Building an agent that answers questions well is a weekend project. Building one that a finance team relies on to close the month is an engineering discipline. The difference is rarely the model.
What breaks between demo and production
- Silent failure. The agent answers confidently with stale or partial data and nobody notices for weeks.
- No handoff. There is no defined moment where a human approves, corrects or takes over.
- Unclear scope. The agent has access to everything, so every incident becomes a security review.
- No memory of what happened. Without an audit trail you cannot explain a decision to an auditor or a customer.
The production checklist
Before an agent touches a real process, it should have:
- A bounded scope — explicit data sources, explicit actions, explicit limits.
- Identity and permissions — the agent acts on behalf of a role, and inherits that role's access, not more.
- A human handoff point — the step where a person approves before anything irreversible happens.
- Observability — every run logged with inputs, retrieved context, output and cost.
- A rollback path — actions that can be reversed, and a defined owner who can reverse them.
- An accepted quality bar — measured against real cases, agreed with the business area before launch.
Start where the handoff already exists
The fastest path to production is to automate a process that already has a review step: invoice validation, contract triage, ticket classification. The human checkpoint is already part of the workflow, so the agent can take over the volume while the team keeps the judgment — and the trust is built with evidence instead of promises.