With the release of DeepSeek R1 in January 2025 we learned that the moat for AI isn't at the model level- it's at the product or application layer. Indeed, it seems the model layer is the one without a moat, contrary to fears in early 2024, with 8+ largely equivalent foundational models being available.
This means every single successful agentic use case in enterprises will be hard won application builds, done hundreds of times.
100s or 1000s of GenAI applications running in your organization, all susceptible to model drift, context drift, memory drift, tool use/RAG drift...
Companies that only fearfully deploy trivial applications will lose market share rapidly.
Building non-trivial applications that implement bespoke safety and performance logic will be expensive, fragile, and hard to update.
Agentic Performance Management is the solution. It allows rapid, safe deployment of agentic applications that you can rapidly evolve and defend against performance drift.
Anomalies in agent behavior include:
Solving for 1-4 at the application with guardrails for safety and performance allow massive business value to be delivery, shortening cycle times, increasing user capabilities, and creating guardrails for human behavour.
Enablement, autonomy, and scaled management by exception at scale are alone enough to warrant deep integration of GenaI into business operations.
APM provides the verifiable performance and safety to enable this WITH TODAY"S TECHNOLOGY.
Control points are about the aspects of your system where you can control safety or performance. They can be passive (monitoring) or active (routing/fail-over rules).
Critical control points are the essential ones that are sufficient to maintain safety in your system. In LLMs this is often the human in the loop. Grounding your LLM with RAG or tool use is helpful, but usually not sufficient when considering safety.
GRC is there to ensure that failures in some part of the system do no harm. The best GRC strategy is one built into your operating procedures and workflows that demonstrate compliance and the systems and controls to ensure compliance in the future.
Most consultancies are writing documents that check at box but do nothing to get Agentic solutions into operations.
Building a solution with embedded operational risk management and process safety management capabilities is the essential foundation for GRC. GRC without APM is a castle built on sand.
Building autonomous agents on low-code platforms that only succeed due to massive investment in tool use is a horrific wast of money and a failing strategy.
Building agentic applications and workflows that add real business value rather than simply attempt to remove cost are where the winning solutions will be found.
