AI Agent Production Go-Live Checklist 2026: 45 Checks Before You Deploy
78% of enterprises have AI agent pilots running, but only 14% have scaled to production — that is an 88% failure-before-production rate, and the top barrier is not model capability but governance, observability, and operational readiness (LangChain, Zepic, and Harness Engineering surveys, all 2026). This checklist gives you 45 concrete pass/fail checks across 6 domains with scoring thresholds to gate your deployment decision. Why 88% of AI Agent Pilots Never Make It to Production The research data is consistent across every source I reviewed. Agents are technically working in pilots — the model can complete the task — but they stall before production for structural reasons that have nothing to do with model quality: ...