LLM agents for the enterprise

Buy when

The workflow fits a mature vertical product (e.g. a standard support deflection path) and you accept their data model.

Build when

Policy, systems, or document mix are yours alone—or when audit and permissions requirements exceed a product's ceiling.

Wait when

You cannot name the owner, the system of record, or what "done" means. No model fixes that.

Procurement reality

Ask vendors where human review lives, how rules are versioned, and what happens on tool failure. Demo chat quality is the least useful signal.

Pilot on one workflow with your data. Refuse multi-year platform commitments before a production loop exists.

Build readiness

You are ready to build when you have an owner, a system of record, sample cases, and a written "done" definition. Missing any of those, wait.

In practice

Map the workflow on a whiteboard before you open a framework: inputs, systems of record, humans, and irreversible writes. If that map is fuzzy, the agent will encode the fuzz.

Pick ten to fifty real historical cases as an eval set. Include the ugly ones. Run the agent offline against them until critical fields and hard rules are acceptable. Only then connect write tools.

Ship with a pause switch, a human queue, and a weekly review of override reasons. Promote repeated overrides into rules. That loop is how production systems improve—not another prompt brainstorm.

Common failure modes

• Treating a demo on clean samples as readiness for production volume.
• One shared service account with broad write access across systems.
• No owner for the exception queue, so failures pile up as noise.
• Changing prompts and models without regression gates on real cases.
• Measuring only model latency or thumbs-up, not completed-case cost and audit completeness.

What good looks like after ninety days

The first workflow is boring: stable override rate, known failure modes, operators who trust the queue. Config changes go through review. Traces answer "what happened to this case?" without archaeology.

At that point you can add a second document type or a second agent role. Expanding before the first path is boring is how programs stall with five half-built pilots.