The Agent's Alibi

Roughly 78% of enterprises are running AI agent pilots. About 14% have reached production scale. That gap has been stable long enough to deserve a different kind of attention. Failure modes have been cataloged rigorously. The puzzle is why the gap persists despite enormous investment in closing it.

When an agent produces a wrong output, the post-mortem begins. Was the input data clean? Was the prompt well-structured? Did the tools respond correctly? Was the model capable enough? Did the environment change between testing and deployment? Each question is legitimate. Each can absorb the finding. And because the agent's decision-making runs through all of these simultaneously, no single component is isolable as the root cause.

A human analyst who makes a bad judgment call can be identified as the decision point. An agent that makes a bad call made it because of data it received, tools it accessed, prompts that shaped its reasoning, and a model that generated its response. The causal chain passes through the agent's reasoning and through every piece of infrastructure around it, tangled together. The agent sits at the intersection of every other component, which means every other component is a more specific, more actionable place to assign blame. This dynamic holds within a single agent's dependency chain and, as multi-agent failure research has found, across systems of agents too, where breakdowns trace to coordination and orchestration rather than any individual agent. The failure lives in the space between components. That space, by definition, belongs to none of them.

So teams invest in better data pipelines, refined prompts, more robust tooling, upgraded models. Half of executives at large enterprises plan to allocate $10–50 million to data lineage, governance, and architecture. The investments are rational. They produce measurable improvement. And they target the agent's surroundings rather than the agent's emergent behavior.

The compounding math makes attribution worse. At 85% accuracy per step, a ten-step workflow succeeds roughly 20% of the time. When the final output is wrong, which step introduced the error? By the time it surfaces, the mistake at step two has been absorbed into the context of steps three through nine, indistinguishable from legitimate reasoning.

The pattern reinforces itself because the surrounding infrastructure genuinely is imperfect. The data genuinely was messy. Fixing those things genuinely helps. So the attribution pattern validates itself with each cycle. The industry gets better pipelines, sharper prompts, more reliable tools.

That 37-point difference is the empirical fingerprint of the attribution pattern: teams have thorough visibility into whether components are functioning. Output correctness gets far less scrutiny.

The pilot-to-production gap may persist precisely because the thing that needs examination is the one thing the architecture makes structurally difficult to examine. Every improvement that targets the agent's surroundings is a real improvement and, quietly, an alibi. An industry whose primary improvement strategy systematically addresses everything around the agent's emergent behavior will keep closing gaps, while the number sits at 14%.