The three disciplines separating AI agent demos from real-world deployment

Getting AI agents to perform reliably in production — not just in demos — is turning out to be harder than enterprises anticipated. Fragmented data, unclear workflows, and runaway escalation rates are slowing deployments across industries.“The technology itself often works well in demonstrations,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst with Greyhound Research. “The challenge begins when it is asked to operate inside the complexity of a real organization.” Burley Kawasaki, who oversees agent deployment at Creatio, and team have developed a methodology built around three disciplines: data virtualization to work around data lake delays; agent dashboards and KPIs as a management layer; and tightly bounded use-case loops to drive toward high autonomy.In simpler use cases, Kawasaki says these practices have enabled agents to handle up to 80-90% of tasks on their own. With further tuning, he estimates they could support autonomous resolution in at least half of use cases, even in more complex