Every failed agent deployment we've audited shares a root cause: autonomy arrived before trust. The agent could act, so it did — and the first visible mistake ended the program politically, whatever the average performance was.
We now design the escalation ladder before the agent. Level zero: the agent drafts, a human sends. Level one: the agent acts on the reversible, reports on the rest. Level two: the agent acts within budgets — spend, blast radius, confidence — and pages a human at the edges. Each promotion is earned with evaluation data, not enthusiasm.
The counterintuitive result: teams that start with less autonomy reach full autonomy faster. Trust compounds when every expansion of scope is backed by a measured record at the previous level.