We're Defining a New Category: Agent Runtime Operations
The article argues that while DevOps, AIOps, and MLOps exist, there is no category for managing AI agents in production. It cites that 86% of engineering teams now run AI agents in production, but only 10% of agent pilots ever reach production—a 76% gap attributed to operations, not models. After analyzing production agent incidents, the author identifies four structural failure modes: retry storms, hallucinated API calls, silent failures, and multi-agent pipeline corruption. 40% of agent deployments fail within 6 months, and standard advice like exponential backoff just burns more tokens. The proposed Agent Runtime Operations category aims to provide SRE-like tooling for agents, addressing the lack of monitoring, incident response, and rollback mechanisms currently available.
Without dedicated operations tooling, most AI agents fail in production, wasting resources and corrupting downstream systems.