AI Reality Checks
Agents need guardrails, not motivational posters
Agentic workflows can be useful, but only when the boring control plane exists first.
4 min read · 2026-06-08
The fastest way to waste money in 2026 is to call every automation an agent and pretend autonomy is a strategy. Tools, memory, retries, approvals, audit trails, cost controls, and failure modes matter more than the word agent on a slide.
What actually works: narrow task boundaries, deterministic workflow steps where possible, explicit human approval for high-risk actions, clean observability, and hard kill switches. If your agent can spend money, change customer data, or email a regulator, it needs more than vibes.
This is the kind of blunt assessment I give consulting clients. I do not build the agent for you. I help you decide whether an agent should exist, what risks need control, and what your technical team or vendor must prove before you trust it.
If this sounds uncomfortably familiar, get a paid review.
I no longer take on implementation or building projects. I only offer paid consultations and strategic advisory, which means the guidance is not a setup for selling you a build.
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