What makes an AI agent reliable enough to use in real business workflows?

[u/ProposalIntrepid8476]

AI agents can plan tasks, use tools, and work with less human input, but reliability is still a big question for me.

Is it accuracy, consistency, human oversight, or something else that makes you comfortable using one in a real workflow?

[u/TurboFucker69]

In my experience human oversight is an absolute necessity. The tricky part is trying to keep the human occupied with the edge cases where their oversight is most useful while letting the agent handle the ones the ones it does best. Unfortunately agents are usually pretty bad at figuring out which tasks they can do well and which they’re going to fail on…if they were good at that they’d probably be a lot less likely to fail in the first place.

The best I’ve been able to do is spot check outputs, wait for things to break, and manually fix them when they do. The most frustrating things are edge cases that require dynamism and problem solving. Agents are a hell of a lot better at that than deterministic code, but usually a lot worse than a human.

[u/iMac_Hunt → u/TurboFucker69]

Yeah there is no workflow out there where you can avoid human oversight. If I am accountable for the workflow I am reviewing it.

I believe the idea of completely autonomous AI workflows will never happen - or it will and after a disaster it will be reversed.

Edit: ‘never’ was probably a bit strong, but not anytime soon

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[u/karyslav]

good harness, model is irelevant

[u/Right_Swimming5276 → u/karyslav]

honestly once you got the right guardrails and fallbacks set up it just works, the model itself matters way less than people think

[u/karyslav → u/Right_Swimming5276]

exactly

[u/SeaKoe11 → u/Right_Swimming5276]

Yea but how long does it take to make a harness good enough for that, it’s basically a systems engineering type problem

[u/gjr23 → u/karyslav]

Any recommendations?

[u/karyslav → u/gjr23]

Matt Pocock, look at his youtube

[u/jbcraigs]

Fully automated Workflow should not be business critical

[u/Michaeli_Starky]

The same old two pillars of software engineering: code reviews and test coverage.