Most AI agents work in demos. They break in production. MIT's 2025 State of AI in Business report ( Fortune summary ) found that 95 percent of enterprise AI pilots show no measurable business return. The same study found something more telling. Pilots built by buying tools from a vendor succeed about 67 percent of the time. Pilots built internally succeed at about a third of that rate, roughly one in five. That gap matches what we see every week. A team builds something that works on a sample of five cases. The first week of real volume, it falls apart. The failures are not random. After watching this happen across recruiting, healthcare back-office, legal review, financial reconciliation, supply chain, and more, two patterns explain almost all of them. Reliability and governance Most prototypes are built to demo. Demos ask one question. Can the agent finish the task once? Production asks different questions.…