AI agents show unpredictable behavior in critical tasks

AI agents, which use large language models to make decisions and take actions, have become widespread for tasks like writing code and resolving IT issues. However, these agents exhibit nondeterministic behavior, meaning they can produce unpredictable outputs even for identical inputs, which creates both their power and their risk. The article explains that agents work well for situations without a single correct answer, like weather-dependent planning or incident response, but should be avoided for critical tasks like payroll processing, medical decisions, or situations where failures could cause serious harm. Organizations should calculate an "error budget" to determine whether the business benefits of deploying agents outweigh the costs of potential misbehavior before deciding to use them.