Here is a question too few businesses ask before deploying an agent: what happens when it stops working? Every system has downtime eventually - an outage, a failed update, a broken connection. The more work you hand to an agent, the more its failure matters. Planning for that moment is the difference between a shrug and a scramble.
Two kinds of failure to plan for
- The agent stops - an outage means the work simply is not getting done. Who notices, and how fast?
- The agent misbehaves - a subtler failure where it keeps acting, but wrongly. This is the more dangerous case, covered in what happens when an AI agent gets it wrong.
Both need a plan, and they need different plans.
Build in continuity
- Monitoring and alerts - know within minutes that the agent has stopped, not at the end of the week
- A manual fallback - keep the human process warm enough that people can step back in for critical work
- Graceful degradation - the agent should fail safely (stop and escalate), never silently
- Clear ownership - a named person who responds when it goes down
The goal is that an outage delays some routine work, rather than halting the business.
Match the plan to the stakes
An agent sorting internal emails going down is a minor annoyance. An agent handling customer payments going down is a serious incident. Grade your agents by consequence and put stronger continuity plans behind the ones that matter - the risk-grading logic from security and data concerns with business AI agents.
Do not let convenience erode capability
If automating a task means your team forgets how to do it, an outage becomes a crisis. For critical work, keep enough human capability alive to take over - resilience is worth the small ongoing cost.
The bottom line
Agents will have downtime, so plan for it: monitoring, a manual fallback, safe failure and clear ownership, sized to each agent's stakes. Building that resilience is core to the AI Risk Management and Security course at London School of Business UK. Enquire today.