--- 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 sourced claim that changes a watchlist, an assumption register, or a Monday decision." 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 collects candidate passages. Rank orders them for the question actually asked. Assemble builds the context the model may see. Inspect checks that the cited chunk is the one used. Navigate decides the next lookup or the refusal. 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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