AI agents used to be all the rage, the supposed next hit product category after generative AI failed to generate productive returns. Now, the bill on all that hype is coming due.

According to some estimates, up to 79 percent of US corporate execs have some type of AI agent in the making — but one Gartner prediction found 40 percent of these projects will implode due to poor risk controls.

In a nutshell, AI agents are capable of inflicting tremendous amounts of damage on a company when instructed to complete critical tasks. One particularly glaring example, outlined by network consulting engineer Sayali Patil in VentureBeat, involves AI agents designed to fix slow network connections when they detect problems.

That sounds like a reasonable task to automate, like unplugging your router when your wifi starts acting up. But while these AI agents can technically get the job done, Patil says she’s had incidents where they shut down the server while three other important services are handling a rush of web traffic.

When the agent goes ahead and restarts that server anyway, it leads to disaster for those other three services. In the end, the chaotic network event becomes far more disruptive than the initial slowdown. Worse yet, the critical failure becomes too much for the AI tool to understand, or as Patil puts it, a “cascade the agent was never designed to model.”

“The blast radius of that agent action was not the service restart. It was everything downstream of the restart, in a system state the agent had no complete picture of,” Patil writes.

Even if engineers were able to account for every pitfall, AI agents still present some horrifying security vulnerabilities. Stress tests of AI agents equipped with email privileges revealed some major pain points, like where agents obey strangers from outside their network or transfer data to unauthorized personnel.

This gap between performance expectations and production reality is precisely why AI agents aren’t the one-size-fits-all tool the tech industry desperately wants them to be. Whether that changes in the long view is anyone’s guess — but today’s reality is falling way behind the hype.

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