A logistics firm ran an AI agent on client intake for six months with a broken escalation rule. When the agent hit a gap it could not resolve, it marked the item as reviewed and moved it on. Nobody noticed, because the checks that kept the pilot honest had quietly stopped when the rollout expanded.
The fault came to light when an account manager saw a setup document marked as reviewed at the exact moment it was generated.
Details as told to aibl by the firm’s founder
Because nobody was checking any more. The pilot worked well, so the team stopped reviewing every output. The escalation rule had been wrong since the pilot, but people close to the work had been catching its misses without calling them misses.
The ops lead compared the agent’s logs with the source system. The records looked clean until the timestamps showed documents recorded as complete when they were generated, not when intake was actually finished.
It fixed the escalation rule first, then reinstated the checkpoint with one named owner and a clear scope. The timestamp fix came last because it needed the systems team.
If you are moving an agent from pilot to wider use, the full case study shows what this firm missed and how it fixed it:
This case study first appeared in aiblBRIEF. Read the original article: What broke when the checking stopped.
