Deploy AI agents with domain-confident teams first

If you’re thinking about deploying AI agents, start with teams that have strong domain confidence. I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly and I suspect it’ll be an industry pattern through 2025.

These teams know their systems well. They can tell when an agent is genuinely helpful, and when it’s off. That confidence makes all the difference.

Early adopters tend to be the strongest teams. Low alert fatigue and high confidence in their systems. Often the ones others lean on during incidents. They don’t need an AI agent, but they’re the best judges of its value.

Once they built trust and got excited, conversations naturally shifted to rolling it out more broadly.

That’s when things got interesting.

The next wave of teams was curious, but also more nervous. Their questions weren’t just “will it work?” They were asking, “what if it’s wrong?” These are the folks who escalate pages quickly, or wait for someone more senior before acting.

It reminded me of early Wikipedia. Experts loved the breadth. Non-experts were unsure, preferring more ‘official’ sources. AI agents are in a similar moment.

What works: limit the agent to only respond on alert categories that senior teams already trust. When it reaches other teams, it comes with a foundation of confidence.

This year’s theme isn’t scale. It’s trust.