Last week I watched a platform team deploy their first production agent to handle document summarization across 50+ departments. Three months later, it was disabled.
Not because the agent was inaccurate—the summaries were solid. Not because it was too expensive—cost was in line. The agent was disabled because the team couldn't answer a straightforward question from their security officer: "Exactly which agent instance processed the finance department's confidential filings, when did it run, what data did it access, and can you prove no one modified the agent's behavior between approval and execution?"
The team had built a capable agent. They had no way to operate it safely at scale.
This is the operational maturity gap, and it's why 79% of enterprises have adopted agents while only 31% actually run them reliably in production.
The Production Agent Reality
