Most Enterprise Agentic Projects Are Doomed, Here’s Why — Jess Grogan-Avignon & Jack Wang, Accenture

Jess Grogan-Avignon and Jack Wang at Accenture built an agentic application in two weeks. Getting it to production took another 12 months. Not because the code was wrong. Because the infrastructure team, the security team, the AI gateway team, the data governance team, and the application team all had to align before anything could ship. That is not a technology problem, and fixing the code does not fix it. The deeper issue is that GitHub averaged 275 million commits per week in 2025 on track for 14 billion by year end, while the approval infrastructure was never designed for that throughput. They name five tensions that predict whether an enterprise agentic project succeeds before it starts: human approval chains need to become executable code rather than longer signoff meetings; finance should back a portfolio of AI bets the way a VC would rather than demanding committed returns from each project; delivery should run on hypothesis driven loops not milestone programs; trust is built by graduating through shadow mode, advisory mode, and controlled autonomy with each step gated by outcome evidence not by project plan completion; and the real moat is not the data in your ERP but the living memory your product builds from real customer signals every day. Speaker info: - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicaannbiggs - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackxwang --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/AGkzpxMdPn8-most-enterprise-agentic-projects-are-doomed-here-s-why Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIE New York, October 12–14 — the first AI Engineer Finance mainstage summit - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney ---