--- title: "SENSE | AI Agents for Startup Strategy" description: "SENSE is a five-move strategic intelligence layer: Scan, Evaluate, Navigate, Simulate, Execute. It turns agent work from a productivity shortcut into a…" image: "https://lenvanderhof.com/photos/len-portrait-1.jpg" --- Framework # SENSE AI Agents for Startup Strategy SENSE is a five-move strategic intelligence layer: Scan, Evaluate, Navigate, Simulate, Execute. It turns agent work from a productivity shortcut into a sourced claim that changes a watchlist, an assumption register, or a Monday decision. The moves 5 ## When to use it Use SENSE when you already have models in the loop and still decide from anecdote. The unit of work is one sourced claim with a confidence grade, not another unread summary. ## The moves 1. 01 ### Scan Collection with a thesis: watch the competitor surfaces, regulatory dockets, and customer signals your strategy actually depends on. 2. 02 ### Evaluate Turn raw signal into a sourced claim with a confidence grade, instead of another summary nobody can act on. 3. 03 ### Navigate Make the claim change something real: the watchlist tightens, the assumption register updates, the strategy moves. 4. 04 ### Simulate Rehearse the future before it arrives: ask what would happen if, and pressure-test the plan against it. 5. 05 ### Execute Meet a decision or it never happened: a one-page brief in the Monday review, an alert the moment it matters. 90-day install ## Install in ninety days A weekly dump is not a layer. SENSE has no Decide phase: the system prepares the choice, a person owns it. The unit of work is one sourced claim with a confidence grade. Ninety days is Diagnose, Deploy, then Evaluate-and-decide. Watchlist, assumption register, cadence, and kill rule are artifacts inside those gates, not a second calendar. 1. 01 ### Diagnose Is this a standing system, or a briefing nobody acts on? Name the competitor surfaces, dockets, and customer signals the strategy actually depends on. 2. 02 ### Deploy Install the watchlist, the assumption register, the cadence, and the kill rule. Use the worksheets already on this site. Do not invent a second kit. 3. 03 ### Evaluate and decide Expand, adjust, or kill in writing. Skip Simulate and you execute into a void. Confidence grades here are working marks, not a psychometric scale. SENSE worksheets90-day layer (essay) ## The book Available now ### AI Agents for Startup Strategy How Founders and Operators Deploy Agentic AI to Move Faster and Think Smarter Open the bookThe articleThe worksheetsThe series ## Related frameworks STACK ### The Agentic Codebase STACK is a five-layer architecture for repositories where humans and agents share work: Structure, Toolchain, Agent configuration, Connection, Knowledge and quality. The agent OS is versioned like the app. CHORUS ### The Multi-Agent Organization CHORUS is a six-skill coordination protocol for teams of 2 to 15 people who share work with specialised AI workers: Charter, Handoff, Orchestrate, Review, Update, Sync. Org charts name reporting lines. CHORUS names coordination lines. GRAIN ### The RAG Engineer GRAIN is a retrieval loop: Gather, Rank, Assemble, Inspect, Navigate. Gather governs the corpus: sources, permissions, and versioning. Rank retrieves candidate passages and reranks them for the question actually asked. Assemble builds the context the model may see. Inspect traces a wrong answer back to the chunk and retrieval decision behind it. Navigate keeps the index fresh: TTL policy, re-ingest, and change detection. If you cannot point at the passage, you do not have retrieval. You have a fluent guess. ## Essays on this site - [What is an AI agent?](https://lenvanderhof.com/en/blog/what-is-an-ai-agent/) - [AI Agents for Startup Strategy: introduction](https://lenvanderhof.com/en/blog/ai-agents-for-startup-strategy-introduction/) - [A SENSE intelligence layer in 90 days](https://lenvanderhof.com/en/blog/sense-90-day-intelligence-layer/) - [An agentic workflow is not an automation](https://lenvanderhof.com/en/blog/agentic-workflow-vs-automation/) - [A go-to-market system that survives the first ten customers](https://lenvanderhof.com/en/blog/gtm-that-survives-ten-customers/) ## Terminology - [SENSE](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/sense/) - [STACK](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/stack/) - [CHORUS](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/chorus/) - [GRAIN](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/grain/) - [AI agent](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/ai-agent/) - [Human in the loop](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/human-in-the-loop/) - [Override doctrine](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/override-doctrine/) SENSE here is the five-move protocol from AI Agents for Startup Strategy. It is not a product, sensor brand, or generic "sense-making" slogan. ## Citation SENSE (AI Agents for Startup Strategy). Len P. van der Hof, Systems for the Strategic Self. https://lenvanderhof.com/frameworks/sense/ ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "DefinedTerm", "@id": "https://lenvanderhof.com/frameworks/sense/#term", "name": "SENSE", "description": "SENSE is a five-move strategic intelligence layer: Scan, Evaluate, Navigate, Simulate, Execute. 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