Every vendor pitch I hear lately follows the same script: “Just deploy our autonomous agents and watch them solve your business problems.” It’s seductive. It’s also dangerously misleading.
The AI agent hype cycle has reached a fever pitch, and I’m concerned we’re repeating the mistakes of every previous enterprise technology wave—overselling capabilities, underselling complexity, and leaving practitioners to clean up the mess.
The autonomous agent myth
Let’s be clear about what today’s “autonomous” agents actually are: they’re sophisticated pattern-matching systems that can follow instructions, make API calls, and chain together operations based on training data and prompts. That’s powerful. That’s useful. But it’s not autonomy in any meaningful sense.
True autonomy implies independent judgment, contextual reasoning, and the ability to handle novel situations without human oversight. Our current agents don’t have that. They have very good heuristics, impressive language understanding, and the ability to execute predefined workflows with some flexibility.
The distinction matters because when we oversell autonomy, we encourage organizations to deploy agents in scenarios they’re not ready for—and we set ourselves up for the inevitable backlash when things go wrong.
What actually happens in production
Here’s what I see when enterprises deploy “autonomous” agents without proper guardrails:
Agents confidently execute the wrong action. They misinterpret context, follow patterns that don’t apply, or chain together API calls in ways that technically work but produce nonsensical business outcomes. And because they seem so confident in their responses, humans trust them longer than they should.
Agents create new technical debt faster than they solve problems. Every agent that operates without proper API governance, versioning, and observability becomes another system you can’t easily change, debug, or decommission. They become invisible dependencies that break in subtle ways.
Agents mask underlying process problems. Instead of fixing broken workflows, we deploy agents to “paper over” them. The agent becomes a band-aid on a systemic issue, and now you have two problems: the original broken process and an agent that’s learned to work around it.
What we should be building instead
I’m not arguing against agents—I’m arguing for honesty about what they are and what they need to work reliably.
Structured agents over autonomous ones. Give agents clear capabilities, well-defined boundaries, and explicit error handling. The best agents I’ve seen are the ones with the most constraints, not the fewest.
Observable agents over black-box ones. If you can’t explain what your agent did and why, you don’t have a production system—you have a liability. Every agent action should be traceable, auditable, and reversible.
Collaborative agents over replacement ones. Agents work best when they augment human decision-making, not replace it. The goal should be “humans + agents” not “agents instead of humans.”
The path forward
We need to mature our approach to agents before the inevitable backlash hits. That means:
Stop selling autonomy. Sell capability. Sell specific, measurable improvements in specific workflows.
Demand governance from day one. Don’t deploy an agent without observability, without versioning, without a rollback plan.
Measure actual outcomes, not agent activity. An agent that makes 1,000 API calls isn’t successful unless those calls drive real business value.
Build for the 99% case, not the demo. The edge cases are where agents fail, and edge cases are 80% of production.
My bet
I believe agents will transform how enterprises operate—but not through magical autonomy. They’ll transform through boring, disciplined engineering: clear contracts, proper testing, thoughtful constraints, and continuous oversight.
The enterprises that win with agents won’t be the ones that deploy them fastest. They’ll be the ones that deploy them most carefully, with the right expectations and the right infrastructure.
The magic isn’t in the agent. It’s in the system you build around it.
Disagree? Have a different perspective on agent autonomy? I’d love to hear it. The industry needs more honest conversations about what agents can and can’t do—and the best way to have those conversations is by sharing our real experiences, not vendor promises.