Designing Agentic Systems Reliable Enough for Production

Most agents don't fail in production because the model is bad. They fail because the system around the model has no guardrails, no structure, and no way to see what's happening. In this session I'll make the case that reliability is an engineering problem, not a prompting one. I'll walk through the harness every production agent needs: control flow, a real plan, execute, observe, and replan design, and observability you can act on. I'll back it with production failures we've all seen and a benchmark where the same model went from 20% to 60%+ just by changing the system. You'll leave with a pre-deploy checklist: the blocks to include, and the ones most teams forget.