Gartner expects about 40% of agentic AI projects to be canceled by 2027. Only around 17% of organizations have actually deployed agents, even though more than 60% plan to.

This episode covers the first three parts of my series, Enterprise AI in Production, and looks at why a great agentic demo so often stalls before it reaches production.

We cover:

• Predictability. Can we audit it, reproduce it, and put an SLA on it? These are enterprise software questions, not AI questions, and they decide what goes live.
• Cost. An agent that keeps reasoning keeps spending tokens. Why cost per decision matters, and why paying to re-solve problems you already solved is the hidden waste.
• Trust. Enterprises buy confidence, not capability. We walk through the four questions that decide whether something ships: explainability, reproducibility, auditability and accountability.

The pattern that connects all three: AI should discover, and deterministic systems should execute. Once AI reliably solves a class of problems, turn that into a rule or workflow. It then runs cheaply, the same way every time, and a regulator can inspect it.

Capability gets you the meeting. Confidence gets you the deployment.

Where have you drawn the line between reasoning and execution in your systems? I'd like to hear.

#EnterpriseAI #AgenticAI #AIinProduction #AIGovernance

AI agents can plan, re-plan, call tools, reflect, and keep reasoning. That flexibility is powerful—but every reasoning step costs money.

In Part 2 of Enterprise AI in Production, I look at one of the biggest challenges in taking agentic AI from demo to production: unpredictable cost.

The important question isn't simply how much an AI model costs.

It's:

What does one business decision cost—and can we bound that cost?

When an agent repeatedly reasons through a problem it has already solved hundreds or thousands of times, we're paying premium token costs to rediscover something the system already knows.

A better pattern is to let reasoning earn its retirement.

Use AI for genuinely new, ambiguous, or difficult problems. Once a behavior becomes stable and repeatable, convert it into a deterministic rule, workflow, cached decision, or ordinary code.

You don't lose the intelligence. You bank it.

In this episode:

• Why autonomous agents can create unpredictable operating costs
• Why cost per decision matters more than token cost alone
• The hidden cost of repeatedly solving the same problem
• How to identify workflows that should move off the reasoning path
• Why reasoning should be a phase—not a permanent state
• How hybrid AI architectures can improve enterprise ROI

The goal isn't to use less AI.

It's to make sure we're paying for reasoning only when reasoning is creating new value.

Agentic AI can look impressive in a demo. Production is where the difficult questions begin.

Can the system be audited? Can its decisions be reproduced? What happens when the underlying model changes? Can it meet compliance requirements, control costs, and guarantee reliable execution?

In this episode:

• Why autonomous-agent architectures struggle at production scale
• The difference between AI reasoning and system execution
• Why predictability matters more than adding more AI
• How hybrid architectures balance intelligence and control
• When AI-discovered solutions should become deterministic workflows

Next episode: Why reasoning is expensive—and execution should become cheap.