AI Agent Deployment Is an Operations Project, Not a Software Purchase

AI Agent Deployment Is an Operations Project, Not a Software PurchaseI think a lot of businesses are going to waste money on AI agents for one simple reason: They will treat the deployment like buying software. That sounds normal. Pick a tool. Create accounts. Watch a demo. Give the team access. Tell everyone, “We have AI now.” But agents are not normal software. A normal tool waits for a human to use it. An AI agent is supposed to do work across a workflow. That means it needs context, permissions, rules, review points, escalation paths, and someone responsible for improving it when the first version is wrong. If nobody owns those pieces, the agent becomes another abandoned login. I have a fairly strong opinion here: AI agent deployment is an operations project before it is a technology project. The model matters. The tools matter. But the workflow matters more. The agent is not the hard partThe impressive part of an AI demo is usually the agent doing something flashy. It reads an…