AI
What It Takes to Run AI Agents in Production
Agents are powerful and risky. The controls that make autonomy safe in a real business.
By Neha GuptaFebruary 14, 20269 min read
An agent that can act is an agent that can act wrong. Production-grade agents are defined less by their model and more by their controls.
Scope and permission
Give an agent the narrowest set of tools and permissions it needs, with hard spend and rate limits. An agent that can only do five things can only break five things.
Approval gates
Anything consequential, sending money, emailing customers, deleting data, should pause for human approval. Autonomy is a dial, not a switch.
Observe everything
Log every step, input, and output. When an agent does something surprising, you need a trace, not a shrug. Evaluate task success on real scenarios before and after each change.
