05-19-2026IMPACT COUNCIL

AI agents work fine, your workflow doesn’t

Care about the process more than the tools.

[Photo: Getty Images]

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Boards everywhere are saying “we need AI agents.” That pressure moves down the organization fast. Teams build a pilot and achieve good results in a sandbox. Then they try to put it in production and everything slows down. Usually, the model performed fine. What was missing was what surrounded it—monitoring, ownership, a plan for when things go wrong.

I’ve been shipping software in regulated industries for 20 years. In those industries, when something hallucinates, planes don’t fly or money doesn’t move. So you learn to care about the process more than the tools, and realize that the model is the easy part. You can swap one for another in an afternoon. What you can’t swap is the workflow underneath it, and the domain knowledge baked into how an agent actually makes decisions.

THE WORKFLOW IS THE PRODUCT

In production, you don’t release........

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