A dangerous narrative is taking hold in boardrooms across the country, a story of effortless, overnight transformation powered by artificial intelligence.

This story, sold with breathless enthusiasm by reports like McKinsey’s “Seizing the Agentic AI Advantage,” threatens to poison the well for everyone, leading to wasted investment and deep disillusionment.

The report tempts us with a future of autonomous AI “agents” forming an “agentic AI mesh,” an interconnected ecosystem of programs that negotiate, plan, and execute complex workflows without human oversight. Imagine an AI agent in procurement autonomously negotiating terms with a vendor’s AI agent. Now, imagine that agent misinterpreting a sales forecast and ordering $10 million worth of the wrong component.

Granting an AI agent th

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