In April 2025, an AI agent named “Sam” working in customer support for the developer tools company Cursor told users that their licenses worked on only one device. Subscriptions were canceled, complaints flooded Hacker News, and the company scrambled to clarify that no such policy existed. Sam had invented it. The technology took on a life of its own, a Frankensteinian paradox in which Cursor’s creation began speaking for its creator. The autonomous system asserted a fact that customers experienced as a unilateral decision by the company. By the time the startup discovered the mistake, the damage had been paid in the slowest and most expensive currency in business, trust. Cursor’s mistake was not deploying Agentic AI but deploying it in the wrong place.
The most consequential decision for CEOs implementing agentic systems is determining where to deploy agents in the customer journey. The underlying models are converging quickly, but the autonomous technology built on top of them is not. Vendors differ meaningfully in embedded governance standards, orchestration, integrations, and reliability. Even the strongest vendor advantage cannot save a firm that deploys a capable agent in the wrong place. Winners decide how close to the customer their agents can get, and how clearly they draw the line between work the AI does and work humans still own.
