship with the QIS Ecosystem. Listing is editorial and is never sold. Where that changes, it will be disclosed on the entry itself and in partners.json.
Analytics engine
A query engine optimized for analytical workloads — scanning and aggregating large columnar datasets — as distinct from transactional processing. Full definition →
Constraints
Programmable rules applied to what a system may accept or emit, enforced in code rather than stated in policy, and capable of halting execution. Full definition →
Programmable validation and correction applied to model inputs and outputs.
Data quality
The degree to which data is accurate, complete, timely and fit for the specific use being made of it — assessed against declared expectations rather than in the abstract. Full definition →
Declarative data validation — expectations as executable, versioned assertions.
Evaluation
The systematic measurement of whether a system produces acceptable outputs against defined criteria, on a held-out or adversarial set, before and after deployment. Full definition →
Experiment tracking
The recording of what was run, with which data, code, parameters and result, so that a past experiment can be identified and reproduced. Full definition →
Graph database
A store in which relationships between entities are first-class and indexed, so that traversal across connections is efficient rather than a series of joins. Full definition →
Ingestion
The movement of data from a source system into an environment where it can be used, including extraction, transport and initial landing. Full definition →
Lineage
The recorded history of a data element — where it came from, what was done to it, and by which job — sufficient to trace an output back to its sources. Full definition →
An open standard for collecting dataset and job lineage metadata across tools.
Observability
The property that a system's internal state can be understood from the signals it emits — traces, metrics and logs — without modifying it to ask. Full definition →
Traces, prompts, and evaluations for LLM applications — the closest thing to a decision trail an agent currently produces.
Production ML observability with drift and performance monitoring across model versions.
Orchestration
The layer that coordinates multiple agents or steps toward an outcome — sequencing, branching, retry, and the handling of partial failure. Full definition →
Microsoft's SDK for embedding model orchestration into conventional applications.
Graph-structured agent workflows with explicit state and controllable execution paths.
Programmatic optimization of language model pipelines — compiled prompts rather than hand-written ones.
Durable execution — workflows that survive process failure, with complete replayable event history.
Asset-oriented data orchestration with typed dependencies and materialisation history.
Research environment
The interface in which analysis is written, executed and iterated — notebooks, IDEs and their execution models. Full definition →
Reactive Python notebooks stored as plain files, with deterministic execution order.
Retrieval
The selection of relevant material from a corpus and its supply to a model as context, determining what evidence the model sees before it answers. Full definition →
Transformation
The conversion of raw data into analysis-ready form — cleaning, joining, aggregating, deriving — expressed as code and ideally versioned and tested. Full definition →
Vector search
Retrieval by similarity in an embedding space, returning items whose vector representation is closest to a query's. Full definition →