AI agent incident response — The plan for this should exist before the first deployment, not after the first incident.
AI agent incident response: bu ne anlama geliyor
Every organisation deploying agents will eventually have one that takes a wrong action with visible consequences. The question is not whether, but whether the response was designed in advance.
What the plan needs to contain
How the wrong action is detected — by a person noticing, or by a monitor. How it is stopped, including whether an agent can be paused without stopping the systems it writes to. How it is reversed, and what cannot be reversed. Who is told, in what order. And what changes afterwards.
That last one is where organisations get it wrong. The reflex after an incident is to disable the agent. Sometimes correct; usually an overcorrection that discards the value along with the risk.
The proportionate response
Narrow the scope rather than remove it. If the agent mispriced a product family, take that family out of scope and leave the rest running while you understand what happened.
An organisation that can do this has a programme. One that can only choose between full autonomy and none has a pilot that happens to be in production.
Detection is the part nobody designs
Most incident plans start at “we notice”. The noticing is assumed, and it is the weakest link.
An agent that acts a hundred times a day and is wrong once produces no signal a person would spot. The wrong action looks like the other ninety-nine until its consequence surfaces, which may be days later in another department.
What works is monitoring the distribution rather than the instance: the rate of a decision class, the average magnitude, the share going to one supplier or one location. A single wrong price is invisible; a step change in how many prices moved this morning is not.
Pausing without stopping
The question to answer before deployment: can this agent be stopped while the systems it writes to keep running?
If the agent is embedded in the ordering pipeline, disabling it may stop ordering entirely. That turns a contained incident into an outage, and the pressure to re-enable before the cause is understood becomes enormous.
The pattern that avoids this is a fallback rather than a switch. Turning the agent off returns the decision to its previous mechanism — the reorder point, the standard schedule, the planner’s queue. Slower and less good, and available immediately.
What cannot be reversed
Worth listing explicitly, before an incident rather than during one.
An order sent to a supplier can be cancelled, at a relationship cost. A price change can be reverted, but customers who saw it saw it. A message sent to a customer cannot be recalled at all. A production run consumed material.
The list determines where approval gates belong. Anything on the irreversible side needs a person in the loop, not because the agent is likely to be wrong but because being wrong there has no correction path.
The disclosure question
Who is told, and in what order, is usually decided under pressure and badly.
The default worth setting in advance: the person accountable for the decision first, the affected party second, and the wider organisation only when there is something to say. Incidents that damage trust usually did so through the sequence rather than through the error.
What changes afterwards
The useful post-incident output is a narrowed scope and a new monitor, not a disabled system.
If the agent mispriced a family because it lacked a constraint, the constraint gets written down and the family returns to scope once it is enforced. That sequence — remove, fix, restore — is what a programme looks like. Removal without restoration is how organisations end up with a year of work switched off and nobody willing to be the one who turns it back on.