01DEMOS
A chatbot in the corner, not an agent in the workflow
Most "AI agent" pilots ship as a chat window that answers questions but never updates a deal, sends a follow-up or files a ticket. If it cannot read and write your CRM through real APIs, it is a demo, and demos never show ROI.
02TRUST
One hallucinated email and the team pulls the plug
An agent that invents a discount, misquotes a price or emails the wrong customer burns trust instantly. Without guardrails, output validation and approval gates on outbound actions, the first bad action is usually the last day of the project.
03CONTEXT
Agents that know the internet but not your business
A model with no retrieval over your CRM history, pricing rules and product docs guesses where it should know. Agents need grounded context, the account record, the last three calls, the actual price book, or their actions are confident fiction.
04PROOF
No evals, no acceptance metrics, no ROI story
If nobody measures how often the agent's actions are accepted, corrected or rejected, nobody can defend the spend, or safely expand autonomy. Agents without an evaluation harness stay stuck in pilot forever, then quietly get cancelled.