the interesting test is not what an agent can do, but what it takes to stop it

Question

Most reviews of an AI agent focus on capability. Can it read the right records, does it hallucinate, is the output good enough to send to a customer. Sensible questions. They are also the wrong place to spend your caution.

An agent that is right 90% of the time and can be switched off in sixty seconds is safer to run than one that is right 99% of the time and takes a change-management window to stop. Accuracy degrades quietly. A missing off switch fails all at once, and always at the worst moment.

The blocker is rarely technical. It is that the agent borrowed a human's credential, and three other things quietly borrowed the same one. Nobody wrote that down.

So the question worth asking before deployment is not how good it is. It is: if this thing starts doing the wrong thing tonight, who can stop it, and what else goes dark when they do?

https://unlockedconsulting.ai/blog/ai-agent-identity-access-revocation