The World Cup is on, and fans across the globe are rooting on their favorite players. They thrill every time Messi scores a goal, Díaz completes a daring pass, or Martínez blocks a shot. And yet ultimately, no matter how brilliant an individual performance, all that truly matters is whether the team won.
Agents today are brilliant individual performers. They resolve cases, qualify leads, answer calls, and with tools like observability, you can even understand how effectively they accomplish those objectives. You can even coach them toward better performance. Resolving a customer’s issue, a better-qualified pipeline: those are outcomes, and getting agents to drive toward them is real progress.That’s loop engineering at work. Rather than walking an agent through a script of prompts, you hand it an objective and a way to measure progress, and it does more than finish a task: it plans, checks its own work, learns from the result, and adjusts. For clear, individual objectives this already works remarkably well, which is why a coding agent can land a record number of accepted pull requests.But an individual outcome is still an individual stat. More pull requests don’t tell you whether the company shipped a better product and sold more of it. The ultimate goal isn’t completing a task. It’s moving the business forward, and that’s harder to measure.
